IAB forms programmatic council: Industry heavyweights draft rules as programmatic’s $200 billion market outpaces oversight and walled gardens hold sway.

FTC restrains holdcos: Publicis, WPP, and Dentsu must end uniform brand safety rules as regulators probe political bias in ad buying.

Publicis' AI-led growth and new business wins show resilience in a challenging macro environment.

An FTC review of Publicis, WPP, and Dentsu spotlights political risk in ad placements and brand safety policies.

Exits and audit fallout adds to doubts about The Trade Desk's open-web pitch as walled gardens seize market share.

Sports content is one of the last bastions of live, appointment viewing. Key data shows who’s watching, which platforms they use, and how they engage with content between events.

AI is speeding up B2B buying without making decisions easier. Buyers move through early research faster and with less vendor contact. Marketers need clear, specific, consistent information across touchpoints—or risk losing ground in evaluation.

Publicis dominated 2025 new business with $10 billion in wins and slim losses, widening the gap as competitors like WPP stumbled.

Social teams are rethinking YouTube as Shorts surges, both long-form and episodic content gain traction, and generative search reshapes discovery. But legacy silos and cost concerns still hold many back, even as audiences and creators are leaning in.

Dentsu is entering repair mode; a record impairment and leadership shift mark a pivot toward cost control and disciplined capital allocation.

Early ChatGPT ads favor learning over ROI; high CPMs and limited measurement skew participation toward brands buying influence and insight.

Algorithms now shape most ad spend: Decisioning is expanding beyond targeting, increasing scale while adding opacity across planning, execution, and measurement.

Automation is now table stakes in social advertising. Platforms are pushing AI-driven campaigns at scale. But advertisers still demand control, transparency, and brand safety—and it’s all reshaping how performance media gets bought.

This FAQ explores the agency ecosystem, the forces reshaping it, and what marketers should consider when evaluating agency partners.

Ad agencies face AI disruption, consolidation, in-housing, and economic pressure. Legacy models are cracking as clients automate more work, forcing agencies to rethink their business strategies—or risk falling behind.

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

This FAQ explains how data clean rooms have become essential infrastructure for retail media, enabling privacy-safe data collaboration, closed-loop measurement, and proof of performance as ad spend grows and marketers demand greater accountability.

Disney will invest $1 billion in OpenAI and allow Sora users to create short-form videos featuring more than 200 Disney, Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars characters. User-generated material opens a new potential spigot of low-cost content for Disney+, which is under increased pressure to compete with YouTube. The move marks a major shift for a conglomerate that has historically held its IP close to the chest.

Horizon Media and Havas are teaming up in a new $20 billion joint venture, Horizon Global, designed to add scale without a full merger. Headquartered in New York, the entity will focus on U.S.-centric global accounts while Horizon and Havas continue operating independently. Horizon Global unites Horizon’s Blu platform and Havas’ Converged.AI into a new system called BluConverged, billed as the first AI-native media network. The move comes as Omnicom and Interpublic finalize a $13.5 billion merger, intensifying competition across the agency sector. Horizon Global offers clients a more flexible, performance-based alternative to mega-holdcos weighed down by bureaucracy.

Japan-based agency holding company Dentsu is considering selling its international business, ending its goal to compete against rivals Publicis and WPP. Selling its international business could allow Dentsu to reposition itself as a specialized player in its core market rather than stretching itself thin internationally where it can’t match competitors. The change could make the company more sustainable in the long run, but even if it focuses solely on Japan, rapid adoption of emerging technologies in the ad sector will still necessitate innovation.