Advertisers are looking again at the use of probabilistic data for audience targeting, and, in some cases, are seeing it as a potential solution to addressability concerns.

It’s the latest installment in marketing’s tug of war between precise targeting and broad reach — and an indirect consequence of third-party cookie deprecation.

“It’s not an either-or scenario. There’s no favorite child,” said Kumar Amrendra, head of digital marketing at U.K.-based pay-TV broadcaster Sky.

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Amazon Ads’s quest to become the first programmatic port of call for media buyers is intensifying. 

It’s courting media agencies across the industry hoping that more will treat its demand-side platform (DSP) as their go-to programmatic provider. According to 11 media buyers who spoke to Digiday, its pitch to decision-makers emphasizes a refreshed user interface, CTV inventory, and, in select cases, financial incentives. Along the way, it hopes to expand its advertiser base to include more non-endemics.

While it’s far from winning over the industry, it’s gained media buyers’ attention — and likely that of market incumbents The Trade Desk and Google’s DV360.

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President Trump’s latest tariff proposal is creating headaches for automotive marketers and media buyers, but they’re not slamming the brakes on media spend just yet.

The uncertainty created by the mere threat of tariffs can often lead to marketplace confusion, consumer hesitancy and unnecessary pullbacks in media spend.

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The injection of college sports creators into the U.S. influencer economy has permanently altered the way creator marketing and sports partnerships work.

At this year’s March Madness tournament, you would be hard pressed to find a participating brand without a clutch of NIL (name, image, likeness) partners attached to its campaign. And four years on from the sector’s Big Bang moment, brands are booking creators for more than just their on-court presence.

Take bottled water brand Niagara as a case in point.

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Forget chatbots and prompt engineering — “agentic” is the latest AI buzzword to captivate and confuse marketers and media execs. 

In recent months, tech firms like OpenAI have emphasized AI agents and “agentic” applications of the technology in their mission to popularize generative AI adoption. The latest development comes courtesy of Adobe, which unveiled several AI agent tools last week at its Summit conference in Las Vegas, including a “foundation” agentic platform and 10 off-the-shelf AI agents.

Though the tech is clearly still in a larval stage, there’s real implications for brands, agencies and publishers relating to it. But in order to see through chatbots masquerading as something more, it’s important to understand the differences between agentic systems, AI agents and the various use cases already being applied at agencies, brands and publishers.

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There’s nothing like a deadline to focus the mind. And there’s no better way to lose focus than by removing one.

Just over five years ago, Google set out to sunset the use of the third-party cookies in its Chrome browser. The tech giant’s scheme provoked the ad tech industry to develop dozens of potential successors to the cookie, from ID5 to The Trade Desk’s Unified ID 2.0 to LiveRamp’s RampID.

Media buyers responded by testing these alternative identifiers for audience targeting and measurement. But without the cookie cutoff hanging over the industry (or their clients), they aren’t pursuing alt-IDs with the same fervor.

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Advertisers are split on whether to double down or cash out as TikTok’s future in the U.S. hangs in the balance. But enough have walked away to send ad prices downward for those who do stay.

CPMs on the app declined 80% between January 2024 and January 2025, according to an estimate from adtech firm AdRoll based on performance data from 20,000 advertisers.

Several factors could be at play — weak demand, stiffer competition — but it’s hard to ignore the elephant in the room: the U.S. ban that was supposed to take effect in early January. Though ultimately delayed by President Trump, the mere threat of a ban was enough to rattle marketers, forcing some to scale back and others to walk away entirely.

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Agency holding companies are gradually remolding themselves. No longer constellations of disparate talent, some of them now behave as “operating companies”.

That’s partially a branding trick, but behind the marquee, units like WPP’s Choreograph, or Omnicom’s Omni provide real connective tissue. And in the pitch room, they’re becoming ever more important.

Take Havas, for example. Its Converged “operating system” (or “data spine”, depending on your taste for corporate metaphors) was launched last February as a cookieless media planning and activation solution.

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As the tit-for-tat tariff fight between the U.S. and Mexico, Canada, China and the European Union continues, marketers are watching closely — and worrying.

To recap: President Donald Trump announced 25% tariffs in February then put them off for a month before re-tabling the issue last week, leading to another postponement for Mexico and Canada. The U.K. and Europe haven’t been granted the same grace and this week’s retaliatory tariffs from the E.U. are, at the time of writing, still set to go into force, pending legislative approval in April, as are Canada’s reciprocal steel, sports equipment and computer tariffs. (Bloomberg has a running tally).

The constant change has left marketers’ and agency execs’ heads spinning.

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The climax of the college basketball season is almost upon us. Most know it as March Madness.

Basketball observers are hoping the next Caitlin Clark will emerge during this year’s March Madness tourney. For the media world, it’s another chance to see how brands like Experian, State Farm, Priceline and longtime sponsor Powerade adapt to shifting viewer habits like the years-long migration from linear to streaming viewership, and mass audiences’ embrace of the women’s game.

According to Nielsen NBA audiences on ABC and ESPN have largely flatlined this season, down 1% year-on-year, while TNT’s are 14% lower — apparently a casualty of dwindling cable usage in the U.S — collectively, NBA audiences are down 5%. But the NCAA’s spring tournament typically attracts significant numbers of casual viewers over its three-week run, thanks in part to thousands of office betting pools around the tournament that draws their attention.

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Executive dysfunction behind the scenes at brand advertisers is making it harder for them to track and direct retail media investments.

The segment is one of the fastest growing areas of investment (accounting for over $140 billion of global ad spend, per eMarketer) and has provided a new stream of revenue for major retailers in the U.S., U.K. and Europe.

In Target’s latest earnings report, for example, strong performance at its retail media unit ($649 million in annual revenue, a 25% increase over 2023) offset gloomy net revenues across the rest of its business. Walmart’s retail media ad business tells a similar story, having grown 27% year over year in 2024 to net in $4.4 billion in global ad revenue.

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The Trade Desk (TTD) and media agencies are drifting apart — a conscious uncoupling that crept in slowly but is now moving fast. 

Agencies say their spending isn’t climbing like it used to, while The Trade Desk is busy chasing direct deals with advertisers. It’s not a full on breakup yet, but both sides are clearly eyeing other options. 

One holding company media buyer, who exchanged anonymity for candor, told Digiday that rising client investment in CTV — and the many DSPs that can be used to place such spend — meant their agency was becoming less reliant on The Trade Desk over time.

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Questions that keep marketers up at night:

Why did our customers buy our product? 

Why did they buy when they did?

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Bit by bit, more advertisers are beginning to use contextual targeting approaches for their programmatic media investments.

Signal loss from the gradual decline of the third-party cookie, rising esteem for contextual targeting firms’ AI capabilities, and the recent Adalytics investigation into ad tech’s role in monetizing child sexual abuse material (CSAM), have each given marketers reason to pause and question their current programmatic setups.

As such, contextual targeting providers have been twisting, turning and tuning their pitches to the market — ensuring they’re considered among the solutions to those challenges.

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The cost of ad space on streaming platforms has been dragged down in the last year, as early movers Netflix and Disney+ raced to keep up with Amazon’s aggressive pricing.

Now, the cost-per-thousand viewers (CPM) across those three streamers hovers between $38 to $40 (down from Netflix’s 2022 price of $60), low enough that small to medium business (SMB) advertisers can begin to consider them a viable alternative to local cable or regional linear TV.

Related Insights

The Programmatic Marketer

Streaming TV ad rates are falling and Amazon’s the anchor Read More

Consider the example of Naturepedic, a premium mattress and sleepwear brand based in Cleveland, Ohio.

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Marketers have begun to turn back toward brand-building strategies in recent months. But that doesn’t mean they’re totally abandoning the ideas underpinning performance marketing.

One sign that’s the case is the rise of alt-measurement companies like System1, iSpot and EDO, each of which offers solutions that promise to help marketers track the impact of brand creative. Their testing solutions are used to optimize — and ultimately justify — the media and creative budgets put aside by advertisers for TV tentpole events like the Super Bowl.

Despite the turn back toward “market-leading creative” by brands such as Kimberly-Clark and Nike, marketing budgets across the industry have shrunk in recent years. Gartner’s 2024 CMO survey found that on average, marketing budgets represented 7.7% of overall company revenue, down from 10.5% in 2019. In short, marketers are pursuing brand-building strategies with weaker hands than they’ve had in previous years.

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Changing habits among search engine users have begun to take a toll on the biggest players in the search space — namely Google.

The tech giant still enjoys an enormous chunk of the search market — 89%, October through December in 2024, according to an estimate from Statcounter — but that’s the lowest its share has been in a decade.

Because the tech giant has been synonymous with search, it’s the player with the most to lose, but advertisers need to find new productive ways to reach consumers too.

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Brand advertisers are reviewing their organic and paid search strategies in response to web users turning away from Google.

According to an estimate from Statcounter, Google’s share of the search engine market dropped to 89% at the close of 2024, the first time it had fallen below 90% in 10 years.

Google’s market share decrease belies big changes in the way that users search for information online. Today’s consumers use a wider variety of search tools than they did in previous years, from TikTok to Perplexity to Amazon, depending on their goals. Research published by Omnicom in January suggested clients accordingly consider investing their search across a more diverse set of channels.

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When ad agencies first began signing up to the B Corp movement, execs hoped the climate-friendly status would appeal to new clients and draw industry recruits (as well as further environmental causes).

Agency leaders still cling to that hope, but they do so in a changed political environment.

Last week, Stagwell media agency Assembly certified its European and Asia-Pacific businesses as B Corps. Its U.S., African and Indian businesses are also going through the certification process. At the same time, global full-service agency Dept re-certified its B Corp status — expanding its climate and social commitments beyond its European base and across its global network.

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Fox’s streaming platform Tubi helped the broadcaster stage the most-viewed Super Bowl in history on Feb. 9. 

A record-breaking audience of 127.7 million watched the Eagles crumple the Chiefs on Sunday, and 13.6 million of them did so via Tubi, which is classed as a free ad-supported TV (FAST) channel, according to figures released by Fox (the streaming audience peaked at 15.5 million).

Anjali Sud, CEO of Tubi, referred to the moment as a “major milestone for free ad-supported television,” adding that it was “a full circle moment as we achieve new levels of scale and cultural resonance with viewers.”

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