mediaindustrynews

NBCUniversal's shoppable TV initiative is experiencing significant year-over-year growth, driven by product integration in popular shows like "Traitors" and "Love Island USA." Viewers can purchase products seen on TV via QR codes and interactive on-screen features, leading to a 171% increase in brand favourability and three times higher engagement than traditional ads.

At Advertising Week NY, it was clear that AI agents are already reshaping the ad industry. There were five big stories that spun out of this topic throughout the week: Meta wants the whole campaign in the chat/ ChatGPT wants to become a buyable medium/ TikTok wants to own the journey from discovery to checkout/ The upfronts get an agent, and agencies a lease on life/ Apple's blocklist loomed over Advertising Week.

As brands continue to increase their investment in the creator economy, questions around measurement, commercialisation and effectiveness are becoming harder to ignore. How can creator marketing be evaluated alongside more established media channels without losing sight of what makes it valuable in the first place?

Only 57% of advertisers are confident their organization has the right media mix, according to Kantar’s 2026 Media Reactions report. “I don’t think marketers have lost their faith in media,” said Jeff Greenspoon, CEO of Americas at Kantar. “I think it’s that the media ecosystem is fragmenting, changing and probably outgrowing the way decisions have been made for the last 25 years.”

While the Media Rating Council (MRC) continued accreditation for 24 Nielsen PPM ((personal portable meter) markets, the loss and denial of other radio markets comes at a contentious time for Nielsen and the radio industry, which has been challenging Nielsen’s so-called “subscriber-first” business model requiring stations and markets to pay Nielsen before their audience estimates are reported as part of market share data.

Fresh data from WFA (World Federations of Advertisers) and Agency Mania Solutions’ global research, How brands define, scope and reward agency work finds that pure labour/FTE has dropped from 54 per cent of respondents’ main remuneration methodology in 2011 to 17 per cent in 2026, while fixed-fee or output-based pricing has grown from 20 per cent to 35 per cent.

In a recent interview, Google CEO Sundar Pichai described Google’s plans to develop a deeper integration of AI agents into Search, saying that he envisions the near future as an agentic layer that unifies those experiences rather than actually merging each product.

Now, agentic AI promises something better: the speed and scale of programmatic combined with the customization and direct relationships of traditional media buying. And cutting out unnecessary intermediary fees is the cherry on top.

“It's almost like having an assistant planner," is how Ad+genuity Director of Digital Media & Strategy Kayla Coe characterized the current status on her team ahead of the release of an annual study on the adoption of AI by digital media planning and buying platform Basis Technologies. The study's top line: nearly two-thirds (61.4%) of industry pros it surveyed last summer says they now utilize AI technology every day, which is nearly double the 33.6% from the same survey conducted a year ago.

If we want better media decisions, measurement needs to reflect how people actually make buying decisions, not simply how platforms record them, writes Dan Gee. What’s often missing is an explanation of how all of this contributes to growth. In essence: true media effectiveness.

Marketing teams have become vastly better at optimising campaigns and communications through ever-more precise data and measurement tools. But for the likes of Les Binet, Mark Ritson and James Hurman, such precision puts brands in danger of losing sight of how we generate future demand.

As the platforms take on more of the operational work and AI becomes capable of handling increasingly complicated tasks, the value of having someone manually operate an account starts to fall. Conversely, the value of having someone who understands what the system should be doing, what information it needs, and where it should go next starts to rise. That’s going to change what a PPC agency actually is. Read further.

Marketer spending on product placements will grow 13.7% worldwide, and 12.8% in the U.S. this year, the greatest rate of expansion since the industry rebounded from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2022, according to the 2026 edition of PQ Media's Global Product Placement Forecast.

Andrew Tindall digs into data across 1,478 brands and argues ad awareness deserves a place back in effectiveness planning, alongside attention, emotion and business outcomes. Ad awareness became quite a dirty word in effectiveness. The industry focused too much on it, and we correctly steered toward more System 1 thinking, subconscious engagement and attention, alongside metrics that felt closer to an outcome. But we overcorrected.