Ad tech Briefing: Walmart’s Vibe deal is a reminder not to spend too long courting Madison Avenue

Media Buying Briefing: The holdco tech heads expound on the ups and downs of building AI

Future of Marketing Briefing: CMOs are still haunted by hard questions about value of ad creative

OpenAI turns on cost-per-click ads inside ChatGPT

‘Everything is coming down’: ChatGPT ads are getting cheaper

A closer look at OpenAI’s ads manager – and how much work it still needs

Media Briefing: Inside publishers’ real Cannes agenda – AI money vs agentic hype

For publishers, Cannes this year isn’t just about showing up for clients and sponsors. It’s a mid‑year checkpoint on two hard questions: who is going to pay for the open web in an AI world, and whether agentic media buying is a real fix or just a freshly branded ad‑tech tax.

Forbes tests a creator-led audience play to grow off-platform reach 

Forbes is yet another publisher tapping creators and their audiences to drive off-platform growth – with a slightly different structure.

How Lipton Ice Tea is using local creators instead of building in-house social teams 

Lipton worked with Billion Dollar Boy to activate local creators across six different markets; a new approach to global marketing

Cannes Briefing: Creativity is moving beyond the agency model

For the first time, a growing number of CMOs are thinking about creative more broadly than creative agencies.

Google’s World Cup brand counterattack highlights shifting search behavior

The tech giant is running ads intended to reintroduce its search engine to users, as it begins to feel competitive heat in the AI era.

The hunt for a post-LiveRamp successor is already underway

Prospects are less interested in replicating LiveRamp than securing identity, data and infrastructure.

Walmart buys ‘the Google Ads of streaming’ Vibe in a deal tipped at a $1 billion-plus valuation

The deal would bring Vibe’s 10,000 SME advertisers to the platform, equipping Walmart to better compete with Meta and Pinterest.

Future of TV Briefing: The ad-supported streaming landscape in graphic detail

This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at a spate of recent studies that highlight the growing predominance of ad-supported streaming and the risk in how brands are managing streaming campaigns.

Future of TV Briefing: Fox finds its programmatic identify in Roku

This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at how Fox’s acquisition of Roku bolsters the former’s streaming — specifically, programmatic streaming — advertising business.

At Cannes, Omnicom Media and NBCU say they’re crafting dynamic contextual ads for content

Metadata from NBCU is key to adapting Omnicom clients’ creative be dynamically contextual to the shows in which they run.

Omnicom Media and Paramount partner on dynamic fixed ad units in the streamer’s premieres

Sponsor units in the media company’s streaming premieres are dynamically adapted to enable advertisers to tell a sequential story in those ad breaks, the first time Paramount has added a dynamic insertion capability to streaming.

Agencies look to AI agents for edge, but must fend off brands looking to in-house with the same tech

AI agents are at the core of Dentsu and Dept’s market offerings, but a Hyundai agentic media pilot highlights threat of in-housing.

D+ Research: Marketers embrace AI for social and retail media, but show skepticism in AI ad buying

Digiday+ Research: Marketers optimize GEO strategies amid the effects of zero-click search

Digiday+ Research: Marketers’ AI use rises, but tech skills stall

Meta courts agencies with expanded ad tools while AI reshapes the industry

Spotify rebuilds ad business around automation, AI to secure bigger media budgets

What are digital twins? Marketers weigh the opportunities and risks

Digiday+ Research: Marketing workflows benefit from AI, but trust is still a barrier to adoption

Digiday+ Research: Agencies punt budget growth expectations to 2027 — while AI worries intensify

Digiday+ Research: Publishers favor generative AI over predictive AI

Future of TV Briefing: The upfront is overtaking streaming’s programmatic marketplace

This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at how major TV and streaming ad sellers are seeing upfront deals represent a larger share of their programmatic businesses.

Why Amazon and YouTube pitched operating systems, not just TV inventory at this year’s upfront

Negotiations over identity, infrastructure, AI-driven buying take place as much as programing.

The state of agentic advertising

This State of the Industry Report, sponsored by Optable, examines agentic advertising and how publishers, advertisers and agencies are interacting with the medium — from investment and readiness to barriers and impact. Agentic AI is the latest optimization tactic across media, supporting initiatives like agentic advertising. However, because agentic AI is described as “a situation […]