Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
All Pause No Brakes
The Pause Train has left the station and, counterintuitively, won’t stop for anything.
At the TV upfronts last May, Netflix said it was working on a bespoke pause ad to be launched sometime in 2026. Amazon did them one better, with the introduction of a contextual pause ad unit it started selling last year. Its contextual twist is to use AI to effectively place ads. A cooking show viewer, for example, might see grocery brands or kitchenware brands during the break.
The back half of 2025 saw a spree of programmatic pause ad launches – from The IAB Tech Lab, Magnite, The Ad Council and Kargo, to name a few.
And Amazon Prime Video must have seen promising results, because Amazon-owned Twitch is not tip-toeing or wading, but cannonballing into the market for pause screen ad units, Tubefilter reports. Twitch’s new pause units will include ads on the bottom and sides of the screen, while it’s also testing new skippable video ads on the center of the screen, where the livestream would be.
Twitch users aren’t happy, Tubefilter notes. Although, Twitch users weren’t happy about midroll ads when Twitch launched those, either.
After all, the Pause Train doesn’t pause.
Safe Travels
Expedia CEO Ariane Gorin was on CNBC last Friday to defend the company’s outlook and earnings results.
Wall Street investors aren’t exactly buying it – Expedia shares are down by a quarter since the beginning of February, in part because of investor concerns the business could be disintermediated by AI.
Two interesting facts to note.
When asked how Expedia expanded its profit margin by four points in the past year, Gorin said the top reason was “getting leverage on our marketing spend.”
Expedia spends a relatively high percent of its revenue on marketing, she said. “Getting better at measurement; understanding incrementality; doing more testing.” These are important parts of the company’s margin expansion. Not AI tech efficiencies.
The second fact underscores why Gorin is lukewarm on AI gains. Expedia is among numerous companies with CEOs who are frustrated that relatively strong earnings reports have been usurped by theoretical, hype-based speculation that their businesses will be replaced by AI agents.
AppLovin (down 40% year to date) is another example, as well as Criteo (down 60% in 12 months). Salesforce is down 42% year over year, which sharpened the edge of employee displeasure regarding CEO Marc Benioff’s jokes at a company event last week that ICE agents were lurking in the room to bag people who’d traveled from abroad.
You’re Either With AI Or Against It
Publishers can only look on in horror as AI decimates site traffic. But brands, on the other hand, are eager to reorient their sites to capitalize on the rise of AI instead of competing with it.
Brands are trying to make it easier for large language models like ChatGPT and Claude AI to discover information about their products and, in turn, relay that information to user or shopper agents that have been tasked with research or a potential purchase. Roughly three-fifths of sites currently receive AI traffic, according to a recent Ahrefs study, half of which comes from ChatGPT.
But generative engine optimization is more complex than SEO because outputs aren’t predictably determined by keywords.
Brands should invest in “digital hygiene,” so their websites are easily crawlable for AI agents, Jason Maynard, CTO of North America and Asia Pacific at Zendesk, tells Marketing Dive. Examples of digital hygiene are checking HTML codes for accuracy, standardizing multimedia formats and incorporating high-quality metadata.
Still, rebuilding an online ecosystem that caters to AI search is a long-term investment. Expect brands to be in a “messy middle” until the infrastructure catches up, Maynard says.
But Wait! There’s More!
Trump administration officials oust DOJ antitrust chief Abigail Slater with TV megamergers between Nexstar and TEGNA, as well as Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery, still pending approval. [CBS News]
In an internal memo last year, Meta bet on political turmoil in the US distracting “civil society groups” from challenging the company’s integration of facial recognition technology into its smart glasses. [NYT]
Almost three-fourths of Super Bowl advertisers are continuing their campaigns into the Winter Olympics, according to NBCUniversal. [Adweek]
Following immense backlash from Ring’s Super Bowl ad, the company has canceled its partnership with Flock Safety. [The Verge]
Pinterest CEO Bill Ready claims that the website sees a larger search volume than ChatGPT, so definitely don’t worry that Q4 earnings missed expectations. [TechCrunch]
You’re Hired!
FanDuel taps Paramount+ alum Ari Avishay as SVP of marketing. [Adweek]
Dentsu names Takeshi Sano president and global CEO, while eliminating the roles of global COO and global president. [Adweek]
Sarah Marzano is promoted to eMarketer VP, principal analyst of commerce media. [LinkedIn]
