CTV

A few months ago, I did something I’ve never done before. I saw a CTV ad for a product I needed and got so annoyed about it that I bought a competitor’s version out of spite.

Netflix knows it’s in trouble. Or, rather, it knows people think it’s in trouble.

Megaphone becoming part of Spotify’s Ad Server impacts campaign setups; IAB finds 43% of buyers have little confidence in CTV ad supply quality; and Netflix’s ad-filled MLB Home Run Derby broadcast gets panned.

The “K” in “K-beauty” stands for “Korean.” But it should also stand for “kaboom” because Korean beauty product sales are exploding internationally, especially in the US market.

Netflix considers live TV channels; Ofcom tells social media to cool it with the scam ads; and Meta gets weirdly nonconsensual with its AI images.

The cinematic trope of people stopping to watch the news on a storefront TV display feels pretty out of date today. But sometimes, life can still imitate art.

Ask five people in ad tech to define “CTV” – or any other streaming-related three-letter acronym – and you’ll get five different answers. The IAB wants to fix that.

Retail media and CTV have been on a collision course for years. Walmart Connect and Magnite are making that convergence real. AdExchanger Editorial Director Sara Sluis sits down with Mike Laband, Group SVP of Revenue at Magnite, and Khurrum Malik, VP, Business and Product Marketing at Walmart Connect, to talk about what it looks like […]

A collaboration between InterMedia Advertising, Peer39 and Pontiac Intelligence provided show-level cost-per-acquisition data for 94% of CTV ad impressions.

The IAB Tech Lab is working on standardizing programmatic signals for new streaming TV ad formats, including pause ads. Meanwhile, many brands are eager to add pause ads to their repertoire.

The 2024 Olympics proved premium live sports could be transacted programmatically. The 2026 World Cup tests something harder: whether programmatic spend holds up amid viable alternatives.

For some marketers, the billboards that appear in the backgrounds of TV scenes – or heck, even just the blank walls of a building – feel like prime real estate for even more ad placements.

With media megamergers, acquisitions and spin-offs left and right, the media landscape is changing at a pace that is difficult to keep up with.

Retail media ramps up CTV partnerships to extend ecommerce audiences off-site; LaLiga’s piracy crackdown hits legit sites in Spain; and OpenAI mulls third-party ad measurement.

In a world being agentically orchestrated at scale, human judgment is the indispensable guardrail preventing us from optimizing right over the cliff.

Comcast separates NBCUniversal and Sky from its broadband and wireless business; Omnicom is all in on M&A; and startup Whatnot bets on livestreamed shopping.

AI is rapidly moving from promise to practice in streaming TV advertising, reshaping how campaigns are planned, executed and experienced. But as adoption accelerates, there remains no clear answer to what success actually looks like across all parts of the industry.

As much as consumers complain about AI-generated content, advertising experts say AI still has an important place in video creation and production, including for ads. But using AI in content without turning off consumers is a tricky dance.

Netflix touts sharper targeting, but buyers say its black-box approach – especially the lack of usable IP data – is blunting measurement and quietly pushing performance-driven spend elsewhere.

Walmart will buy Vibe.co, a self-serve video ad platform, in hopes of attracting more small and medium-sized advertisers to connected TV.

Everyone’s investing in AppsFlyer; NBCU launches Rock Studios, a creative studio for brand integrations; and Meta wants to hop on the TV bandwagon.

DSP-only buying puts brands at risk of missing most of the TV marketplace. Tatari’s CRO, Andy Schonfeld, explains why that strategy is wrong.

Amazon is making a splash at Cannes by touting recent Fire TV interface upgrades designed to help viewers find relevant content more easily, including when they are watching the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

For the first time, Omnicom can directly compare ad frequency and performance across multiple major streamers, which typically prefer to keep data locked inside their walled gardens.

The future of TV isn’t traditional vs. CTV. Rather, it’s a partnership of two sides. Fox and Roku represent this convergence.

The Trade Desk is muscling its way into the TV operating system business with its Ventura OS – but the real story isn’t the product itself. It’s what TTD’s ambitions reveal about conflicts of interest within the industry and the inherent mismatch between consumer and advertiser needs.

The broadcast and streaming worlds are being pulled together by a wave of major M&A, from Fox’s $22 billion acquisition of Roku to Paramount’s merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. TV Land, naturally, is watching closely.

Every time an ID hops from platform to platform, it gets less accurate – and in programmatic, there are a heck of a lot of hops.

Some DOJ staffers wanted to challenge the Paramount/WBD merger on antitrust grounds; ad tech M&A is poised to pick up; and social media marketers want to normalize controversial clipping.

Papa Johns tapped NBCUniversal, Instacart and the dentsu-owned media agency Carat for help reaching consumers when they’re low on groceries – and thus more likely to be swayed by a mouth-watering ad.