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Podcasts are becoming broadcasts; your kid’s college scholarship might be a data mining venture; and states are getting wise to false advertising from non-profits.

Upfront week is officially over. In case you missed any of the dog-and-pony shows — including Chappell Roan belting out “Pink Pony Club” during YouTube’s Broadcast — don’t worry; we’ve got you covered.

During upfronts, publishers flexed their ad performance muscles at media buyers all week long in an effort to appeal to the biggest demands media buyers have during their upfront negotiations: flexibility and results.

This year’s TV Upfronts buzzwords are in: performance, dynamic, AI and fandom We explain why this quartet of phrases wove their way through the presentations.

“If we only are looking at ROAS, we’re being fairly myopic about how we understand the actual relationship between the retailer and the brand,” says Liz Roche, VP of media and measurement at the grocery chain Albertsons.

Enjoy this weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem … 

Keywords, Kinda The tabs, they are a-changin’. As in, campaign analytics tabs and what they’re meant to show advertisers.  The biggest shift has been the move from “analytics” to “insights.” “Analytics” used to mean detailed, exportable data that brands could plug into their own systems. “Insights,” by contrast, are curated summaries and useful-sounding takeaways about […]

Another TV upfronts season is in the books. Please send your condolences to Senior Editor Alyssa Boyle and Associate Editor Victoria McNally as they reluctantly return to reality and their overstuffed inboxes.

Advertising agencies have invested millions of dollars into their own AI-powered platforms – and apparently, it’s making a difference.

Bloomberg produces hours of live content a day, between its TV channel and its network of global and business news publications. And it’s shifting its contextual targeting focus beyond standard display ads to live video. 

LLM environments introduce new dimensions to brand safety and suitability. Understanding them is the starting point for testing ChatGPT ads.

Netflix expands its ad ambitions with new programmatic tools; OpenAP pushes cross-publisher CAPI measurement for TV ads; Starlink bidstream data reportedly fuels surveillance tracking.

TelevisaUnivision and Disney took over Day Two of upfronts week in New York City on Tuesday, and the throughline was data quality.

Warner Bros. Discovery used its upfront stage to announce two new ad measurement efforts, including that it’s joining a CAPI-focused initiative led by OpenAP.

TikTok announces a wide array of new tools for advertisers, and they all have one thing in common: a focus on building its ecommerce business.

Zoom CMO Kim Storin has one of the rarer jobs in marketing: She’s responsible for promoting and evolving a brand that’s also become a verb.

The DOJ targets another Google Search ad scam; ICE relies on “advertising intelligence” and support from Palantir to ramp up deportations; and TikTok now lets you book vacations in its app.

AdExchanger Senior Editor Alyssa Boyle and Associate Editor Victoria McNally traversed the island of Manhattan on Monday to scope out upfront presentations by NBCUniversal, Fox and Amazon.

Viant’s modest growth story took a backseat to a far louder claim: that fed-up advertisers are finally ready to ditch the rigged economics of Big Tech’s walled gardens.

TelevisaUnivision is making a three-pronged upfront pitch this week: sports, streaming and culture.

The mass adoption of LLMs is shifting internet search for consumers from following blue links to synthesized answers from LLMs. Zero click is here. As generative engines and personal AI agents begin searching, comparing and acting on our behalf, discovery will no longer happen on a search page. It will happen inside the answers with personalized information and preferences.

Agentic media buying may cut middlemen or add more chaos; Grocers are remodeling for retail media amid rising costs; Peacock is betting on the booming microdrama trend.

The AI content licensing boom is real. But without neutral, scalable infrastructure, it’s on track to repeat programmatic’s trust and transparency failures.

NBCU kicked off the 2026 upfront week with an original take on a not-so-original trend: ad performance. NBCU touted how it’s tapping into modern marketing hot topics, such as sports and AI, to drive ad performance.

Amazon Ads expects this year’s television upfronts to be an outcomes-focused affair. That may explain why the company preempted its Monday evening presentation by announcing the launch of a new ad product called Dynamic TV Creative.

For companies like Shopify, Criteo and Instacart – and even for giants like Amazon and Walmart – figuring out if the agentic oasis is real or a mirage is their priority No. 1.

Audiences that reach publisher sites but leave little to no trace in analytics are referred to as dark traffic. At Penske Media Corporation, shining a light on dark traffic is part of a broader recalibration of how the publisher thinks about audience growth.

Marketers must become memelords now; Yahoo has incurred the wrath of Apollo; and AppLovin is going hybrid.

PubMatic has run more than 30 fully autonomous, end-to-end agentic campaigns through the SSP’s AgenticOS platform, in addition to more than 1,000 direct publisher deals.

If a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound? And if a UID2 doesn’t work, does anyone notice? Inside a UID2 mix-up that has a publisher questioning the value of alt IDs. Then, what Kochava’s settlement with the FTC means for any ad tech company that handles location data.