Regardless of whether a media channel is addressable or not, it's still reaching strategic and high-value audiences. So, understanding how these different media buys interact with each other [helps buyers] make better investment decisions.
The 2026 Marketing Data Report basically shows a gap between AI ambition and operational reality in marketing departments that's only getting wider. Which explains why agencies continue to beef up their AI smarts - as a means of helping to guide their clients through the morass of knowledge, strategy and technology to implement gen AI.
We view media quality as an engine for growth. What we hear consistently from brands is, 'Prove to us that media quality drives higher ROI and higher efficiency.' Advertisers increasingly demand verification providers demonstrate concrete performance improvements from premium placements rather than simply protecting against brand safety risks.
YouTube is now a ranking asset in AI discovery, and you can lose share even if website traffic looks stable. YouTube is highly machine-readable (transcripts, metadata, chapters) and tends to be a low-risk source for AI to summarize and cite.
As AI-generated answers increasingly influence buying decisions and brand discovery, teams face new operational questions: Where is the brand being referenced? Where is it missing? How does that representation shift over time? For agencies, the challenge expands to making AI visibility measurable and repeatable across multiple accounts and reporting cycles. "Agencies and start-ups aren't looking for another dashboard, they're looking for confidence,"
As businesses adjust to the new AEO landscape, marketers are seeing increasing convergence with marketing automation-HubSpot's recent acquisition of Xfunnel signals this shift, bringing AI search optimization directly into the CRM ecosystem where attribution and revenue tracking happen. As a result, Marketers need the right AEO tools to reach their audience, who are flocking to AI search engines in droves.
In this tutorial Grace Leung explains how to create an AI-supported marketing team using Claude Skills in just 16 minutes. Claude Skills are structured workflows that translate standard operating procedures and brand guidelines into repeatable AI-driven processes. These workflows can handle tasks such as content creation, data analysis, and campaign management, allowing teams to maintain consistency while saving time for higher-level strategic work.
According to an SEC filing dated Feb. 18, 2026, Arohi Asset Management PTE Ltd. sold all 1,717,770 shares of DoubleVerify (NYSE: DV) during the fourth quarter. The estimated transaction value was $20.58 million based on the quarterly average price. The quarter-end value of the position fell by $20.58 million, reflecting the complete exit and changes in share price during the period.
Ads in chatbots are becoming standard practice, and advertisers and AI companies are scrambling to determine how to make the most out of this new format. They need to deliver relevant, contextual ads that don't feel invasive or overly repetitive and fit into the chatbot's interface while still being clearly distinct from the organic chat responses. Since LLMs are a mostly untested channel, though, the ones choosing to introduce ads don't have much data to influence their strategy.
Google is rolling out Scenario Planner, a no-code tool designed to make its Meridian marketing mix model accessible to marketers who do not have a data science team on speed dial. Marketing mix modeling has long promised rigorous, data-driven budget optimization. The problem has always been usability. Scenario Planner aims to change that by turning complex model outputs into something marketing leaders can actually use.
At the end of 2024, Meta announced it was shifting away from variable content metrics, such as plays, impressions and accounts reached. Instead, the company said it was pivoting to a more uniform views count instead, and that views were taking over as the main metric for video and image content on both Facebook and Instagram. Now, Meta is building that into its API as well.
One of the industry's most persistent misconceptions is that accountability lives downstream. Better reporting. Better attribution. Better dashboards. But, in reality, accountability begins far earlier, at the point where a business decides what it accepts as truth about identity. Who is real? Who is reachable? Who is persistent? Who has changed? Who should not be acted on at all? The uncomfortable reality is that every optimization decision that follows is only as credible as the answers to those questions.
AI in advertising has gone from a buzzword to a full disruptor in what feels like just a few months. If CES was any indication, there is no sign of this slowing down. Yet, although everyone's talking, few are seeing real results. New research from AdExchanger and Comcast Advertising found that 77% of advertisers agree that AI is transforming how advertising is bought, but a staggering 61% said they hadn't seen a meaningful impact yet.
Revenue -- $137.1 million, up 6% year over year in the fourth quarter. Contribution ex-TAC -- $65.2 million, showing 19% year-over-year growth and representing a 48% margin compared to 42% in the prior year. Adjusted EBITDA -- $24.3 million, increasing 53% year over year and implying an adjusted EBITDA to contribution ex-TAC margin of 37%. Operating Cash Flow -- $21.8 million for the quarter, increasing over 400% year over year.
In the early 1960s, when FM radio (which had been around since the 1930s) finally gained mass adoption in cars, drivers had the welcome option of tuning into the non-commercial band (88.1 to 91.9 MHz) and escaping from relentless AM band advertising. Commuters got even more relief with the advent of in-car media such as 8-track tapes, cassettes, CDs, and at least some parts of satellite radio.
If you're managing social media marketing without a social media scheduler, I've got one thing to say to you: You're making your job harder than it needs to be. A social media scheduler eliminates the chaos of logging into multiple platforms, posting in real-time, and hoping you remembered to hit publish at the right moment - freeing you to focus on strategy instead of logistics.
For millions of people, virtual worlds like Roblox and Fortnite are a preferred escape from the real world-and these games have proven to be a successful way for brands to reach target consumers. A new study from GEEIQ, a data and insights platform for brand marketing in virtual worlds and gaming environments, shows that brands spent $229 million on this marketing channel in 2025. And while that's just over half of the $441 million spent on virtual marketing in 2024,
Unilever has struck a five-year partnership with Google Cloud as the CPG giant prepares for a shift toward agentic commerce and artificial intelligence-powered marketing, according to a press release. The owner of brands like Dove and Hellmann's Mayonnaise will migrate its integrated data and cloud platforms to Google to build out an enterprise-wide AI infrastructure. Unilever will use tools such as Google's Vertex AI to develop capabilities in areas including brand discovery, measurement and marketing.
Performance has always been the foundation of commerce media because it tied spend to measurable behavior. From sponsored search to sponsored products, the category scaled by delivering outcomes that could be directly attributed to transactions. Automation, AI-driven optimization and closed-loop measurement accelerated that model and made outcomes-based buying the norm. Outcomes still matter. But as AI reduces friction and increases competition, outcomes alone no longer create separation.
Last year, the agency partnered with Spectrum Reach, Spectrum's advertising arm, to analyze show-level metadata and see which programmatic CTV placements were performing best across several of its campaigns. One of those campaigns was for a major food and beverage brand that wanted to build on the momentum of its Super Bowl advertising by securing spots in both men's and women's college basketball games during the tournament.
Ads have officially come to ChatGPT. OpenAI has started testing out paid advertisements on both its free model and lowest-priced tier, which costs $8 a month. (Users that opt to pay $20 or more per month or use ChatGPT through a work account will never see ads, the company says.) The pilot program includes major retailers, such as Target and Williams Sonoma, technology companies such as Adobe, and well-known consumer brands such as Audible, Ford, Mazda, Mrs. Meyers, HelloFresh, and Factor.
In the fintech vertical, where growth depends on trust, the decision to monetise through in-app advertising is a bold bet, one that could backfire if a bad ad experience undermines user confidence. But Toss, South Korea's leading fintech super app with over 25 million users, turned that risk into a major revenue win by implementing filters based on user-level relevance and using behavioural signals and first-party data to block disruptive or inappropriate ad categories.
Not just any algorithm, mind you, but the most devilish metric devised to date. Because it finally translates the old publicity strategy of fame once governed by unquantifiable guesswork into money. No, it isn't (black) magic, just computerized math: by analyzing and comparing quantitative and qualitative data, the program in question calculates and assigns an economic value to these star appearances based on their public performance.
Beauty and fashion influencer Eni Popoola first learned she'd been deepfaked the way many creators do: from her audience. A YouTube ad sent by a follower featured her face and her voice, promoting an online course she had never heard of. "People were sending screenshots saying, 'Hey, there's this video of you, and we obviously know it's not you, because this is not something that you would talk about,'" Popoola said. She's far from alone, as the experience of finding one's AI doppelganger - promoting unknown supplements, self-help content or beauty products - is becoming increasingly commonplace in the creator economy.
