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.
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.
Big TV networks and studios are finally shifting toward programmatic advertising - even for their linear TV spots. And this shift is attracting a new wave of advertisers and transforming what a typical TV ad break looks and feels like. For example, as reports, Comcast is starting to see net-new ad revenue growth from first-time TV advertisers. "The people coming in the door are small performance advertisers, but they've been doing social ads forever," says Travis Flood, Comcast Advertising's director of insights. "They don't have a TV ad."
Affiliate/publisher/partner: Drives traffic to online advertisers/merchants, usually via content on a website or blog, or paid traffic. The affiliate earns commission from the merchant when an agreed action (e.g. sale or lead) occurs. Affiliate network: A network enables affiliates/publishers to easily access a wide range of affiliate programmes, and vice versa. Networks generate revenue by charging the merchant a percentage of the commission paid to affiliates.
Capturing your audience in the perfect moment with the perfect content to produce startling results is the ultimate goal of creative content marketing. But the real magic happens when creatives and performance marketers work closely together. When creative experts join forces with performance specialists, you are building a winning formula to achieve maximum impact for your campaign investment. So, the million-dollar question is: how do you create content that achieves your goals and cuts through the noise, across every touchpoint of the customer journey?
Using Anonymised's privacy-by-design, on-device technology, Audience Lift creates multiple people-based audiences that unlock smarter lookalikes and diversified targeting. Audience Lift enables advertisers to launch interest and intent-based audience strategies, allowing each audience to compete for performance across social and search channels. The solution instantly identifies which behaviours drive the highest conversion value and continuously refines targeting based on real-time performance feedback.
But the facts are here: Wall Street darlings Netflix and Snap saw their valuations drop by about 80% in a few weeks, Meta has seen a 34% decline in its overall reputation since its inception (sorry Mark, the Hawaiian honeymoon is over) and Sundar Pichay seems to be spending most of his time talking about his spoiled Googlers needing to come back down to Earth.
Brand builds long-term awareness, perception, and emotional connection. Performance marketing focuses on immediate, measurable actions and specific behaviors like clicks, sign-ups, purchases, or downloads which drives conversions and business goals. The most successful companies know that true growth happens when these two objectives work in harmony, not in opposition. The evidence is now clear: Brand and performance are not opposing forces; they are multipliers.
Shoham Lachkar is an industry-recognized mobile growth expert with over 15 years of experience in ASO (app store optimization), SEO, and performance marketing initiatives. Lachkar holds expertise in ASO, organic growth, user psychology, and mobile marketing and contributes to building scalable frameworks globally. As a leader across multiple top mobile-gaming and marketing organizations, she oversaw ASO strategy for a global portfolio of widely used apps and collaborated with brands whose products have achieved significant reach across major app stores.
Performance marketing agency Wpromote has acquired full-service creative shop Giant Spoon to form a new agency, Wpromote x Giant Spoon, per a company announcement. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Wpromote CEO Andrea Bendzick will lead the merged agency, which promises to support creative strategy with data-driven results and to streamline processes for clients by integrating media, creative, data and full-funnel strategy all in one place.
You'll spearhead our company-wide shift to AI-first creative, building and operationalizing a pipeline that transforms how we conceive, produce, test, and analyze content across Performance Marketing, CRM, and Brand. This is about elevating team capabilities, driving innovation at scale, and setting a new benchmark for what creative can achieve. This role requires both strategic thinking and hands-on execution. You'll be shaping the future of creative work at Blinkist, delivering real impact while pushing the boundaries of what's possible.
LiveLift is an in-flight campaign measurement and optimization tool that the promotions platform says can help drive incremental sales at scale and reimagine a key form of performance marketing. It works by analyzing billions of transactions from over 80 leading retailers that use Ibotta's platform, including Walmart, Instacart and Doordash, comparing statistically matched groups of consumers that have and haven't seen campaigns to determine baseline sales and sales lift generated by promotions.
The narrative goes like this: If you want to connect with your customers, you need to tell stories that capture hearts, not just wallets. But here is the truth. Storytelling is not the right investment for every brand. Done well, it can be powerful. Done without the right context, it can become a costly detour. Story takes time, patience and consistency.
"I think it especially helps our smaller advertisers activate on the platform, because they really appreciate the simplicity and the automation," Reddit's COO Jennifer Wong told Digiday. "We've been working on this for a while, and we're really excited to make our ad platform easier to activate on." Still for now, as Wong put it, the alpha is just a small piece of Reddit's advertiser base, "It's still a small test, more than two hands of advertisers," she said, adding that so far it's received "encouraging feedback."
More than 200 million people today sit in the shadows of addressability, including 150 million iPhone users. But the results from a new campaign collaboration show that despite mounting challenges due to signal loss, privacy shifts and fragmented device ecosystems, there is a way to restore addressability at scale and drive meaningful business outcomes - and it comes from a combination of the right identity resolution and high-quality data.
Australia's digital scene is buzzing, and some of the country's most talented agencies are leading the way. The Netty Awards are once again shining a light on these standouts, celebrating the creativity, strategy, and results that help brands capture attention and make a lasting impact online. From scroll-stopping social campaigns to clever digital strategies that drive real results, these agencies show that great work is as much about genuine connection as it is about clicks and follows.
At MIQ, I wanted to give clients the opportunity to do things themselves. We had traders that were building decision trees manually and making optimizations, so I thought, how can we automate, save time?
Meta's recent announcements focus on enhancing its AI-driven advertising tools, emphasizing capabilities like Value Optimization and new generative AI features for more targeted marketing.
