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In January, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission finalized an updated version of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. And for as much attention as the update may have received, it probably merits more.

“It is a big deal. And I think because there’s been so much other activity in the news, people haven’t really paid attention to it,” Debbie Reynolds, a privacy expert and founder, CEO and chief data privacy officer at Debbie Reynolds Consulting, said on the latest Digiday Podcast episode.

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This week’s Future of TV Briefing features an interview with Roku’s vp of ad marketing and measurement Sarah Harms about the streaming ad measurement landscape.

• Q&A
• Nielsen’s January 2025 Gauge report
• YouTube’s farm league for streaming shows, ESPN’s F1 exit and more

Q&A

This year’s TV and streaming advertising upfront market is — somehow — just around the corner. I know. 

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Even with the third-party cookie still kicking, the digital ad market has become overrun with various identifiers. That can create its own kind of identity crisis without a way to connect those disparate IDs.

But there is a way. It’s called identity resolution, which may be the industry’s most plainly named jargon. As the name suggests, identity resolution is a method for reconciling different identifiers to create a coherent picture of a person’s identity. But that reconciliation process is where things start to get a bit more complex, with the introduction of identity graphs and identity spines.

In the video below, executives from EDO, Future Today, ID5, LiveRamp, Ogury, OpenX, The Weather Company and Yahoo help to break down the identity resolution process.

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This week’s Future of TV Briefing features an interview with Tubi CMO Nicole Parlapiano about the Fox-owned free, ad-supported streamer’s Super Bowl broadcast.

• Tubi’s big game
• YouTube’s TV inflection point, Netflix’s video podcast plans and more

Tubi’s big game

My sister hadn’t heard of Tubi before Sunday. But if it weren’t for the Fox-owned free, ad-supported streaming service, neither she nor I would have been able to tune into this year’s Super Bowl. And we weren’t the only ones to stream Sunday’s big game.

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This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at how noisy content signals are confounding CTV’s contextual advertising opportunity and what makes the situation even more confounding.

• CTV’s noisy signals
• Paramount’s new Nielsen deal, Nielsen’s new network spat, the Super Bowl of AI advertising and more

CTV’s noisy signals

Remember those old-fashioned bunny ears that used to sit atop TVs? How you needed to fiddle with them to get a clear signal but the signal-to-noise ratio was always a bit out of whack? Yeah, the streaming ad market’s supply chain is kinda like that.

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Last year Architectural Digest switched up its e-commerce strategy. Having added affiliate links to its “Open Door” YouTube series showcasing celebrities’ decked-out abodes in 2021, the Condé Nast-owned publication started redirecting viewers from the Google-owned video platform to its own site to shop the decor.

“It’s a much, much deeper, richer experience for the user to go to our site. It’s more fully shopped-out there, and it’s more visual. We can put photos of all the items,” said Amy Astley, global editorial director at Architectural Digest, on the latest Digiday Podcast episode.

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This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at how the growing availability of streaming live sports for programmatic sales will test the supply chain’s infrastructure and require new standards.

• ‘Tsunami of supply’
• Trump’s TikTok deal talks, CNN’s digital pivot, Nielsen’s MRC accreditation and more

‘Tsunami of supply’

The Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Annual Leadership Meeting this week has confirmed what Disney’s Tech and Data Showcase during CES signaled: It’s about to be primetime for programmatically selling ads against streaming live sports.

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IAB Tech Lab’s job basically boils down to taking digital advertising and media practices, products and toolsets and making them mass-production ready. And in 2025, the organization will be doing that at a larger scale and with an emphasis on connected TV advertising and moving programmatic ad practices out of the browser.

This year IAB Tech Lab plans to release 31 new specifications or updates to existing specs, IAB Tech Lab CEO Anthony Katsur was slated to announce during his keynote on Tuesday at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Annual Leadership Meeting in Palm Springs, Calif. That’s an increase from the 23 spec updates the organization released in 2024.

“A lot of [the releases slated for 2025] is in advanced television. Whether it’s CTV and streaming-specific or some of the spec work is targeted toward the convergence between linear and CTV from an advertising perspective. Another significant part is being driven by privacy. Those are the two big drivers of a lot of that work,” said Katsur in an interview ahead of the keynote.

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Remember when 2025 was supposed to be the first official year of the post-cookie era? Well, clearly that hasn’t happened and seems unlikely to happen anytime soon. And it certainly won’t happen until sometime after Google introduces its user choice mechanism in Chrome for people to allow or block third-party cookies.

“If there’s wild amounts of opt-in, then yeah, the third-party cookie in the Chrome ecosystem is probably alive and well. If there’s [a] wild amount of opt-out, if there’s no critical mass around the third-party cookie, then it is effectively dead, even if it lives on in some small percentage. We just — we don’t know how that’s going to shake out,” said Anthony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab, in the latest Digiday Podcast episode, which was recorded on the eve of the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Annual Leadership Meeting in Palm Springs, Calif., which concludes on Jan. 28.

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This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at why advertisers are keeping an eye on streaming services’ ad product developments and ad loads.

• ‘Have you tried to watch streaming?’
• Streaming watch time hits new highs
• Meta’s & YouTube’s TikTok creator charm offensives, Bluesky’s & X’s video updates and more

‘Have you tried to watch streaming?’

As covered last week, Netflix didn’t exactly break new ground in its meetings with ad buyers during the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month. But it did strike a nerve. 

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Las Vegas is kind of an ideal backdrop to survey marketing and media executives about the state of the ad market. Advertising is ultimately gambling after all.

During this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Sin City, executives from brands, agencies and media companies, including Havas, Mastercard, NBCUniversal and Stagwell, revealed where they are placing their chips in 2025 — as well as the bets they would expect to fold this year.

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This week’s Future of TV Briefing reports on the meetings that Netflix held with ad buyers during last week’s Consumer Electronics Show, during which it discussed its advertising road map for the year.

• Nextflix
• Venu’s shutdown, creators’ AI deals, TikTok’s ban likelihood and more

Nextflix

If Netflix’s Christmas Day games were a touchdown — and they were in ad buyers’ minds — then the company is now going for a two-point conversion.

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Omnicom Group’s pending acquisition of Interpublic Group seems especially timely in the hindsight of last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

A major talking point among the brand and agency executives in attendance was the onset of the so-called agentic era of artificial intelligence, in which AI tools handle multi-step tasks for people like booking a full travel itinerary — or firing off a client brief. In this era, data will be at even more of a premium than it is today

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This edition of Digiday’s daily CES Briefing looks at the need for brands to adopt SEO strategies for dealing with AI agents, an interview with Mastercard’s Raja Rajamannar about agency compensation models in the AI era and how Dotdash Meredith has used OpenAI to boost its contextual ad product D/Cipher.

SEO for the agentic AI era

Expect to hear a lot about search engine optimization in 2025. Except it won’t be called that.

“It’s no longer about search engine optimization. It’s about answer engines,” said Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi.

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This edition of Digiday’s daily CES Briefing examines how brands and agencies are seeing a need to change payment structures to account for AI tools handling some agency work, what marketing and media execs may have missed on the CES show floor and how Disney’s tech showcase reflects real-time bidding finally being fast enough for live sports.

Agency compensation models in the AI era

A change to how clients pay agencies seems inevitable in the AI era. How the agency compensation model should change, though, is anyone’s guess. But it has very much been a topic of discussion during CES this week.

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This edition of the daily CES Briefing features an interview with Stagwell’s Mark Penn about the landscape for agencies and a recap of a session from OpenAP’s Audience Summit on the disconnect with streaming ad data.

10 Questions with Stagwell’s Mark Penn

AI is one backdrop for this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. But the Omnicom-Interpublic Group merger is another, particularly for the advertisers and agencies in attendance, such as Stagwell, which has been billing itself as a challenger to the incumbent agency holding companies. 

On Tuesday, Digiday sat down with Stagwell CEO and chairman Mark Penn to hear how the Omnicom-IPG merger is coloring his company’s conversations with clients, what Stagwell is up to with its own recent M&A activity and what the potential TikTok ban and agentic AI era mean for advertisers.

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This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at some of the top trends and developments to keep an eye on in 2025.

• The year-in-preview
• Honey’s boo boo
• Netflix’s newest sports deal, Google’s tracking change, Hollywood’s hard times and more

The year-in-preview

If 2024 felt less monumental than recent years when it comes to the TV, streaming and digital video industry, that may be because its ultimate legacy will be to serve as preamble to what may be an especially significant year.

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This edition of the daily CES Briefing looks at how the agentic era of AI looms over CES and then recaps a session that highlights the underlying issue of everything becoming an ad network.

The artificial intelligence age is passing into the so-called “agentic” era, in which large language models power tools that can take actions on people’s behalf, like booking a full trip itinerary. So of course this temporal shift would show up at the Consumer Electronics Show taking place in Las Vegas this week.

As with the agentic era overall, its presence at CES has still been pretty nascent as of Monday, technically the day before CES officially kicks off. 

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Despite serving as the unofficial kickoff to the advertising and media industry’s calendar, this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas doesn’t necessarily set the industry’s agenda for the year. But it does help to put it in motion.

Advertisers and agencies come to Sin City with their budgets planned out for the year, and with the annual technology showcase as the backdrop, they meet with publishers, platforms and tech vendors to map out how exactly to spend that money.

“You’ve already set the groundwork back in October [when many brands set their annual marketing budgets]. This is that ‘come to Jesus’ moment of, ‘You committed to me a million dollars. What are we doing this year?’” said Mark Wagman, managing director of data and technology at MediaLink, the UTA-owned consulting firm that will host the “Marketing Reinvented” session track during CES. “It’s a little bit of like, ‘What’s on the table and what’s coming?’”

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This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks back at the top topics and trends that overtook the TV, streaming and digital video industries in 2024.

• Year in review
• WBD’s trial separation, LinkedIn’s TikTok clone and more

Year in review

2024 followed a year in which Hollywood experienced a once-in-a-generation work stoppage. So it’d be hard to designate 2024 as “unprecedented” or “seismic” or any of the lofty labels typically affixed in retrospect when trying to surmise the magnitude of a year. With that said, 2024 made a solid case for its place in the history book of the TV, streaming and digital video industry.

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