As streaming services capture an increasing share of both viewership and subscription revenues, this FAQ will help marketers understand the terminology and dynamics shaping video advertising in 2026.

The Olympics and World Cup will propel sports ads to a record year, pushing global spend past $1 trillion.

CTV’s evolution will hit full stride in 2026 amid rising viewership, better measurement, and interactive ads.

Roku and iSpot integration marks tighter CTV attribution loop: iSpot’s product aims to lessen intermediaries between ad spending and performance data.

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.

At CES, Amazon is repositioning Amazon Ads as a full advertising ecosystem rather than a commerce-adjacent channel, emphasizing unified reach across TV, streaming, live sports, audio, and programmatic partners.

In a year marked by platform volatility, AI acceleration, tariff shocks, and shifting consumer behavior, marketers searched for clarity across EMARKETER’s most-read topics. The top 10 themes reflect where advertiser attention truly moved in 2025. These trends captured the forces reshaping performance, discovery, and measurement: AI-driven optimization, creator-centric social ecosystems, commerce-led advertising, and CTV’s rise as the new premium video default. Together, they tell the story of a market recalibrating around efficiency, accountability, and cultural relevance as marketers prepared their 2026 strategies.

As consumers become adept at ignoring ads, avoiding dreaded ad fatigue requires brands to prioritize creativity and interactivity.

Audiences say TV is the most acceptable place for advertising, but amid the shift to digital for younger buyers, a balanced approach is critical.

Amazon is recalibrating its relationship with the agencies and adtech firms that helped build its retail-media dominance. While Amazon insists agencies remain central, many intermediaries say rising data costs and tool duplication echo earlier platform playbooks from Google and Meta—centralize strengths, limit external dependencies, and scale in-house automation. The result is a more controlled, AI-driven ecosystem that may reduce tooling diversity while boosting Amazon’s own ad stack. For marketers, the challenge will be balancing Amazon’s convenience and scale with the flexibility, transparency, and customization offered by independent partners.

On today’s EMARKETER Miniseries—AI-Driven Media Management—we explore how to break down the media manager role into workflows that can be automated or augmented by agentic AI, what agencies misunderstand about AI, and which agency tasks are ripest to hand off to AI right now. EMARKETER Senior Director of Content Jeremy Goldman speaks with Adam Epstein, co-founder and CEO of Gigi. Listen everywhere you find podcasts, and watch on YouTube and Spotify.

NBCUniversal (NBCU) debuted AI-powered ad features ahead of the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show in 2026, giving advertisers the opportunity to leverage AI for better results in live TV and video-on-demand properties. Campaigns running on NBCU properties now gain access to the massive benefits of utilizing AI for TV, CTV, and VOD advertising.

In 2026, AI will reshape advertiser workflows and behaviors, while rising video consumption will boost CTV and YouTube.

Universal Ads announced Thursday an expansion of its Universal Audience Network in partnership with third-party publishers, including Samsung Ads, Cox Media, Philo, Vevo, and Telly. New partnerships enable marketers to scale campaigns with simplicity as Universal Audience Network maintains an over 90% household reach across premium video. Universal Ads is tackling one of streaming’s biggest pain points—fragmentation—by consolidating access to the streaming and connected TV (CTV) ecosystem.

To counter complaints about its proposed Warner Bros. purchase, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos has pointed to what he says is the company’s biggest competitor: YouTube. Netflix’s contention that YouTube is its biggest competitor is defensible, but key differences exist between the platforms that opponents could use to swing back. Ultimately, it may come down to a court ruling—and recent antitrust cases suggest judges may side with Netflix.