Spanish-language media company TelevisaUnivision reported a rocky Q3, with notable downturns in net income, ad revenues, and overall revenues. TelevisaUnivsion and ViX still offer a compelling value proposition for brands seeking smaller, but influential Spanish-language audiences.
In this podcast episode, we discuss how do you decide when to lead with data versus when to trust your team’s creative instinct, how your brand can stand out on social media, how shopper expectations changed, and more. Listen to the discussion with Vice President of Content and guest host, Suzy Davidkhanian, Principal Analyst, Sky Canaves, Chief Content Officer at The Lead, Sonal Gandhi, and SVP of Marketing at Lulu’s, Patrick Buchanan.
Keeping shoppers engaged takes more than clever campaigns; it requires constant reinvention. In a recent Path to Purchase Institute webinar, experts from Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream and Spark Foundry discussed how staying fresh, setting clear objectives, and moving quickly can help brands build lasting connections in a fickle marketplace.
The Omnicom-IPG merger is expected to close in November, according to Omnicom CEO John Wren in the company’s Q3 earnings release, which showed organic revenue growth of 2.6% YoY. The merger seems to have crossed its last hurdle—and the new Omnicom-IPG entity stands to benefit marketers in many ways, though brands must keep some considerations in mind.
Artificial intelligence is transforming how brands navigate media buying, with digital ad buyers using AI for processes like ad personalization, audience insights, and creative ideation. In a conversation with EMARKETER, Mike Hauptman, CEO of cross-DSP manager AdLib, discussed how AI is altering the media buying landscape. Marketers are operating in a landscape where AI is a necessity—but as challenges are expected to persist for years to come, those who thrive will be the ones who find a happy medium.
36% of marketers say user-generated content (UGC) is extremely important to their social media strategy, compared with 2% who say the same for AI-generated content, according to an August 2025 survey from PhotoShelter.
Search advertising is entering a new era where Amazon and other retail media players are reshaping how discovery and intent are monetized. Brands must revisit their “search mix.” Google may remain indispensable, but allocating more spend to retail media will future-proof campaigns against cookie loss and capitalize on where shopping intent now begins.
The New York Times is adding a Watch tab to its app Wednesday in an effort to boost engagement and usher in more advertising business. The tab will feature a mix of short-form, swipeable, vertical video content, per Adweek. In early 2026, the publisher plans to open video ad placements within the tab to brands through a beta program, per Axios. As publishers introduce vertical video ad inventory, marketers should rethink their media mix to include premium placements that mirror the engagement of social video—while considering how those ads may appear alongside hard news or opinion content.
OpenAI launched an AI-powered browser—ChatGPT Atlas—and jumped headfirst into a new kind of rivalry with Google and Perplexity. ChatGPT Atlas is built around OpenAI’s flagship chatbot and features agentic capabilities. The browser is available globally on macOS, and access for Windows, iOS, and Android users is coming soon, per OpenAI. Companies should start optimizing for conversational search by ensuring websites are structured so AI agents can easily find and surface them in user queries. Brands should test both Atlas and Comet to see how their content surfaces and understand how AI browsers engage with users.
Most (63%) of global social media users prefer short videos from creators, according to a March impact.com and EMARKETER survey.
Walmart has expanded its Scintilla Digital Landscapes platform with new capabilities that give suppliers a clearer, data-rich view of how customers move from discovery to purchase.
AdsGency, which bills itself as the first agentic operating system for advertisers, is working to unify the entire advertising process in a single ecosystem. Its large language models (LLMs) target the ideal audience, create the ads, and automate the ad-buying process. AdsGency is breaking down siloes and democratizing advertising for smaller teams that don’t have the talent budget of larger companies. But at the same time, it’s taking over for humans and can easily miss the nuance that people can provide. Brands could adopt systems like AdsGency for targeting, placements, and analytics but leave the content to human creatives.
Marketing measurement is entering a new phase of speed and precision. InMarket’s Michael Della Penna told EMARKETER that marketers are moving beyond static reports toward real-time insights—fusing marketing mix modeling (MMM) and multi-touch attribution (MTA) to understand what drives incremental sales as campaigns run. AI-powered models now forecast lift, optimize spend, and connect awareness to conversion through unified platforms. With 56% of marketers prioritizing sales lift and nearly half investing in MMM, the focus is clear: decision speed over dashboards. InMarket’s end-to-end system exemplifies this shift, reframing measurement as a continuous feedback loop rather than a quarterly report.
Meta withdrew from Media Rating Council (MRC) brand safety audits last week, just months after its accreditation was officially issued, per Adweek. Despite its other brand safety moves, Meta’s step away from the MRC indicates that advertisers are now navigating a digital ad landscape that necessitates investment in platforms without stringent brand safety protocols—requiring marketers to strengthen their own brand safety monitoring and verification processes.
Google has officially eliminated its Privacy Sandbox and removed the remaining 10 Sandbox technologies that were still available, marking an end to its yearslong plan to pivot away from third-party cookies on Chrome. Even as giants like Google step away from first-party initiatives, advertisers should prepare for continued change as many are pushing forward with post-cookie ambitions. Cookies may linger for some time to come, but that doesn’t negate broader consumer sentiments that favor data transparency.
On today’s podcast episode, we discuss what it means to have an authentic relationship with your customer, the benefits of collaborating on loyalty, and how to make folks feel like they are getting the most out of their rewards app. Join our conversation with analyst and guest host, Arielle Feger, GM of CPG Partnerships at Fetch, Carmen Gonzalez-Meister, and Director of Category and Ecommerce Strategy at Nestlé, Nicole Lesinski. Listen everywhere you find podcasts and watch on YouTube and Spotify.
The Trade Desk’s connected TV (CTV) operating system, Ventura, is entering a crowded market dominated by giant tech players like Amazon—but TTD views the operating system as a yearslong bet on increasing transparency in the CTV market, senior vice president of Ventura Matthew Henick told EMARKETER. Big Tech’s hold on the CTV operating system space will persist for some time, but Ventura hints at trends that could disrupt that dominance. TTD’s push to improve transparency and addressability for both publishers and advertisers taps into a growing discontentment with the Big Tech status quo.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered an outage that continued to disrupt services into Monday afternoon, degrading services across more than a thousand company websites, including Disney+, Reddit, McDonald’s, Facebook, United Airlines, Coinbase, Perplexity, and Canva, per The Verge. Businesses reliant on a single cloud vendor could face operational, legal, and reputational risks when outages hit public services, banks, and travel sectors simultaneously. Brands should audit vendor dependencies, test crisis communication flows, and prioritize multi-cloud failover readiness to safeguard user experience during inevitable disruptions.
Adobe’s new genAI model marketplace—Adobe AI Foundry—lets brands create bespoke versions of its Firefly AI model. The marketplace helps enterprise users train and deploy customized content-creation models by retraining Firefly’s base knowledge. The models can understand brands’ tone, style, and products, per VentureBeat, then generate content accordingly. Platforms like Adobe AI Foundry could help marketers create more relevant, personalized ad experiences across platforms. CMOs should treat model customization as a way to consolidate creative tools and vendors while scaling personalization at speed, using it to strengthen collaboration between in-house teams and agencies.