CTV

NBCUniversal might find itself in a pretty enviable position when it finally spins off from Comcast next year, judging from the third quarter earnings report the company posted on Thursday.

LinkedIn is plugging its professional data into Google’s ad buying platform so that advertisers can use job titles and company info to target streaming ads programmatically.

As podcasts move into video and CTV, will audio be left behind once again? It doesn’t have to be that way, says Maria Tullin, Horizon Media’s SVP of performance audio and podcast strategy.

Netflix has a tracking pixel; the FTC signs off on Publicis acquiring LiveRamp; and Apple’s ad ID ban is no big deal next to its product plans.

Netflix’s revenue grew 12% YOY to $12.9 billion in Q3, which it maintains is in line with its forecast. Its ads business, however, is lagging slightly compared with expectations, causing Netflix to tweak its forecast for the rest of the year.

Traditional television buying has always required campaigns to work in broad strokes. But political campaigns’ audience-first thinking should carry through to how they use CTV.

VideoAmp is competing in the measurement space by sharpening its focus on TV audience data, ad performance and, of course, AI. The company is also making strategic hires and promoting from within.

LG home screen inventory is now available through agentic buying, opening up a premium TV placement to faster, more automated campaign setup.

Starling recently launched as a connected TV SSP and wants to capitalize on the opportunity to address a major pain point facing CTV marketers: the lack of show-level data.

By all means, measure outcomes. Optimize toward sales. Make television more accountable. But if the product is basically a pixel, an attribution window and a CPA column, that doesn’t mean we’ve transformed TV into Google. 

Given how much agentic AI pervades nearly every conversation these days, it’s easy to overlook how nascent the technology still is, particularly when it comes to buying ads on connected TV.

An AI agent can stay inside its budget and still spend too much. It can log every decision. But the evidence of performance can still arrive after the money is committed.

NBCU, FreeWheel, Carat and Newton Research join forces for agentic AI CTV buys; Monday Night Football gets flooded with Texas Senate ads; and justifying “preferred by cats” in pet food ads.

Warner Bros. Discovery has a new white paper analyzing the data and methodologies of five top video measurement providers: VideoAmp, iSpot, Comscore, Innovid and Samba.

MMM helps marketers understand if a channel worked in the aggregate and what happens when the next dollar is added. For CTV, that discipline is badly needed. But MMMs can’t answer everything.

Connected TV advertisers are still pining after show-level control. And PubMatic announced contextual targeting at the episode level is available to media buyers accessing CTV inventory through its platform.

Jenny Wall is a veteran of the TV and CTV industry, but tends to specialize in what she calls “disruptive” companies.

Ad-free might not be free anymore; Amazon isn’t the only company hiding its transaction data; and the Paramount WBD merger continues.

OpenAi and Microsoft have known about the “doom loop” of content scraping all along; “Fortnite” has become a brand marketer’s nightmare; and Forrester thinks streamers are going to shed their subscription models.

A week ago, HBO MAX had its verified Reddit account overrun by a hacker group, which eluded notice for two days while it ran 108 different ad permutations targeting an unknown number of Redditors.

Scaled show-level optimization is not a standard product. In many cases, that functionality is still in the early stages of development.

When a creator already loves the product they’re marketing, it’s easy to work it into their content in ways that feel natural. That’s exactly what the Try Guys did.

Horizon is bringing Roku’s streaming-TV data into its homegrown intelligence platform to help advertisers act on viewing signals while campaigns are still in flight.

Creator Sports Network is trying to monetize the ad industry’s two biggest buzzwords: creators and sports. Creator Sports Network, which launched in 2023, helps influencers livestream sports events on their social media pages. The platform doesn’t livestream the actual sports games; it acquires sports airing rights and shares them with influencers, who then stream the […]

Google tests out a “pay per value” AI licensing scheme; Netflix, Amazon and YouTube join forces; and Apple may soon launch integrations with third-party LLMs.

Waiting rooms are the latest surface to get screenified. Meet PatientPoint, a point-of-care video ad network with 145,000 screens in 32,000 doctor offices across the US.

While Eric Seufert’s “everything is an ad network” mantra keeps being proven correct, a new truism is also taking shape: “Wherever an advertising business emerges, the measurement challenge follows.”

FAST’s credibility gap is structural: Platforms are sitting on audience data that would validate the inventory they’re selling, and they are choosing not to share it.

Qortex’s video intelligence platform ingests information like a campaign’s objectives and its start and end dates, then offers up the audience segments or content categories that it predicts will perform the best.

Shunned by streamers, cable news builds its own app bundles; Grindr pays $35 million to settle a UK lawsuit over selling data to advertisers; and LG TVs can be hacked to record audio.