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.

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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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Brands often plan to extend their Super Bowl activity beyond game day, the better to maximize their time in the spotlight and the star power of celebrity talent.

In the past, an advertiser might have accomplished that by running cut-down versions of its Big Game spot on linear and digital channels. In 2025, that strategy now includes shoppable CTV ad units. 

Unilever’s mayonnaise brand Hellmann’s grabbed headlines and industry attention when it brought back Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal for an ad referencing their classic romcom When Harry Met Sally. 

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Today’s marketers have plenty of experience navigating economic uncertainty. They’ve guided their brands through pandemics, elections and long stretches of economic uncertainty, and they’ve built up a playbook of responses and strategies as a result.

That said, the last few weeks have forced many to dust off their playbooks as they figure out how to navigate the latest challenge – a pending trade war between the U.S. and much of the rest of the world. U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs targeting China (as well as mooted policies targeting the EU, Canada, Mexico, Taiwan and others), will inevitably affect advertisers and their investment plans.

For most marketers, the emergence of tariffs poses the same dilemma as a recession or pandemic: You can spend your way through it, or spend less.

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Last week, Netflix unveiled the European rollout of its programmatic beta program involving tie-ups with demand-side platforms Google and The Trade Desk, among others, that will go into effect later this month.

It’s the second leg of a global rollout first unveiled during its last upfront pitch and subsequently launched across the Americas that its leadership was keen to laud the success of on its earnings call earlier this year.

Netflix co-CEO Gregory K. Peters claims ads will be a “priority part of our roadmap for several years,” dubbing 2025 as a transitionary stage of its rollout whereby it will switch gears “from crawl to walk.” 

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Andy Warhol predicted that ordinary people would each someday experience 15 minutes of fame. At this year’s Super Bowl, Fox is offering advertisers a quicker route to nationwide recognition — 15 seconds, for half a million dollars.

As the Super Bowl approaches, broadcaster Fox is dividing up its Big-Game ad space into increasingly smaller parcels of airtime.

In addition to the standard 30- and 60-second ad units sold against Super Bowl coverage, Fox has made a limited supply of 15-second, streaming-only ad units on Tubi, its free ad-supported streaming (FAST) service, available to advertisers.

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The Super Bowl represents a high-stakes maneuver for top marketers. Mess up, and you’ve tipped as much as $8 million down the drain. Stick the landing, and you’ll have reached a third of Americans in 30 seconds.

For the most part, the Super Bowl is reserved for brands that have already come to terms with the risks, like Budweiser, which has run big game spots for over 40 years with only a single year skipped, or 11-time returnee Squarespace.

Occasionally, however, we find a contender willing to take a fresh risk. This year, there’s at least three.

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The Super Bowl is a pricey party. But it’s not the only joint in town.

Shared moments like the big game — which last year was watched by an average of 123.4 million U.S. viewers, second only to the Apollo moon landing in July 1969 — are more valuable than ever.

Getting a brand in front of those viewers isn’t cheap. A 30-second spot during the big game carried a $7 million sticker price during Fox’s upfronts this year. Last-minute spots freed up by brands pulling their ads (some in response to the California wildfires) went for as much as $8 million, according to Adweek.

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Advertisers have long told themselves that brand safety is something they control. But with Meta rolling back its content moderation rules — narrowing the gap between brands and whether chaos goes viral — it’s clear that control was always a myth.

Platforms make the rules, rewrite them at will, and expect advertisers to fall in line. Most do. Because in digital advertising, the game isn’t about eliminating risk. It’s about learning to live with it.

Meta’s changes technically don’t touch paid ads. But organic content still dictates the broader tone of the platform — and what users engage with inevitably influences the ad ecosystem. Brand safety tools can only do so much when the overall environment becomes more volatile. And yet, what choice do marketers really have? Pulling spend rarely moves the needle, and staying put means accepting that brand safety is less about control — and more about calculated risk.

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Amazon Prime Video’s ad business celebrates its first birthday today.

Over the course of 12 months, it’s fine-tuned a pitch to buyers and brands to put the case for their investment beyond argument — and in doing so, overtaken streaming rivals and ensconced itself on brands’ media plans, while padding the margins of Amazon’s already formidable ad business. 

The platform shifted from emphasizing the quality of its Prime Video content slate, which includes fare like the Rings of Power, The Boys and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, to highlighting its growing measurement capabilities and new ad formats, according to seven media buyers who spoke to Digiday. All the while, it’s held CPMs at a competitive level, forcing rivals to lower their own prices. A spokesperson for Amazon declined requests for an interview.

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Havas Media Network has kicked off the new year with an acquisition aimed at deepening its sports marketing expertise and diversifying its revenue base.

The media arm of Havas struck a deal to acquire CA Sports, a specialist sponsorship agency based in Spain, and add it to its entertainment-focused Havas Play unit. It’s the first acquisition by the French holding company since it was listed on the Euronext Amsterdam stock exchange in December, following a spinoff from the Vivendi media empire.

According to Jorge Irizar, CEO of Havas Media Network Spain and global COO of Havas Media Network, it’s the first of 10 acquisitions the media group is targeting over the course of this year, and part of a multi-year process to broaden its business model.

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For those still counting, there’s another retail media network to add to the list. Alongside real estate, airlines and banking, airport shops have joined the race.

WHSmith, a retail chain that operates hundreds of stores in airports across the U.S., is set to launch a retail media side-business combining in-store out-of-home and digital out-of-home media inventory and audience data for use in off-site campaigns.

Stuart Michell, chief commercial officer at WHSmith North America, said the network’s appeal rested on the huge numbers of people who routinely trudge through American airports — some 2.3 million a day, according to a 2023 Transportation Security Administration (TSA) estimate.

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Over three decades of expansion, Amazon has displaced countless smaller businesses in the sectors it targeted, from bookshops to main street retailers. 

In its latest retail initiative, however, the tech titan wants to be a big brother to smaller businesses that want their cut of the retail media gold rush – lowering the barrier to entry for companies previously priced out of $54.85 billion spent on retail media last year, according to eMarketer stats.

Through the Amazon Retail Ad Service the company is offering to provide (at a cost) its retail media ad tech stack to retail brands that lack the scale or resources to build out their own systems. 

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