CTV

Netflix announces a new way to measure viewership; streaming and smart TV companies face data collection investigations; and Polymarket ads incentivized losing bets.

Deli meat company Land O’Frost has been leaning into a new MMM approach to figure out which opportunities it’s been overlooking – or even inhibiting.

CTV has become a powerful full-funnel channel, attracting advertisers of all sizes – and the momentum isn’t slowing.

CTV ad spend is projected to rise another 16% this year to $26.6 billion, according to the IAB. But with rapid growth comes complexity. Advertisers now face a maze of platforms, apps and channels, each with different buying models, audience access and inconsistent measurement. For SMBs without large teams or budgets, this fragmentation is especially challenging to navigate.

Cloudflare restricts how bots can scrape content; TiVo’s customer base stays loyal, even as TiVo leaves the DVR business; and Nestlé announces a stark reduction in headcount.

The layoffs reflect a strategic decision on People Inc.’s part to free up money to invest in growth areas, according to CEO Neil Vogel’s memo to employees.

CleanTap claims that 100% of the invalid traffic it spoofed was accepted into live auctions run by programmatic platforms and was successfully bid on by advertisers.

HUMAN has recently started complementing its bid request analysis by analyzing the time between when a bot clicks an ad and when the landing page loads. Now it’s offering the solution to individual advertisers.

YouTube backpedals on banning COVID and political misinfo; Tylenol pushes back against Trump’s claims that it causes autism; and Disney doubles down on linear TV and raises Disney+ prices after its Kimmel boycott threat.

The old approach to media and measurement is no longer sustainable. AI is now embedded across every step of the media value chain, and AI is only as good as the data it’s fed.

CTV, like digital display before it, is facing fraud and mislabeled information. The prevailing advice for advertisers is to go directly to the networks and streaming platforms. However, buying direct comes with a fraud risk itself.

Concrete findings on how effective QR codes are at driving ad interactions are now available, and some industry best practices are emerging.

GAM’s dinner with ad agencies sparked speculation that Google is preparing to spin off its bundled SSP and ad server as a remedy to its ad tech monopoly. But Google says it’s just part of the trend of SSPs going direct to buyers.

Brands don’t feel secure enough to lock in huge CTV deals outside of live sports. So what happens to all of that nonsports content spread out across streaming channels?

Pause ads are going programmatic, as connected TV ad buying becomes more automated. Plus: how publishers are proposing to be compensated by AI companies – and the odds that they’ll receive what they are asking for.

The American College of Education partnered with performance TV company MNTN to better reach its audience of adults seeking higher education.

The IAB Tech Lab video classification updates introduced much-needed clarity. But valuable inventory, now categorized differently, is being deprioritized or rejected, even though its performance hasn’t changed.

The competitive set has shifted and it’s stacked against independent DSPs. But, instead of chasing what competitors already own, TTD can own what they can’t: trust.

OpenX filed a lawsuit against Google over its anticompetitive practices. And HyphaMetrics claimed victory against Nielsen in court over a patent lawsuit.

The SSP is betting on the DOJ’s antitrust remedies, plus closer relationships with agencies, DSPs and mid-sized advertisers, to help it eat some of Google’s lunch.

CleanTap, an ad tech startup launched by the founder of Method Media Intelligence, wants to separate the wheat from the chaff in CTV by serving as a curation layer between DSPs and SSPs.

Change can be bumpy. From The Trade Desk’s Solimar-to-Kokai transition to Nielsen’s transition to its Big Data + Panel offering, we go inside customers’ challenges with these two transforming platforms.

Ride-hailing app company Curb Mobility is bringing TikTok’s user-generated content to Taxi TV, its network of more than 15,000 in-taxi screens across 65 US markets.

Brands spend millions activating around Coachella. Then they spend the next three months trying to figure out if any of it actually worked. It’s a reflection of our industry’s broken approach to measuring media effectiveness.

Netflix cracks Nielsen’s top 3 channels, but YouTube is still tops; CTV is maturing as a marketing channel, but it comes with zits; and Google rolls out another core update for search.

The return of in-banner video has resulted in a deluge of cheap video supply flooding the open web, driving down CPM rates for dedicated video inventory and creating user experience and ad quality concerns.

CTV advertisers have carried over one-to-one programmatic logic from display and online video into a channel that behaves nothing like them. We need to stop chasing CTV impressions and start chasing impact.

Measuring media quality is just the first step. A bigger challenge looms: assessing media quality against a marketer’s short-term and long-term goals.

Häagen-Dazs launched its new “Slow” campaign earlier this year, hoping to strike a chord with a diverse array of consumers across platforms.

Alliant will integrate AnalyticsIQ’s audience modeling platform, which is based on user surveys and studies of health, wellness and cognitive psychology.

Pub tech SaaS startup Swivel wants to make ad ops much less manual and time-consuming with an AI-driven yield optimization tool designed by people who used to build ad servers.