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.
As performance takes center-stage in more advertising discussions, demands to solve fragmentation and cruddy measurement are reaching a fever pitch.
A word of caution to digital advertising companies, as they go all in on AI algorithms: They need to build these solutions with ownership, governance and accountability from the start – or AI could sink them with a single mistake.
To squeeze the most juice out of their live sports campaigns, many marketers are adopting programmatic buying and marketing mix modeling, both of which are also drawing more advertisers to the digital live sports cornucopia.
Performance CTV tech company Keynes launched an AI-powered platform. Tuckernuck says it can finally “pop open the hood” and see what’s working.
ROAS who? Martinelli’s is testing how crisp its retail media spend really is by using a new metric called incremental ROAS.
Media measurement provider Measured launched an MCP integration that allows brands to ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and other AI platforms how their media is performing.
Don’t Take Customers At Face Value
Verizon Value President David “DK” Kim digs into the lingering stigma around prepaid wireless – and how reframing customers as “prepaid by need” versus “prepaid by choice” changes the way Verizon markets and measures its eight-brand portfolio of prepaid plans.
A word of caution to digital advertising companies, as they go all in on AI algorithms: They need to build these solutions with ownership, governance and accountability from the start – or AI could sink them with a single mistake.
