Snap Stops Grading Its Own Homework
Snap announced Unified Attribution, a beta product that merges its own first‑party data with mobile measurement partner (MMP) data, starting with AppsFlyer. The feature lets advertisers choose a dual‑optimization mode that credits both Snap’s internal attribution and the MMP’s view. Snap plans to expand the integration across the entire MMP ecosystem later this year. By feeding real‑time MMP signals into its machine‑learning models, Snap aims to reduce attribution gaps and improve campaign efficiency.
Google’s AI Search Guidelines: What Affiliates Need to Know
Google’s new AI Search guidelines make clear that AI‑generated overviews still depend on traditional SEO signals such as crawlable pages, trustworthy content, and structured data. The documentation warns affiliates against shortcuts like forced content chunking, llms.txt files, and fake brand‑mention...
Mobile Measurement Set the Standard. Web Is Finally Catching Up.
AppsFlyer launched Web Performance Measurement, extending its mobile‑grade attribution infrastructure to web campaigns. The new suite delivers independent, server‑to‑server conversion postbacks, unified reporting across walled‑garden networks, and cross‑platform cost‑and‑revenue tracking. By closing the loop between mobile, desktop and web, marketers...
Q1 2026 Malformed & Fraudulent CTV Bundle IDs Risk Report
Pixalate released its Q1 2026 Connected TV (CTV) Malformed and Fraudulent Bundle IDs Risk Report, covering Amazon Fire TV, Roku, Apple TV, LG Smart TV, and Samsung Smart TV. The analysis of roughly 2 billion programmatic impressions shows that malformed or unidentified...
When Data Becomes Surveillance: What Meta’s Instagram DM Change Means for Marketers
Meta stripped end‑to‑end encryption from Instagram direct messages on May 8 2026, shifting DMs to standard encryption that the company can read. The move aligns with the TAKE IT DOWN Act, which pressures platforms to monitor exploitative content. While Meta has not announced advertising...
StackAdapt Unveils Next Evolution of AI-Powered Proactive Marketing at Conversion 2026
StackAdapt announced a suite of AI‑driven features at Conversion 2026, including the real‑time Command Centre, the conversational Ivy Studio workspace, a beta AI Video Builder, cross‑channel attribution, and programmatic direct mail for U.S. marketers. The tools aim to cut manual workflow,...
Viant Taps Ad Fontes Media to Bring ‘News Bias’ Targeting to CTV
Viant’s demand‑side platform has partnered with Ad Fontes Media to embed the firm’s reliability‑and‑bias scores into connected‑TV (CTV) inventory. The integration, now live, lets advertisers target individual news shows rather than whole apps or domains. It is the first CTV solution...
How Townsquare and Bonneville Are Playing the Digital Slowdown
Townsquare Media reported a 7% rise in digital advertising in Q1, with programmatic revenue jumping more than 20%, pushing digital to 59% of total revenue and 63% of profit. Borrell’s 2026 Benchmark shows local digital ad growth has decelerated sharply,...
MakeMyTrip Promotes AI Travel Assistant Myra with Aparshakti Khurana in New Ad
MakeMyTrip has rolled out two digital films starring Aparshakti Khurana and Manjot Singh to promote Myra 2.0, its AI‑powered travel assistant. The ads highlight Myra’s ability to manage itinerary choices, accommodation requests and payments through a conversational, voice‑enabled interface. Myra now supports eight...
Google Ads Budget Misallocation Is More Common Than You Think – And Harder To Spot via @Sejournal, @LisaRocksSEM
Google Ads budgets are frequently misallocated, especially as Performance Max reshapes spend patterns and Smart Bidding struggles with low‑volume campaigns. Small daily budgets keep algorithms under the conversion thresholds needed for Target CPA or ROAS, leading to throttled spend and...
TechCrunch Leads,Yahoo Drops: Picnic’s 2026 Inventory Quality Rankings
Picnic released its PIQ10 2026 ranking, naming the UK’s ten highest‑quality publishers for advertising based on its continuously updated PIQ platform. TechCrunch surged to the top spot, while National Geographic, Politico and The Guardian entered the list for the first time....
Publicis Acquisition of LiveRamp Reshapes Commerce Media
Publicis announced a $2.167 billion acquisition of LiveRamp, a leading data‑clean‑room provider. The deal builds on Publicis’ recent string of commerce‑focused purchases, including Epsilon, Profitero and Mars United Commerce. By pairing LiveRamp’s neutral data‑collaboration platform with Epsilon’s identity graph, Publicis aims...
AI Ads Are Already Here. Your Lead Data Isn’t Ready.
OpenAI and Criteo announced a pilot that places ads inside ChatGPT, turning the conversational AI into a new performance marketing surface. The article warns that AI‑generated lead data can be plagued by hallucinations, producing inaccurate names, titles, or contact details...
The Growing Role of Social Media Hashtags in Recruitment and HR Marketing
Social media hashtags are becoming a core component of recruitment and HR marketing, helping talent‑acquisition teams surface job posts to early‑career audiences. Testing across campus hiring, software roles, and retail shifts showed that free first‑party tools like Creative Center excel...
Tap4Change Launches First Campaign Platform with Koala in a Blond Wig via All Good Collective
Tap4Change, an Australian donation platform, launched its first digital campaign with All Good Collective, featuring a koala in a blond wig for wildlife charity People For Nature and hair‑salon brand Franck Provost. The platform routes 100% of donor money to...
Agencies Are Moving Closer to Supply, and It’s Reshaping the Programmatic Middle Layer
Publicis Groupe’s pending acquisition of LiveRamp signals agencies’ push to own more of the programmatic stack. The move follows a broader industry trend where DSPs and SSPs blur traditional boundaries, and buyers seek tighter control over supply‑path economics. Index Exchange’s...
Far and Wide vs Bullseye
At the ET Brand Equity ‘igNight’ event, media veterans Vikram Sakhuja and Shashi Sinha sparred over whether reach remains the primary marketing metric or if targeted, attention‑driven advertising has taken precedence. Sakhuja argued that broad reach is essential for acquiring...
The 7 Best URL Shorteners in 2026
Jill Duffy’s updated 2026 roundup identifies the seven leading URL‑shortening platforms, ranking Rebrandly as the all‑around winner and Bitly for enterprise needs. Each service is evaluated on branding, analytics, QR‑code generation, automation support and price, with a detailed pricing matrix...
90% Of Brands Have Zero AI Search Mentions, New Study Finds 4 Key SEO Insights
A Victorious‑sponsored study of 177 brands across healthcare, SaaS, financial services, ecommerce/retail, and legal sectors found that 90% of them received no AI‑search mentions in Q1 2026. Only 18 brands were cited or mentioned on any of the eight AI platforms...
X Pitches Advertisers on Rising Opportunities in the App
X is revamping its ad sales pitch by highlighting a major AI‑driven upgrade to its targeting engine, which it says can better understand user behavior and boost campaign performance. The company also touts an affluent audience, with average household incomes...
X Launches Display of Active Followers to Contextualize Performance Data
X has added an active‑followers metric to its creator analytics, showing the exact number and percentage of followers who were active in the past 24 hours and a 3‑hour reach snapshot. The move aims to give creators clearer context for engagement...
Content Marketing for Hotels: How 10X Content Improves SEO and PR
TravelBoom is urging independent hotels to adopt "10X" content—a step beyond basic guides—to boost organic search visibility, earn media coverage, and increase direct bookings. The approach focuses on delivering comprehensive, insider‑level travel information that outperforms existing web results, rather than...
Amazon, Netflix and Google to Capture Half of CTV Ad Market by 2030
Omdia forecasts global connected‑TV (CTV) advertising revenue to rise from $44 billion in 2025 to $81 billion by 2030. Google, Amazon and Netflix together are projected to capture 50% of that market, with shares of 26%, 13% and 9% respectively. The data...
Liftoff Upgrades Cortex
Liftoff, a leading mobile‑app performance‑marketing platform, announced a major upgrade to its Cortex neural‑network engine on May 19, 2026. The enhancements add unattributed sample learning, multicast user‑level ROAS modeling, and sequential behavioral modeling. These changes expand the data pool, shift predictions to...
Why Marketing Measurement Feels Broken and How to Fix It
Marketing measurement feels broken because deterministic attribution once gave a false sense of certainty, and recent privacy and platform changes have exposed its limits. Gary Danks argues that the problem isn’t tools but mindset, urging teams to focus on total...
ITV Launches Live Addressable+ with Omnicom
ITV has introduced Live Addressable+, its first addressable advertising solution for live linear channels, in an exclusive beta with Omnicom Media Group. The trial involves more than 20 brands across automotive, retail and telecoms, leveraging ITV’s first‑party audience data and...
Advanced CTV Measurement, Now Live for Universal Ads
Singular announced that its Advanced CTV Measurement is now live for Universal Ads, enabling app promotion campaigns on connected‑TV inventory. The integration requires no new SDK or separate data pipeline; advertisers create a CTV‑to‑Mobile tracking link in Singular and attach...
Accounts in Transit: Thundery Adds Celebree School
Thunderly Marketing has been hired by early‑childhood education franchisor Celebree School to run its digital‑marketing and franchise‑development program, covering paid media, SEO, creative and analytics. CIIC PR added luxury‑travel operator Kemetale, which offers intimate Nile cruises, to its client roster,...
Accounts in Transit: Thunderly Adds Celebree School
Thunderly Marketing has been hired by early‑childhood education franchisor Celebree School to run a full‑scale digital marketing and franchise development program, covering paid media, SEO content, website optimization and analytics. CIIC PR added luxury travel client Kemetale, a provider of...
AdWMG Launches Mobile UA Solution for App Growth Campaigns
adWMG introduced Mobile UA, a dedicated user‑acquisition solution for mobile studios and agencies. The platform taps into 1.4 trillion ad requests through adWMG’s DSP, letting advertisers run performance‑based CPI and CPA campaigns. It integrates with major mobile measurement partners for transparent...
Microsoft Has Sought Ad Compatibility For Many Years
Microsoft Advertising is intensifying its push for cross‑platform ad compatibility, adding immediate performance recommendations after each import and enhancing Performance Max to capture new customers. The company’s recent upgrades aim to cut manual resizing, speed time‑to‑launch, and boost ROI, positioning Microsoft...
ADvendio & Kevel Launch New Integration to Power the Next Wave of Campaign Management
ADvendio announced a strategic partnership with Kevel, integrating the retailer‑focused ad‑serving platform into its omnichannel advertising management suite. The new integration, rolling out in the Spring 2026 release, automates key campaign‑management tasks such as trafficking, forecasting, targeting and billing through AI‑powered...
Why Incrementality Testing Alone Won’t Fix Your Paid Media Budget – The Missing Metric via @Sejournal, @Tonyadam
Direct‑to‑consumer brands are increasingly relying on lift studies, but incrementality alone can mislead budget decisions. The article argues that Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER)—total revenue divided by total ad spend—provides the essential business‑level anchor. By stacking MER, incrementality, and attribution, marketers...
AnyMind Launches AI Platform to Link Online Ads with Retail Sales
AnyMind Group unveiled AnyAI OMO, an AI‑driven platform that ties online advertising and social media activity directly to offline retail sales in Japan. The service combines the firm’s data infrastructure with Japanese distributor Sun Smile’s network, offering real‑time insights and...
Investigation Into Suspected Anti-Competitive Conduct by Google in Ad Tech
The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) opened a Chapter II investigation in May 2022 into Google’s dominance across the ad‑tech stack, alleging the company favours its own services in online display advertising. In September 2024 the CMA issued a statement...
What eCommerce Brands Get Wrong About Retail Media Measurement
Retail media networks report ROAS using proprietary attribution rules, creating up to a 63% variation across platforms. eCommerce brands typically operate on six different networks, turning each into its own source of truth and inflating a fragmentation tax. Because the...
Wolt Ads and Koddi Team to Expand Programmatic Access to Commerce Media in Germany
Wolt Ads, Germany's leading in‑app retail media platform, has partnered with commerce‑media technology firm Koddi to enable programmatic buying of its inventory. Koddi’s supply‑side platform now integrates directly with Wolt’s auction system, giving brands and agencies a streamlined path to...
Why LinkedIn Is the Most Underrated Answer Engine Optimisation Channel
LinkedIn has emerged as a top source for large language models, ranking ahead of Wikipedia and YouTube in AI citations, according to SEMrush’s 2026 LinkedIn AI Visibility Study. Long‑form LinkedIn articles account for roughly 50‑66% of all LinkedIn content cited...
Pitch Deck: X Leans on AI and Performance in a Bid to Win Ad Dollars
X is re‑branding its advertising offering around AI‑driven performance, promising brands higher ROI through algorithmic targeting. The platform highlights its massive user base and new tools that claim to optimize creative placement, bidding, and audience segmentation in real time. However,...
AI Is the Next Generation Ad Channel. Here’s How Brands Must Get Ahead
OpenAI’s rollout of ads marks AI’s transition from a research tool to a full‑fledged advertising channel, forcing brands to confront a new, opaque influence point in the consumer journey. Large language models now shape product preferences before shoppers reach search...
Meta Adds New Creator Publishing Tools
Meta unveiled two creator‑focused publishing tools on May 18, 2026. The web‑based Creator Studio now includes a Content Planner that visualizes scheduled posts, flags timing gaps, and links directly to performance insights. A revamped bulk‑upload flow for Reels lets creators add captions...
Google Ads Costs Keep Rising, but Conversion Rates Improved in 2025
The 2025 WordStream benchmark, covering over 16,000 Google Ads campaigns, shows the average cost‑per‑click climbing to $5.42, a 16% rise from 2024. At the same time, average conversion rates improved to 8.18%, indicating better efficiency despite pricier traffic. Automation tools...
Instacart Expands Ads Manager Tools to Retailers
Instacart is extending its Ads Manager platform to grocery and retail partners, adding a self‑serve suite that lets retailers create basket‑level promotions, target high‑intent shoppers, and track performance in real time. The move follows a milestone year in which Instacart’s...
Intentsify Expands Global Access to B2B Audience Data Across Leading DSPs
Intentsify has made more than 700 pre‑built B2B audience segments directly available in leading demand‑side platforms such as The Trade Desk and Google DV360. The rollout adds global distribution through LiveRamp, covering over 90 countries, and introduces Canadian reach via...
X Is Making a Major Creator Push, Launching Ad Product to Connect Brands and Users (Exclusive)
X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, announced Creator Connect, an AI‑powered marketplace that pairs brands with creators, especially niche and emerging influencers. Leveraging technology from its sister company xAI, the service matches creators based on campaign goals, real‑time trends,...
Podscribe Expands Audio Incrementality Measurement with Synthetic Controls and Randomized Holdout Testing
Podscribe, a leading podcast attribution platform, launched expanded incrementality measurement tools that include synthetic control groups, randomized user‑level holdouts, ghost holdouts, PSA‑based testing, and publisher‑created holdouts. The new features run through Podscribe’s SmartServe ad‑serving layer, which inserts a VAST tag...
Topsort Launches TikTok Offsite Ads to Extend Commerce Media Beyond Onsite Placements
Topsort unveiled TikTok Offsite Ads, a new AI‑native capability that lets marketplaces and vendors run TikTok campaigns directly from its commerce media platform. The feature integrates TikTok advertising into the same catalog, budgeting, scheduling and reporting infrastructure that powers onsite...
DoubleVerify Launches AI-Powered Threads Suitability Controls?
DoubleVerify introduced AI‑powered pre‑screen suitability controls for Meta Threads, letting advertisers block content that falls below their brand thresholds before ads are served. The new feature adds 30 granular avoidance categories, such as Youth Entertainment and Gambling, and refreshes hourly...
Chatbot Ad IDs Share Data To Google, Microsoft, Other Analytics Providers
A University of California‑Davis study examined network traffic from 20 AI chatbots during a standard query. Researchers found 47 unique third‑party owners and 178 chatbot‑to‑third‑party domain pairs, with analytics tags on 17 bots and advertising tags on 12. Notably, Gemini,...
Aftermarket Auto Parts Retailer Grows AI Search Revenue 344% in Six Months, New Visibility Labs Case Study Shows
Visibility Labs released a case study showing its six‑month AI SEO campaign propelled Private Label MFG, an aftermarket auto parts retailer, from under 1% to more than 20% visibility on generative‑AI prompts. The effort generated a 344% jump in AI‑driven...