
August 7, 2026
Second-quarter earnings calls usually serve as a brief interlude in the traditional summer lull for business news, but this week’s offerings in ad tech bucked that trend with one of the most renowned names in the sector set to be taken private, while others posted faltering revenue-growth rates, if not marked decline.
In summary, it was a week that’s likely to further fuel speculation that more public ad tech companies will follow the likes of the ad verification duo Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify, plus LiveRamp, by exiting Wall Street in favor of ownership by strategic players or private equity.
Yesterday (August 6), DoubleVerify and Nielsen Holdings announced a definitive agreement for the TV-ratings giant to acquire the ad verification company in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $2.15 billion, with the union expected to be made official by the close of the first quarter next year.
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August 7, 2026
The Trade Desk missed its second-quarter forecast. Advertisers buying on price, not value, are a big part of the reason why. So now it’s betting on measurement so clear they can’t keep doing it.
Key to those efforts will be a new measurement framework, which is in alpha. CEO Jeff Green flagged it on the earnings call yesterday (August 6). When it does launch, the hope is that it will “more fairly assign value across the entire customer journey, giving marketers greater confidence in whether advertising is creating incremental business results”. To do it properly, The Trade Desk is working with, in Green’s words, “some of the largest media companies, the largest measurement companies, and the largest data companies to bring it to life”.
It’s fair to say Green has a lot riding on the outcome.
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August 7, 2026
Creator agencies are turning into entertainment studios.
But unlike traditional studios, marketers are the ones footing the bill. More of them want to back up the “make content, not ads” mantra with actual budget, and that’s driving demand for specialist talent so high that creator agencies are either rebuilding themselves as entertainment companies or launching as one from day one.
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August 7, 2026
Publishers have begun offering ad inventory specifically designed to be seen by AI agents. With clients desperate to improve their AI search visibility, some media buyers say it’s worth a shot. Others regard it as magical thinking.
To recap, Time Inc is inserting ads into markdown versions of its webpages, which have been specially designed for AI systems and agents to read. The ads themselves are formatted as FAQs with a brand’s information and messaging, and labeled as sponsored content.
Time claims it’s the first time a publisher has offered such a channel. In the eyes of some media experts, it’s a potential shortcut to solving AI visibility concerns.
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August 7, 2026
Marketers have spent the past year trying to understand how to get their brands mentioned in AI search results. Now, they’re putting dollars and organizing teams around their AI visibility efforts.
The problem is marketers are flying the plane while building it.
In some sense, they don’t have a choice. Nearly one in five consumers have already replaced traditional research with AI, according to a recent SponsorCX survey. Call it a fear of missing out (FOMO). Marketers are spending on tools promising AI visibility. They’re optimizing web pages for AI bot crawlers. Marketing budgets now account for GEO efforts. All the while, there’s little known about the LLMs’ decision making processes.
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August 7, 2026
There’s significant debate about synthetic audiences. Sure, they save agencies and brands considerably on time and money, but there are inherent risks as well. Probably the biggest is that most synthetic data models are regressive — they trend toward the mean. They smooth out the edges, compress the variance, and pull everything within a standard deviation or two of average.
But another risk is that too much research is commissioned but seldom used, and within the creative world, rarely used as a springboard to informing creative ideas at their outset.
Ideally, a New Zealand-based market research firm, is looking to reinvent research when serving the creative side of the industry by integrating consumer insights earlier in the creative process, enhancing creativity and reducing risk. The platform connects data from various teams, enabling compounding knowledge and, in the long run, incorporating synthetic data usage into the process.
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August 7, 2026
This story was first published by Digiday sibling Glossy
In July, Korean skin-care brand Innisfree partnered with comedian and “Saturday Night Live” star Tommy Brennan on a series of man-on-the-street-style interviews to promote its Green Tea Sunscreen Serum. The benefits of the sunscreen took second fiddle to Brennan’s playful questions with New Yorkers, and that was largely the idea, according to the brand.
“With Gen Z, in particular, traditional product-focused advertising is really not enough anymore,” said Jamie Lee, head of brand marketing at Innisfree U.S. “Entertainment is 100% the way to capture an audience.”
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August 6, 2026
Loud as the chatter about outcome-based remuneration is across the holdco space, the reality of it is still some way off, according to one of its most vocal proponents, WPP CEO Cindy Rose.
It’s a notable admission given Rose has made outcome-based pay a core pillar of WPP’s turnaround plan, overhauling how global client leaders — the senior execs running the biggest accounts — get paid, tying it directly to client growth. Getting clients to pay the same way is another matter. So far, only one has: Jaguar Land Rover.
“If you look at the history of this industry, the commercial model has been evolving for the past 40 years, and I think we’re going to have to continue to adapt because the time and materials model is probably not sustainable in the long term because AI ultimately will enable us to do our work faster with fewer people,” Rose told Digiday today (August 6) as the agency giant published its first-half earnings report.
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August 6, 2026
This week’s Media Briefing unpacks the rise of markdown as an AI optimization strategy for publishers, and why not everyone is convinced it’s necessary.
For years, publishing meant optimizing for Google. That’s shifting to optimizing for AI. Some publishers — such as Time — think the fix is as simple as markdown pages.
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August 6, 2026
OpenAI is launching an ad carousel.
The format, which has been seen via screenshots and verified by Digiday, shows a product carousel that allows multiple products to appear within a single ChatGPT ad placement, at the bottom of a user’s conversation — the same way a typical single product ad would appear.
The update comes just three months after the platform initially made it easier for e-commerce companies to run ads on ChatGPT. At the time, OpenAI enabled automation to allow retailers to bulk create “product feed” campaigns from their product catalogues, rather than build them one by one. The format itself was designed to stack ads side-by-side, opening up the opportunity for carousel placements.
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August 6, 2026
Employee creator networks are the new creator networks.
Last week, Gap Inc. announced it was opening up its creator program to its employees across Old Navy, Gap, Athleta, and Banana Republic, giving them a chance to earn commission by sharing personalized affiliate links on social media. It’s less of an officially sanctioned employee creator program like Starbucks’ Green Apron Creators and more just an extension of Gaps’ existing program. It’s a sign of how quickly these programs are gathering pace.
“The attitude has completely flipped,” said Keith Bendes, chief strategy officer at influencer marketing agency Linqia.
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August 6, 2026
This story was first published by Digiday sibling Modern Retail.
Kroger has made advertising part of its AI shopping assistant on day one, following the implementation of advertising features on competitors’ chatbots.
Last week, Kroger launched an AI assistant within the websites and mobile apps of most of its grocery banners, excluding Harris Teeter. The assistant was developed in partnership with Cooklist, an AI platform for grocers. Shoppers can use the assistant to plan meals, find recipes and build a cart around budgets or dietary needs., according to Kroger Precision Marketing — the grocer’s retail media business — which detailed the feature on its website Monday. For other assistants, this feature has typically been introduced later: Walmart, for example, announced advertising features for its Sparky shopping assistant in January, one year after the AI tool’s launch. It had been testing ads in Sparky since the fall. OpenAI began testing ads in ChatGPT in May, several years after its initial launch.
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August 5, 2026
This week’s Future of TV Briefing features a Q&A with Catalyst Brands evp and chief customer and marketing officer Marisa Thalberg about Aéropostale’s recent creator-led episodic series.
Brands are increasingly trying to make entertainment, not just ads. They’re enlisting creators and producing episodic series, sometimes simultaneously.
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August 5, 2026
Gaming’s next battleground isn’t consoles or subscriptions, it’s ad budgets. Electronic Arts and Xbox have already started chasing marketers. Now Sony’s lining up to do the same for PlayStation.
That’s the read, anyway, if a string of open roles at the division that sells PlayStation’s ad inventory is any indication. Several of the postings on the Sony Interactive Entertainment Media Solutions team are advertising-specific.
The clearest signal is a global director posting for client partnerships, which went up in mid-July 2026 and remains live as of this writing, is tasked with defining and driving the global strategy, structure, and performance of the Sony Interactive Entertainment Media Solutions client partnership sales organization. The mandate spans the PlayStation ecosystem in all its global markets across programmatic, FAST and CTV as well as its emerging ad solutions. In simple terms, the role is meant to scale a function, which is usually what shows up right before a platform pushes harder on monetization.
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August 5, 2026
As the 2026 holiday season approaches, advertisers are planning their marketing strategies amid an uncertain economy. Consumers continue to grapple with higher prices and affordability, while brands face rising operating costs and increased pressure to prove their marketing dollars are delivering measurable returns.
As advertisers prepare for a holiday season in which shoppers are likely to remain selective about where they spend, many are betting on personalized offers, loyalty programs, bundled products and AI-powered shopping experiences to earn consumer attention.
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