American Eagle’s CMO: algorithms can’t replace gut feel on creative
American Eagle CMO Craig Brommers argues human emotion still drives brand campaigns more than AI-driven optimization. It’s a marketer’s pushback on the industry’s rush to automate creative and media decisions with algorithms.
Walmart Connect adds TikTok, Snapchat, Roku to retail media network
Walmart Connect now lets brands buy TikTok, Snapchat and Roku inventory through its own platform, keeping first-party data and measurement in-house. It’s a bid to chase Gen Z dollars and close the gap with Amazon’s ad business.
World Cup hydration breaks turned into prime ad inventory
FIFA’s new mid-half hydration breaks lost under 3% of audience, far better than halftime’s 18-20% drop. Fox Sports used the low-churn windows to sell added inventory, showing tentpole broadcasters new ways to monetize live sports beyond kickoff and halftime.
2Q26 earnings show ad growth splitting sharply by category
A wave of 2Q26 earnings shows live sports, streaming, in-app, and out-of-home ads thriving while linear TV, publishing, and open web lag. Growth is strong overall but uneven, rewarding product focus and go-to-market choices over sector membership.
Big Tech’s $700B capex spree exposes a capital gap among agency holding cos
Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft now guide to $700B combined 2026 capex. Meanwhile Stagwell spends 8% of net revenue versus Omnicom’s 1%, showing scale, not urgency, drives who bets big on AI infrastructure.
LLMs’ hunger for video could turn creators and planners into data suppliers
AI models need vast troves of video to train on, and creators plus media planners may end up licensing content and expertise to feed them. That opens a new, murky revenue stream — and a new dependency on AI platforms.
World Cup ad winners mixed comedy with soccer star power
New ad testing shows humor drove the strongest emotional response among World Cup advertisers, with Lay’s “Bandwagon” starring Will Ferrell leading likeability scores. Celebrity soccer talent reinforced but didn’t replace comedy as the key driver of viewer engagement.
Report: Kushner and Iger group nears deal to buy the Lakers
TBPN flags a Kushner-Iger investor group reportedly closing in on Lakers ownership. A media exec buying a marquee NBA franchise would reshape sports rights leverage and streaming carriage talks around the team.
Survey: budget approvals, not creative, are top campaign bottleneck
A 400-marketer survey from Extreme Reach finds budget approvals, not creative disputes, are the leading source of friction between marketing and finance.
Non-endemic brands quietly become Amazon’s next ad growth engine
Banks, airlines and pharma firms are targeting shoppers who’ll never buy their products through Amazon, using its consumer-behavior data instead.
iSpot data: Burger King’s food-first, nostalgia ads are its best performers in 2026
iSpot’s SAGE tool finds BK’s 2026 creative outperforms its all-time average, driven by appetite-appeal shots and a “You Rule” customer-crowning narrative. Nostalgia-heavy spots like “What Is It?”
Stagwell builds its own inventory marketplace, muscling into ad tech turf
Stagwell is launching an AI-driven media curation marketplace to control inventory access directly, rather than relying on ad tech intermediaries. It’s a sign agencies want a bigger cut of the supply chain, not just a seat at the buying table.
Agentic media buying is turning into a client-by-client build, not a platform
Butler/Till is scaling AI agent buying across clients and channels, but says controls must be configured per client, not applied uniformly. That means agencies need bespoke guardrails, not one-size-fits-all automation, to trust agentic systems with budgets.
Liquid Death’s media chief on proving ads move cans off shelves
Liquid Death’s Benoit Vatere talks measurement strategy for tying media spend to actual retail sales lift. It’s a rare CPG-side view on solving marketing attribution’s hardest, most persistent problem: sales causation, not just correlation.
Fox extends iSpot deal, expands outcome measurement across screens
Fox is renewing and deepening its iSpot partnership, feeding outcomes data into its AdStudio platform for linear and streaming. It’s a signal that TV sellers see attribution and business-outcome proof, not just reach, as the currency advertisers now demand.
Walmart closes $1.4B Vibe.co deal to build streaming ad muscle
Walmart finalized its acquisition of streaming adtech startup Vibe.co, reportedly for $1.4 billion. The deal signals retail media’s biggest player is now racing to build its own ad-supported streaming stack to compete directly with Amazon.
Stingray’s Purdy pitches retail media audio and CTV audio ads
In a three-part video series, Stingray CRO David Purdy argues in-store audio and CTV audio ads are underused opportunities, while flagging Europe’s slow FAST growth. His pitch: captive audiences alone don’t work without format tweaks.
Spectrum Reach exec: fragmentation forces marketers to buy reach differently
TVREV’s Alan Wolk and Spectrum Reach’s Dan Callahan discuss how “Feudal Media” fragmentation is pushing marketers toward partners who can aggregate premium inventory. Transparency and trust are becoming the differentiators as reach gets harder to assemble.
Op-ed: Africa’s TV measurement gap is costing broadcasters real ad revenue
A BMA opinion piece argues Africa’s thin measurement panels leave most viewers uncounted, undervaluing airtime and starving carriage talks of data. It calls for shared standards and a pan-African joint-industry measurement body, aided by AI and return-path data.
Disney weighs a free ad-supported tier for Disney+
Disney is exploring a FAST-style free tier following Paramount’s similar move, aiming to monetize unwatched library content and expand ad reach. Analysts argue it curbs churn by keeping downgraded subscribers in-ecosystem rather than losing them outright.
Peacock turns a profit as Comcast preps NBCU-cable split
Comcast’s Q2 results show Peacock hit profitability for the first time since 2020, even as broadband keeps losing subscribers. The mix bolsters NBCUniversal’s standalone case ahead of its planned split from Comcast’s cable business.
FCC’s Aug 6 vote may scrap national ownership cap, not just raise it
The FCC is weighing whether to drop the 39% national ownership cap entirely in favor of case-by-case public-interest review.