Daily News Roundup

VideoAmp cuts 50 jobs; Roku reports its quarterly earnings; and customer acquisition costs are rising.

WPP’s earnings were less bad than expected; Versant’s, meanwhile, weren’t great either; and Cloudflare gets into the AEO game.

Criteo shares dropped by 24% after reporting sluggish, down-trending Q2 earnings. And sports streaming distributor FuboTV’s earnings for last quarter are a mixed bag.

People Inc. holds the line on ad revenue as quality inventory gets harder to find in a sea of AI slop. Plus: BMW is running a first-of-its-kind campaign featuring in-car Spider-Man takeovers.

Holdcos get creative with M&A; striking a balance with influencer marketing; and social influencers are given marketing titles at brands.

Big agencies wrestle with offsetting the rising cost of token consumption. Plus: OpenAI shared policies on how brands can apply ad credit to campaigns.

Serves You Right The ad industry has found a new audience to bombard with ads: AI bots. Time recently began serving ads to bots in an attempt to monetize its growing bot traffic. The ads are formatted as FAQ-style brand content and labeled as sponsored. Influencing agents may eventually become even more important than influencing […]

Freewheel will begin reporting show-level data; Xbox will let users stream games for free if they watch ads; and Meta and Google can develop AI ads without even a prompt.

Eyewear company Blacksheep claims that Google replaced its site with a lookalike domain that led to an error page, causing the brand to lose its position in organic search.

Some holdcos will pay AI costs in exchange for principal inventory commitments; Google will require Ads API customers to have passkeys; and microdramas struggle with the ethics of AI likenesses.

Google’s changing up Max; CTV buyers are “addicted to siloing;” and Bluesky’s AI investments may be moot.

Paramount+, unlike Netflix, announces a subscription-free option; Havas announces plans to go AI-first; and Faire’s Promoted Listings platform targets wholesalers, rather than individual customers.

Sports are where the money is; Reddit’s rethinking its AI licensing strategy; and data targeting has its darker sides.

Kraft Heinz’s deal with Disney represents a food marketing trend; how buying location data is a legal loophole for the government; analysts rain on OpenAI’s ad parade.

The purported best ways to counter ad fraud; CPG brands struggle in the face of GLP-1s; and the open web might be meeting its end.

Everything is an ad network, including sports arenas; Apple Ads is getting an upgrade; and Patreon blocks bots from its free content.

Google has to hand over some of its AI features to competitors; when LLMs will (or won’t) be critical; and publishers are productizing GEO offerings.

Private equity is hungry for challenger ecommerce marketplace players. Plus: Brands and creators aren’t thrilled with TikTok Shop’s AI-generated shoppable videos.

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.

Meta’s AI creative products still need work; the role of humans in agentic media buying; and how Vizio TV owners can opt out of sharing data with Walmart.

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.

Intuit shakes up its media business; the OpenAI ads pilot continues to expand; and the MLB seems to have changed its tune on gambling.

Everybody wants a bite of next year’s FIFA World Cup; Warner Bros. Discovery ventures into the Amazon; and ChatGPT has its favorite influencers just like we do.

Criteo has two potential buyers; publishers consider blocking Google’s joint AI-scraping/search-indexing bot; and Microsoft’s billion-player gaming goal might make sense for mobile.

Creator marketing is taking over the B2B space; Reddit develops AI tools to fight spam; and Comcast-owned Sky will acquire ITV’s Media & Entertainment unit.

Paramount consolidates its ad tech and product teams; Meta execs are still figuring out the role of AI; and FIFA and World Cup sponsors lean on influencers.

OpenAI’s hiring priorities hint at the nascent ad platform’s future direction. Plus: Cloudflare unveils tools to categorize crawlers.

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.

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.

Apple abandoned its ad network; Did Cannes Lions abandon its creators?; and CMOs decide how much to abandon creative budgets.