News on drugmaker deals, weight loss drug coverage, medication price hikes, and health insurance to kick off the New Year.
AI platforms must tread carefully to avoid crossing into diagnosis and treatment advice
The first oral GLP-1 hits pharmacy shelves and telehealth platforms this week, expanding access to more affordable obesity treatment.
The CDC’s new guidance muddles what’s essential, risking more missed or delayed shots.
The ad industry kept busy during the holiday season, so we rounded up the biggest stories from the last two weeks you need to know about.
CTV ad clarity gets a boost: DoubleVerify’s new tool streamlines planning and reporting to fix performance blind spots in streaming. Read online
AI will reshape premium video buying—and NBCUniversal’s proof-of-concept shows agentic systems can unify planning and optimization across linear and streaming in seconds.
Messasges are evolving from promo push to frictionless, full-funnel conversion tool.
New APIs let brands blend their own data with supply insights, enabling real-time, customized ad decisioning.
Visa and Mastercard reached a new settlement with merchants to lower fees in the US this November—another attempt to end a roughly 20-year fight in the courts, per SEC filings. The modest interchange reductions and new ability to steer customers away from higher-fee cards offer meaningful cost relief for small and midsize retailers that consumers may be more willing to support by using another card. However, those concessions are unlikely to move the needle for large national chains. They don’t materially change their economics, nor do they address the fundamental issue that networks and issuers still hold most of the pricing power.
2025 was a big year for cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency payment users grew 24.8%, to 4.9 million US adults, per our forecast. Between institutional buy-in and unprecedented support at the highest levels of the US government, the crypto market hit record highs—before plummeting in the final months of the year. Crypto gained mainstream momentum, but its volatility hasn’t changed. For banks and crypto infrastructures, this unpredictability kneecaps efforts to integrate crypto as an accepted currency at the point-of-sale.
40% of marketers worldwide are using AI for social media management, the top reported use case, according to a September 2025 survey from MiQ and Censuswide.
2025 saw mergers, layoffs, and AI overhauls as the agency model fractured and reformed.
M&A activity ramped up, transforming the banking industry.
A Canadian dollar-backed stablecoin is coming, but it may get stuck in a regulatory quagmire.
Agencies that don’t make AI skills a core part of employee training risk being sidelined in the age of AI.
In 2026, commerce will thread itself even more tightly into the platforms consumers already use, whether they're watching TV, scrolling TikTok, or browsing a retailer’s site. Streamers will hunt for new revenues beyond subscriptions and ads, fashion shoppers will polarize toward luxury or low-cost, and TikTok Shop will transition from experiment to expectation. Meanwhile, creators will embed more directly into retail environments as brands seek safer, more strategic partnerships.
Next year will bring shifts that redefine how networks operate, how brands show up, and how performance is measured. Here are three predictions for commerce media in 2026.
28% of retail commerce media decision-makers in North America and Europe say they review and approve creatives manually but lack automation or dynamic capabilities, according to November 2025 data from Koddi and Forrester Consulting.