CTV

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.

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 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.

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.

To close the gap between digital audio ad spend and audience engagement, audio platforms want to get more deeply embedded in omnichannel campaign planning tools.

Advertisers can target high- and medium-attention ad inventory in Amazon DSP while filtering out low-attention placements and made-for-advertising sites.

Performance CTV tech company Keynes launched an AI-powered platform. Tuckernuck says it can finally “pop open the hood” and see what’s working.

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.

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.

TTD confirmed that this CTV publisher’s errors would have made its UID2s useless for ad targeting. But TTD also said it wouldn’t have had enough information to flag the issue.

There is a clear set of capabilities that CTV OEMs and streamers can offer advertisers that the original content owner cannot. Here are the most material gaps that the buy side experiences between supply sent from the publisher and supply sent from distributors.

Programmatic enemies make better friends in the AI era; social video projected to outgrow CTV this year; and apps are integrating into chatbots, but where are the users?

IAS pushes clearer streaming ad visibility; Meta eyes a plug-in CTV play; Too many creators, not enough ad dollars.

For the first time, Unity’s gaming audiences will be available for ad targeting outside the Unity platform, with Index Exchange using Unity’s data to curate web and CTV inventory.

In-store audio ads grow, but attribution and headphones raise doubts; Hidden fees persist as drip pricing draws scrutiny; World Cup ad costs surge.

CTV never fit cleanly into campaign execution models built for RTB-based trading. Whether agentic AI solutions can simplify the complicated CTV landscape for publishers will be their first real test case.

An upcoming paper from CIMM doesn’t just demonstrate that differences in media quality can be measured. It also argues that tying media value to short-term outcomes has perpetuated longstanding industry challenges.

If you want to protect your margins, your data and your long-term strategy, here are five questions worth asking before you sign anything.

Judge tosses Helena World Chronicle case against Google; Apple will introduce ads to Maps; EU broadcasters push DMA “gatekeeper” label for Big Tech in CTV.

The age-old question for streaming TV advertisers is, how to target the viewers they want while reaching the scale their businesses need. The quick-serve restaurant operator CKE, which owns Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s, sought an answer in a case study with Attain and Amazon Ads.

One web page now needs as much memory to run as an entire operating system did 30 years ago; not even advertisers understand the industry’s acronyms; and prediction markets want to sponsor individual journalists.

Complexity hasn’t made the CTV supply chain difficult to trust. This is a transparency problem and, more specifically, an ads.txt problem.

2026 is the year CTV will bridge the gap between branding and performance. Fresh off the Convergent TV World event, our team discusses the rise of performance TV, shifting live sports rights and the impact of M&A on the streaming experience in this future-facing episode.

There are more pharma ads on CTV, but are they even targeted?; Gen Z longs for the ad-free TikTok of yore; and Meta buys a social network for AI agents.

Consumers today switch between screens and viewing interfaces to seamlessly view content. Now it’s time for advertisers to catch up to this convergence, so they can make ad experiences better – not worse, said Cadent CEO Doug Rozen.

Marketers who want to remain competitive need to reexamine the way they view, plan and measure performance across video and streaming platforms. If they’re still debating programmatic vs. direct or linear vs. streaming, then they’re missing out on the real meaning behind convergent TV, according to Mike Fogarty, head of client development, brand and agency […]

Is brand advertising bad now,?; Prediction markets are targeting college students; and performance TV is a real thing, maybe.

“We are focused on being where the world watches video,” said Tara Walpert Levy, YouTube’s VP, Americas at the Convergent TV conference in NYC on Thursday. “And to us that now is TV.”