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Freewheel will begin reporting show-level data; Xbox will let users stream games for free if they watch ads; and Meta and Google can develop AI ads without even a prompt.

Some holdcos will pay AI costs in exchange for principal inventory commitments; Google will require Ads API customers to have passkeys; and microdramas struggle with the ethics of AI likenesses.

Agentic AI shows promise for direct deals. But if Google has its way, Buyer Direct could put an end to all sorts of agentic direct sales opportunities while they’re still in the cradle.

Google’s changing up Max; CTV buyers are “addicted to siloing;” and Bluesky’s AI investments may be moot.

Sports are where the money is; Reddit’s rethinking its AI licensing strategy; and data targeting has its darker sides.

Investors didn’t bring up Google’s advertising business or ads in general once during the Q&A portion of Alphabet’s earnings report call on Wednesday.

The purported best ways to counter ad fraud; CPG brands struggle in the face of GLP-1s; and the open web might be meeting its end.

We’re witnessing the end of the pageview era. But the interesting question isn’t how publishers replace their lost search traffic; it’s what they do with the audience they already have.

Google has to hand over some of its AI features to competitors; when LLMs will (or won’t) be critical; and publishers are productizing GEO offerings.

Google and Meta are quietly rewriting the rules of ad measurement, and they’re doing it with open-source marketing mix modeling tools that many marketers don’t even realize they’re using.

Advertising in AI-native destinations and experiences is already starting to look less like a series of experiments and more like an emerging market.

Instead of relying on rigid audience segments, modern systems can interpret a real-world moment in real time, combining layers of information to better predict what someone might actually care about right now.

Criteo has two potential buyers; publishers consider blocking Google’s joint AI-scraping/search-indexing bot; and Microsoft’s billion-player gaming goal might make sense for mobile.

In a world being agentically orchestrated at scale, human judgment is the indispensable guardrail preventing us from optimizing right over the cliff.

Everyone’s investing in AppsFlyer; NBCU launches Rock Studios, a creative studio for brand integrations; and Meta wants to hop on the TV bandwagon.

Ask Ad Manger offers instant troubleshooting help when a campaign isn’t delivering as expected, ideally by diagnosing the problem and suggesting how to fix it.

Where will OpenAI put its ads?; YouTube may or may not be considered TV; and Uber and Lyft deals really are too good to be true.

Viant creates a direct pipeline between its DSP and media companies; Google and TTD won’t renew their TAG accreditations; and OpenAI may lower the cost of tokens.

The pitch for dynamic take rates is reasonable. Total volume goes up, and the publisher sees more impressions clearing. But the problem is where the extra volume comes from. 

Amazon has third parties selling some of its ad inventory; Scope3 selling Adloox to Peer39 suggests sustainability is out; and “fabric” is the new AI-related buzzword for ad tech.

The programmatic intelligence layer is owned by the same parties that are extracting margin from it. That structure is now being dismantled by an AI-underpinned protocol that moves the intelligence layer into the open.

Agentic shopping is the next big thing. At least that’s the message from Google’s big annual conference for ad product updates.

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 […]

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.

People Inc. previewed plans to downsize by focusing mainly on its key properties. The strategy makes sense considering its publishing portfolio has lost about two-thirds of its Google traffic.

Google is launching Meridian Studio, an enterprise version of its Meridian media mix modeling platform and an updated open-source version of its GeoX tool for measuring incrementality across geos. 

Going viral isn’t great; AI search is a nightmare; and CTV is forcing everyone to get along.

Generative AI search has pushed traffic off a cliff across most of the internet, but not on social platforms. Reddit included.

Google announced new features and ad types for AI Max, its AI-based bidding product for search and shopping or sponsored product ads. The company also touted “hundreds of thousands” of advertisers using AI Max.

Alphabet earned $109.9 billion in Q1 this year, up from $90.2 billion a year ago. And that’s not even the truly gobsmacking number.