Know What's Happening in Advertising
Know What's Happening in Advertising
CFOs Push Incrementality Testing as Key to CTV Spend Validation
CFOs are tightening scrutiny on connected‑TV spend because traditional metrics like impressions and modeled ROAS fail to prove incremental revenue. The article argues that incrementality testing, which isolates lift through holdout groups and deterministic transaction data, is emerging as a differentiator for proving true CTV impact.
Sell-side decisioning is reshaping programmatic advertising by giving media owners direct control over inventory, data and pricing at the moment an impression is generated. Index Exchange’s recent Live event highlighted that the top 100 owners using its Index Marketplaces saw eCPMs rise 53% versus open auctions. The model lets publishers package first‑party data and contextual signals into bespoke media products, creating “niche at scale” opportunities. By shifting decisioning upstream, the approach also broadens reach, strengthens DSP competition and opens new partnership pathways.
Happydemics has introduced “In‑Flight Mode,” a real‑time brand‑lift measurement tool that embeds outcome tracking directly into live campaigns. Marketers can now monitor consideration, purchase intent and other brand KPIs as ads run, and instantly tweak creative, targeting or media mix....
AI Digital launched Elevate, an AI‑powered marketing intelligence platform to combat ad tech fragmentation. Nutpods, a dairy‑free creamer brand, used Elevate to unify data across channels and receive near‑real‑time insights. The platform revealed audio ads outperformed other placements, allowing Nutpods...
Apple is rolling out Maps advertising in the United States and Canada this summer through its new Apple Business platform, positioning the service as a direct competitor to Google Maps ads. The format places businesses at the top of search...
Reuters partnered with Integral Ad Science to replace traditional keyword blocklists with IAS’s Context Control semantic solution. By analyzing meaning, sentiment, and entity relationships, the platform identified safe articles previously flagged by keywords, especially on the Lifestyle subdomain where 13.4%...
The article argues that the classic linear marketing funnel is being replaced by a loop‑based model driven by AI‑generated answers that deliver brand exposure without clicks. It defines three stages—exposure, recall, and return—explaining how users first see a brand in...
Lately, more businesses are coming with ₹3L+ ad spend but declining ROI. There’s a silent doubt — “Are ads just getting expensive now?” They assume rising CPMs are the problem. But deeper inside, it’s poor funnel depth — no mid-stage nurturing, only cold-to-sale...
The WNBA unveiled the marketing playbook for its 30th season, launching a "GOAT" campaign that spotlights legends like Sheryl Swoopes. The rollout follows a unanimous Board of Governors vote approving a new seven‑year collective bargaining agreement that raises player salaries,...
Ocean Outdoor has opened entries for its 2026 Digital Creative Competition across the UK, the Netherlands, the Nordics and Germany. The contest runs from April 7 to August 21, is free to enter, and offers a total prize fund of €2.675 million (about...
The NFL announced a multi‑year partnership with U.S. Bank, making it the league’s first standalone banking and wealth‑management sponsor in three decades. The deal breaks the former all‑encompassing Visa agreement into three separate categories, with American Express taking payments and a peer‑to‑peer...
AI agents are emerging as a fourth place of commerce, moving beyond stores, e‑commerce, and mobile. These assistants now not only answer queries but automatically select brands based on data signals such as search demand, reviews, and online conversation. Out‑of‑home...
Adtelligent Inc., a full‑stack advertising technology firm, has been named to the Financial Times and Statista ‘America’s Fastest Growing Companies 2026’ list, which spotlights firms with the strongest revenue growth from 2021 to 2024. The ranking underscores Adtelligent’s rapid expansion, driven by...
Uber UK has rolled out a new "sunbed wars" activation, covering cars with giant beach towels to promote its Reserve service for airport trips. The campaign, created by creative agency Mother, taps into the British habit of early‑morning sun‑bathing to...
Almost every week, I see this same issue across Meta accounts spending ₹50K–₹80K/month. Leads are coming in, CPL looks “fine” at ₹180… but conversions stay stuck at 1.2%. There’s always this hesitation — “Maybe the audience is wrong?” But the real gap sits...
Today, I was reviewing an account spending ₹1.2L/month with a steady 1.8X ROAS. The founder sounded calm… but underneath, there was quiet frustration — “It’s not scaling anymore.” They believed increasing budget would fix it. It didn’t. The issue wasn’t spend — it...
In this special edition of the eMarketer "Behind the Numbers" podcast, senior analyst Arielle Fager leads a panel with Jack Newper of Purdue Farms and Matt Barresi of Kimberly‑Clark to dissect the growing gap between retail media spend and measurement...
The American Prospect announced it is removing all programmatic advertising from its website, citing concerns over reader privacy, site performance, and security vulnerabilities. The outlet said personal data deserves greater respect and that programmatic ads slow pages and disrupt the...
Generally seeing the “attribution loss” from click to engaged view be about 10% across most clients within Meta. Developing new multipliers for each client still operating on 7DC, however a lot already shifted to IA attribution so those were not impacted. I...
The Programmatic Bureau (TPB) has named WeThinkMedia as its exclusive Australian sales representative, giving Australian advertisers a single gateway to New Zealand programmatic inventory across DOOH, CTV, audio and display. The partnership aims to cut the fragmentation that has traditionally complicated...
Curious Nation, the independent activation agency, announced two senior hires to strengthen its trans‑Tasman operations: Christina Crawford as senior producer in New Zealand and Anna Smith as account manager in Sydney. Crawford brings over two decades of global event‑production experience, while...
Atomic 212° demonstrated that pairing digital audio with programmatic digital out‑of‑home (DOOH) creates a measurable priming effect, boosting long‑term memory encoding by roughly 17‑18%. The combined media sequence drove a 5.2‑times increase in conversion efficiency when retargeted through Yahoo DSP....
A February 2026 Ipsos Consumer Tracker survey of 1,085 U.S. adults found that 63% say ads in AI‑driven search results would erode their trust, while only 24% disagree. The same data show a majority (52%) doubt ads would simplify the...
SparkToro announced upgraded keyword data in its audience research reports, shifting focus from sheer comprehensiveness to relevance. The new system surfaces higher‑intent search terms while automatically filtering out off‑topic queries across verticals such as modern lighting design, Costa Rica travel, and...
Financial services advertising is undergoing a strategic overhaul as fintech firms allocate roughly 75% of their media budgets to digital channels, outpacing traditional banks’ 60% share. In the investment segment, digital spend surged 68% year‑over‑year while TV budgets contracted, prompting...
McCann Canada’s creative director Athina Afton Lallijee shares how her multicultural upbringing and optimism drive her work, from low‑budget Lego campaigns to socially‑focused Kids Help Phone spots. She credits diverse experiences, mentorship, and a belief that great ideas can emerge...
The article outlines five practical SEO A/B tests—title‑tag variations, AI Overview optimization, internal‑link placement, content length/depth, and schema markup—to systematically boost organic traffic. It explains how to set up control and variant groups, measure results with Google Search Console, and...
ProOps Consulting’s Chris Quinn warns that many publishers rely on manual, fragmented Google Ad Manager (GAM) workflows, causing revenue leakage especially during high‑volume periods like Q4. The lack of dedicated development resources and a sparse GAM add‑on marketplace forces ad‑ops...
A joint study by Integral Ad Science (IAS) and Reuters found that over half of Reuters' brand‑suitable news pages would be demonetized by typical keyword blocklists, despite meeting IAS' Context Control Targeting standards. In the news section, 54% of URLs...
Generative AI is reshaping how American voters consume information, creating a new frontier for political campaigns ahead of the 2026 midterms, which are projected to cost $10.8 billion with programmatic buying accounting for over half of digital spend. Campaigns face hidden...
As of March 2026 Google commands roughly 90 % of global search traffic, edging just above the 90 % threshold after a brief dip in early 2026. Bing has risen to about 5 % worldwide and exceeds 10 % in the United States, boosted by AI‑driven...
Mid-market retail brands are shifting to three core first‑party data tactics as third‑party cookies disappear. Loyalty and membership programs now focus on exclusive experiences rather than simple discounts, generating richer purchase and preference signals. Progressive profiling spreads data capture across...
Google disclosed on April 3, 2025 a logging error that has been inflating Search Console impression counts since May 2025, while clicks and other metrics remain unchanged. The flaw means nearly a year of visibility data may be overstated, prompting analysts to treat...
AI decision engines now require deterministic identity, making first‑party data essential for advertising. A recent IAB report shows 71% of brands, agencies and publishers are expanding first‑party data, nearly double the rate from two years ago. Retail media spend is...
CNN, owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, is building its own AI‑agent infrastructure to enable autonomous media trading, targeting a launch in Q1 2027. The company will finish scoping protocols by Q2 2026, test on select properties in Q3, and evaluate buyer behavior...
This morning, a founder messaged me after spending ₹2L in 60 days with inconsistent results. There was confusion — “Some days work, most don’t… I don’t get it.” They kept changing creatives, hoping something would click. But the inconsistency came from fragmented campaign...
Amazon has made ads a default feature on Prime Video, turning the platform into a massive, ad‑supported audience within its commerce ecosystem. Marketers can now buy pre‑roll, mid‑roll and occasional post‑roll spots programmatically via Amazon DSP, linking video impressions to...
Advertisers are turning to matched‑market tests to prove ad incrementality as consumer confidence wanes and identifier opt‑outs erode data signals. The method pits a test geography receiving media against a control geography without exposure, isolating true lift while mitigating risk....
Google announced a fix for a long‑running Search Console bug that has been inflating impression counts since May 13, 2025. The logging error will be corrected over the next few weeks, causing reported impressions in the Performance report to drop....
RecSys, ad ranking, and the AI advertising opportunity Certainly, Meta seems to be investing resources into advanced architectures for ad retrieval, ad ranking, and RecSys more generally. And the results are impressive: a 3% increase in conversions might be interpreted as...
I'm not one to talk ad performance on Meta but yesterday may have been the worst performance day I've seen on Meta in a long time that wasn't involving an outage. Confirmed now with multiple others.
The paid‑search landscape has moved from keyword‑centric tactics to AI‑driven strategy. Google’s AI Max layer now treats keywords as one of many signals, using conversion data, first‑party audiences, and creative assets to optimize bids and placements. Advertisers who feed high‑quality...
In March, forecast data showed Instagram’s ad revenue growth could fall from 27% YoY in 2026 to just 15.5% by 2027, a drop of over ten percentage points, while Facebook faces sub‑10% growth. Papa John’s announced a $22 million investment in...
Major League Baseball has deepened its partnership with Adobe to automate fan‑engagement marketing across all 30 clubs. The expanded deal adds Adobe's GenStudio performance‑marketing platform, Firefly Services creative tools, and an LLM Optimizer for AI‑driven search visibility. Teams will use...
A creator tested whether Claude, an AI language model, could not only write a 10‑slide Instagram carousel but also publish it automatically via PRISM’s MCP integration. The prompt produced a narrative‑driven carousel in the creator’s voice, and PRISM posted it...
OpenAI is set to roll out a self‑serve ChatGPT Ads platform in April, expanding the pilot beyond the U.S. to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The initial limited test generated an annualized $100 million revenue run‑rate and attracted roughly 600 advertisers, but...
OpenAI secured a $122 billion funding round, lifting its valuation to about $852 billion and hinting at a future public listing. The company also extended its advertising pilot to Canada, Australia and New Zealand, giving brands more time to test AI‑assistant ads. In...
Boathouse appointed Sonia Chung as its first Chief Strategy Officer, tasking her with dismantling data silos that tie marketers to Big‑Tech platforms. Chung argues agencies should build their own measurement infrastructure, using AI to fuse structured and unstructured signals across paid,...
Crumbl partnered with Samsung Ads for a seven‑week CTV acquisition campaign in Q4, leveraging Samsung’s integration with AppsFlyer to track performance. The effort generated over 16,000 app installs and a 23% conversion rate, slightly higher than the brand’s typical social‑driven...
The Trade Desk’s relationship with Publicis collapsed after a leaked transparency audit, prompting rivals to tout their own openness. However, agency buyers largely dismissed transparency as a decisive factor, focusing instead on margin and control. Competitors such as Nexxen are...
Brands are tightening budgets amid a crowded sports calendar that includes the Super Bowl, 2026 Winter Olympics and FIFA World Cup. Global ad spend is set to exceed $1 trillion, but live‑sports slots remain prohibitively expensive, with 30‑second Super Bowl spots...
