Marketing Brew informs marketing pros of the latest on brand strategy, social media, and ad tech via our weekday newsletter, virtual events, marketing conferences, and digital guides.

Marketing Brew

Ryan Barwick

marketingbrew.com

A video ad promoting the film Wonka displayed on Lyft's app

Lyft introduces video ads to its app

The rideshare company also announced a partnership with Nielsen to measure ad campaign performance

A chocolate chip cookie disappearing into thin air on a light purple backdrop

Advertisers expect Google to delay its cookie phase-out, according to industry survey

But they’re also preparing for signal loss and planning around new privacy laws, according to IAB’s State of Data report.  

the Baltimore Banner on the side of a building framed by a blue heart statue in the foreground

Ads and events are bringing in more revenue than subscriptions at the Baltimore Banner—for now

The publication is courting local and regional advertisers while eschewing programmatic inventory. 

A square with a mouse cursor pointing at it denoting an advertising click

Ad Tech & Programmatic

Jasmine Sheena

Like it or not, GenAI is coming to digital video ad creation.

Almost 9 in 10 digital video buyers are using or plan to use gen AI to aid in the creation of digital video ads, according to a new report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). According to the report, which is based on a survey of 368 advertisers fielded between February 17 and March 7, around 30% of digital video ads will be made with or enhanced by GenAI tools this year, up eight percentage points from 2024; that number is expected to grow to 39% next year.

Small- and mid-tier brands are expected to adapt the tech quicker than larger companies, according to the IAB: “Small spenders,” which the report defines as companies spending less than $10 million annually, expect 45% of their ads to be created with GenAI by 2026, while 36% of “large spenders” (those who spend $50+ million annually) said the same.

Of the respondents who said they were using or planned to use GenAI to create multiple versions of ads, the largest share (42%) said they were doing so to create “versions for different audiences,” while a slightly smaller percentage (38%) said they were using the tech to make “visual and style changes.”

The responses “suggest that the other GenAI capabilities become more valuable when buyers have already solved for reaching the right audience first,” the report read.

The effects on digital video could be considerable. Overall, digital video (defined in the report as CTV, social video, and online video) is expected to make up 58% of total TV and video ad spend in 2025, according to the report. In 2025, digital video spend is expected to grow 14% to $72 billion, while CTV spend is expected to grow 13% to $26.6 billion.

 As advertisers continue to spend on digital video, content quality (43%) and targeting capabilities (39%) ranked as the top two most important criteria when deciding where exactly to put that spend. Targeting capabilities were important to 56% of small spenders, while only 39% of mid-tier and 35% of large brands said the same.

Advertisers of all kinds are looking for more options in the CTV video space, the IAB found, and more than half of buyers reported seeking out more capabilities and options when advertising against live programming on streaming compared to on linear TV, according to the report.

“Although streaming is still an emerging channel for live content...buyers are holding their streaming partners to a higher standard than linear TV,” the report read.

Brand safety and incremental audiences polled highest in terms of expectations buyers have when looking to spend on live content on both streaming platforms and linear TV.

Excluding insertion order transactions, 75% of CTV buys were done programmatically in 2024. This year, that number is projected to grow to 85%.

 When it comes to reasons to buy digital video ads, buyers surveyed were most interested in achieving bottom-funnel outcomes such as store visits (both online and off) and sales (both clocked in at 44%). In terms of measurement preference, 55% said campaign and placement-level KPIs were most important, while 47% said “basic data regarding the adjacent content” was crucial.

But measurement continues to pose some challenges, especially among small spenders: 38% said that “measurement complexity” presents a challenge to activating in digital video programmatically, while “standardization issues” and “leveraging cross-channel data” both were a concern for 36% of small spenders.

A robot arm reaching out and touching a screen displaying a web browser

GenAI is officially coming for digital video ad creation

Nearly 90% of digital video buyers are using or plan to use generative AI for ads, according to a new report from the IAB.

If you’re on the internet these days, you’d be hard-pressed to 

The term, which refers to low-quality AI-generated content that is beginning to 

 on social media platforms like Instagram and video platforms like YouTube, are often bizarre and are sometimes even funny. But for some brands concerned about brand safety and suitability, having ads run against such content might be no laughing matter.

On YouTube though, ads for brands are sometimes appearing next to such AI-slop content. A look at several YouTube pages that post AI slop revealed some major brands’ advertisements showing up against those pages’ content, which ranges from simply strange to AI-generated misinformation.

One channel, called Pan-African Dreams, has shared misinformation and recently 

 for posting a lengthy deepfake video that falsely depicts Pope Leo XIV delivering a speech praising Ibrahim Traoré, the military leader of Burkina Faso, prompting a 

 from the Vatican. In mid-May, the video had 

Marketing Brew observed brands including HBO Max, Amazon Hub Delivery, theater ticket seller TodayTix, and the tourism site Visit Florida appearing against content on the channel.

Another AI slop channel, Banana Adventure, posts bizarre videos mostly centered on Minions, the characters from the Despicable Me

franchise, as well as other characters like the Joker. Marketing Brew observed ads for Amazon Hub Delivery, Android, and Tia Health next to that channel’s content.

And on a third AI slop channel with the name Mikey, which seems to post mostly what appear to be AI-generated cartoon stills with AI-generated voice-overs, including images of Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Marketing Brew saw ads for Adobe and Samsung Home Appliances.

In an email, Google spokesperson Nate Funkhouser told Marketing Brew that YouTube does not currently offer advertisers the ability to opt out of appearing next to AI-generated content. “We offer controls for advertisers to decide where their ads run based on the content of a video, not how it was produced,” Funkhouser said in the statement.

Emails requesting comment sent to Android, HBO Max, Samsung, TodayTix, and Visit Florida went unreturned. Representatives for Adobe, Amazon Hub Delivery, and Tia Health did not provide comment.

After viewing the ads on Banana Adventure and Pan-African Dreams and requesting comment from YouTube, both channels were removed from the platform. The Mikey channel, meanwhile, was not found to violate YouTube’s policies, according to Google.

For some brands, monitoring exactly where their ads are showing up on YouTube has already seemed like a game of Whac-A-Mole. In recent years, major brands’ advertisements have been spotted running against 

, even, at times, those that were using brand-safety tools.

In the case of AI slop on YouTube, though, some of those existing challenges for brand safety and suitability stand to be multiplied. Brands should be mindful about appearing next to AI-generated content, said Anirudh Dhebar, a marketing professor at Babson College, as advertising next to AI slop could contain reputational risk for brands. 

And while a brand may not necessarily take issue with being associated with AI-generated content in itself, issues could arise if that AI-generated slop overlaps with other potentially damaging content. Both Disney and Universal are 

 the generative AI company Midjourney, alleging that users can easily create images based on protected intellectual property, representing a “bottomless pit of plagiarism.”

Tyler Folkman, GM at TubeBuddy, which offers a suite of tools for YouTubers, said that he doesn’t expect many AI slop channels to flourish for too long on YouTube due to likely low levels of engagement on their videos, but he acknowledged that it can be difficult to get problematic AI slop videos taken down from YouTube due to the platform’s vast size.

As of March 2024, YouTube has put in place some restrictions on uploading AI-generated content that requires creators to disclose if AI tools were used to create a video. More broadly, YouTube has policies 

, and other types of content on the platform.

Dhebar told Marketing Brew that the proliferation of AI slop in its various forms can present additional challenges for advertisers.

“If I'm an advertiser, I need to be very mindful, and I’m in a precarious point,” he explained. “On one hand, I want the biggest bang for my dollar, that's in the short term; [in] the longer term, there might be significant reputational risk. How do I balance those two?”

AI slop is proliferating on YouTube—and major brands are advertising against it 

Brands like HBO Max, Amazon Hub Delivery, and Samsung Home Appliances had their ads appear next to low-quality AI-generated videos.

Alyssa Meyers

Podcasts have long been known for a very personal style of host-read ads that are often sold directly. So when it comes to programmatic ad sales, the sector has sometimes been viewed as a rare holdout.

But, much like the worst person you know starting a podcast, the introduction of more ad tech and automation in podcasting 

In one of the latest signs of the time, Spotify rolled out its 

this spring, marking the first time the audio giant is letting ad buyers participate in true open-marketplace programmatic bidding through demand-side platforms like The Trade Desk and Google DV360.

“Marketers want more flexibility and more agility to make decisions,” Brian Berner, Spotify’s head of global ad sales and partnerships, told Marketing Brew at Cannes Lions. “They don’t want to be held to the traditional, long-term upfronts. We’ve been getting that feedback for a while.”

As of now, the exchange includes music and video content, but podcasts are soon to come, Berner said. We spoke with him about the new ad exchange and the current state of the audio ad ecosystem.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What was your thinking behind putting all music and video content in the Spotify Ad Exchange first and at the same time?

How we think about inventory in general is we think about the user experience…What we as a company are doing, from a consumer experience perspective, is as we’re making a bigger push to have video content on the platform, it’s because our consumers are looking for music videos or video podcasts. What we think through is, first you look at the user experience, and then it’s like, “All right, based on this moment, am I watching Spotify, or am I listening to Spotify?” Then our tech will, in that environment, whether it’s in-stream or in-feed, decide if it’s best to serve an audio ad right now, a display ad, or a video ad. Regardless of whatever those three ads are, all of it is accessible via programmatic.

Why wait to add podcast inventory to the mix?

You have to build the foundation and then start putting together all the framework. We needed to build the core ecosystem or infrastructure. Now pods are next on the roadmap, and further innovation to come.

Do brands and buyers still have the same 

 about buying podcast ads programmatically as they did when that tech was less common in audio?

I don’t think so. I think the hesitation a couple years back was that the standardization and verification wasn’t there. [There have been] big announcements from us these past years, like our partnership with IAS and incorporating their brand-safety metrics into podcasts in particular. I think as people have gotten more comfortable with industry standardization that is similar to brand-safety metrics in just digital, period, [that] has gotten everyone more comfortable leaning in and knowing that the right controls are in place to make sure your brand is appearing in environments you want it to. I’d say the hesitation isn’t there as much, but brands are always going to keep brand safety top of mind.

Is the podcasting tech and advertising space up to speed with other digital platforms?

Podcasting is still in its infancy. You’re going to see continued consumption, engagement, and innovation in podcasting. You have creators leaning in, and the ones that are truly partnering with us, or just any audio partner for that matter, they’re starting to understand you can’t replicate your social video strategy the same way you do podcasts. You are going to see some phenomenal creators leverage audio differently than social to build bigger followings.

With video and audio content becoming increasingly tied together, how do you advise brands around measuring campaigns that run against the same general content but on different platforms, like a pure RSS podcast and a YouTube video?

Brands are pushing us there…What we’re trying to solve for is that a good portion of podcasts are still downloaded, and everything Spotify is trying to do with SAI (Streaming Ad Insertion) is to get podcasts into streaming. If you can get more streaming consumption, then you have the standardization of measurement. We are working with brands on holistic performance, and then they’re looking at their creative within maybe music versus podcasts and figuring out what messaging performs. But we still have to continue to invest and innovate in measurement.

Brian Berner, Spotify’s head of global ad sales and partnerships

Spotify’s head of global ad sales on the latest in programmatic audio

The platform recently opened up the Spotify Ad Exchange, giving audio buyers access to real-time bidding for its inventory for the first time. 

Did you know that Spotify has a head of dance and electronic development? Her name is Ronny Ho, and her team decides what electronic music makes it to Spotify’s in-house curated playlists.

At Spotify’s second annual Sparks event in New York last week, Ho and other execs talked about how they find topical music to populate Spotify’s biggest playlists. The audio streaming giant also announced editorial Watchfeeds, a new collection of written and video content and user interactions that will appear on top of playlists to explain and personalize the editorial team’s choices—and ideally, help drive engagement on the Spotify platform.

The event was one of several advertising-related events held by the streaming service this year as it continues to look for opportunities for platform monetization, particularly as it 

 into video. Fresh off its first full year of profitability, Spotify, which last reported 268 million users, is leaning into advertising, with a focus on adtech and generative AI that it detailed last month at its first-ever version of an upfront, Spotify Advance; at Google’s NewFront presentation last week, the platform also got a shout-out.

The goal of all of it, according to Ann Piper, head of North America ad sales for Spotify, is to get advertisers to see audio ads as a crucial part of their marketing mixes.

“Audio from a time spent [perspective] is outpacing the money that goes there in terms of the ad dollars,” she told Marketing Brew.

The Sparks event, Piper told us, was meant to complement Spotify Advance, which was designed to showcase what Spotify is doing to advance measurement, buying, and creation across its platform. Sparks, which was held in both the US and the UK, instead showcased region-specific insights.

At Advance, Spotify debuted several new ad products, including Spotify Ad Exchange (SAX), a product that Piper said was centered on interoperability; the ad exchange is compatible with major demand-side platforms like The Trade Desk, Google DV360, Magnite, and LiveRamp. By the time Spotify announced SAX, over 

Piper said that auto and QSR industries are two major sectors that have embraced the ad exchange. Auto brands have used SAX ads to promote products in local designated market areas, she said, while QSR companies have used SAX ads to develop calls to action and use it, generally, for lower-funnel advertising purposes.

Advance also saw the debut of generative AI audio ads on Spotify, which allow advertisers to generate voice-overs and scripts using generative AI tools. As of last month, four in 10 advertisers were leveraging the self-serve capability, the company previously disclosed. While it’s still early days, Spotify is aiming to “hone in” on the data to show advertisers how a campaign is performing against others in their category, Piper said.

At Sparks, the streaming service touted marketing research it partnered with information services company Neustar on, which found that Spotify ads drive a 20% lift in foot traffic for retail clients and drive 14% more return per dollar spent than any other channel for CPG clients. Measuring the impact of audio ads may help get advertisers to take audio ads more seriously, Piper told Marketing Brew.

“Digital audio isn’t always showing up in [media mix modeling], right?” she said. “They’ve had to really work, and especially podcast [ads,] because it’s been newer.”

Inside Spotify’s evolving ads strategy

Ad exec Ann Piper shared how advertisers are adopting Spotify Ad Exchange and generative AI audio ads.

Roku is no Netflix, but it’s no underdog either. The streamer and smart-TV company posted $881 million in revenue in Q1, a 17% YoY increase, according to the company’s most recent quarterly earnings, and its video advertising revenue has grown faster than overall platform revenue.

As the company looks to keep scaling, it has been building up its ad-tech offerings. The company, which opted out of hosting a traditional NewFronts presentation this year, is now leaning on its programmatic capabilities to appeal to advertisers navigating a difficult economic landscape, Roku execs said during the company’s Q1 earnings call.

“If we look at our execution over the last two years, it’s really positioned our business…to navigate environments like we’re seeing now with the macro-uncertainty,” Anthony Wood, Roku CEO, said. “We’ve really diversified our revenue streams; we have more diversified ad products, and we’re less reliant on M&E.”

 Roku has been moving away from being “more of a walled garden” to making its data more accessible through third-party ad-tech integrations, Sarah Harms, Roku’s VP of advertising marketing and measurement, told Marketing Brew. To that end, the streamer inked measurement deals with iSpot in April 2024 and, more recently, Incrmntal (which is, you guessed it, an incrementality measurement platform) in February. In January, Roku introduced its 

 product, which allows advertisers to access Roku viewer preference data when making inventory buys through Roku Exchange, which itself is linked to several DSPs. 

The partnerships all point to a bigger goal. Amid “economic volatility,” Roku execs are hoping advertisers will view CTV as a performance channel, and measurement partnerships are a key part of getting advertisers to see that, Harms said.

“Data Cloud is really just…tying a bow around any of our data applications or assets: making our data available to a holding company for planning or measurement, but also exploring deeper partnerships with a measurement company to share data to improve their methodology,” she said.

On the earnings call, Wood echoed Harms’s message, telling analysts that advertisers tend to look for performance during times of economic uncertainty. Roku’s home-screen marquee video unit, for example, has been popular with advertisers looking for performance buys, Charlie Collier, Roku Media president, said on the call.

While Collier said on the call that the company is seeing advertisers shift spend from “longer-term guaranteed commitments to shorter-term, nonguaranteed campaigns, usually executed programmatically,” execs emphasized that they believe Roku is well-positioned to deal with headwinds, largely thanks to its ad-tech investments.

“Over the past couple years, we’ve focused on building our programmatic capabilities, and that investment is absolutely paying off in an environment like this that demands agility,” he said.

Roku logo appears on a mobile phone screen, with the Roku logo in the background

 Roku leans on ad-tech investments to navigate rocky economic climate

 In an environment that “demands agility,” company execs are framing CTV as a performance channel.

Jennimai Nguyen

Marcello Hernández doesn’t normally wake up before 2pm, at least not according to his mom. But for T-Mobile, the 

 star was on stage bright and early—though with sunglasses firmly on.

On Tuesday, the telecom made its second-ever appearance at NewFronts to announce new data-backed advertising solutions from its advertising arm, T-Mobile Advertising Solutions (T-Ads), and Hernández and his mother, Isabel Cancela, who star in a T-Mobile ad spot as part of a partnership with the brand, teed off the morning presentation. After Hernández spoke about his personal connection to T-Mobile, execs segued into how they plan to deepen marketing connections with a new collection of ad offerings, including highlights on its lifestyle app, expanded in-store retail media opportunities, and AI-powered data analysis.

“We’ve created this very compelling suite of solutions across app ecosystems,” JP Colaco, SVP and chief T-Ads officer, told Marketing Brew. “Because of the unique data that we have and the ability to apply that data to your marketing campaigns, we can provide atypically high results for marketers across the group.”

In its mission to “create the most effective advertising platform in the world,” as Colaco put it onstage, presenters touted T-Ads’s first-party data as key to solving advertising’s pain points of relevancy and integration.

Core to the pitch was highlighting T-Mobile’s owned and operated platforms like the T-Life app, where brands can leverage data brought to life by T-Mobile’s recent tech acquisitions, Vistar and Blis, to better inspire customer action. On the T-Life app, brands can participate in moments like T-Mobile Tuesdays, which rewards T-Mobile customers with free branded redemptions.

One recent campaign with Wingstop, Colaco said, “beat the redemption goal by 55% because our customers go do things based on what’s happening on T-Mobile Tuesdays and what their opportunity is.”

Beyond app-based opportunities, T-Mobile’s data powers its retail media network, which this year will expand beyond the company’s existing 35,000 in-store digital billboard screens to additional retailers across the country. The expansion will allow retailers to use T-Mobile’s connectivity and Vistar’s technology to prop up their own retail media networks, and Colaco said the service will be a “one-stop shop” that will use first-party data from both T-Mobile and retailers for ad targeting.

Going beyond mobile customers presents new opportunities for advertisers and retailers alike, according to Vistar co-founder and CEO Michael Provenzano, and he told us that there are few limitations to what might make a good retailer or advertiser fit.

“The idea is that the software for powering these screens and helping monetize them should be applying to all retailers,” Provenzano told us. “What we’ve seen in our own stores is endemic-heavy. As you imagine, the products and services you sell in the store are the ones that want to advertise there, because you’re so close to the point of purchase for those consumers.”

The tech-du-jour of the marketing industry did not escape discussion at T-Ads’s event, and Colaco emphasized that AI tools are what will take advertising from “reactive to predictive.”

At the event, T-Ads’s head of advertising data, measurement, and partnerships, Andrea Zapata, highlighted how T-Mobile’s AI-powered analysis can build a fuller picture of potential customers. Rather than only looking at screen time–connected data, she emphasized the need for data that takes in activity off-screen, too.

The pitch—and NewFronts week, in general—might end up going against some wisdom from Hernández that he shared at the beginning of the morning. When asked whether he’s gearing up for another 

 sketch, the comedian said he’s not making a lot of noise about it..

“I’ve found that that’s the best way to be,” Hernández said. “If you really want something, just don’t talk about it, and just be quiet and nice, and people sometimes give it to you.”

T-Mobile touts ‘better’ data—not big data—at NewFronts

The telecom’s advertising arm presented a suite of data-backed and AI-powered solutions for OOH and digital advertising.

Kelsey Sutton

To kick off NewFronts week, Google’s VP of agency, platforms, and client solutions, Kristen O’Hara, started off with a question that she was first to admit was a softball. “In one sentence, could you each tell me your favorite use of AI?” she asked a panel featuring an agency exec, consultant, and creator during a breakfast panel Monday morning.

The answers varied from weekly meal prep to interior design—but a more ideal answer might have also mentioned any of Google’s own AI tools, which the tech giant would just an hour later heavily emphasize during its official pitch to advertisers.

Google’s Display & Video 360 platform, which features inventory across TV, sports, gaming, audio, and digital display ads, will get an injection of generative AI capabilities, the company announced Monday, with new updates that will incorporate generative AI into various steps including curating deal packages and providing reporting in response to text prompts. “It’s the DV360 you know, just supercharged with Google AI,” Bill Reardon, GM of enterprise platforms, Google Ads, said ahead of an onstage demo of how the tools work.

Ahead of the presentation, Marta Martinez, managing director of Google Marketing Platforms, Americas, told us that the new tools are aimed at making ad buying and planning even easier across Google.

“How do you make the complex simple?” Martinez told us. “Our consumers are starting to think very differently about how they search and how they explore and how they communicate with technology, and they’re going from shorter queries to more conversational [ones]. We want to bring the experience that they’re having on the web to how they interact with our marketing tools.”

It’s unlikely that Google will be alone in its emphasis on AI during the 17th year of NewFronts presentations that precede the traditional TV upfronts. Major advertising platforms like Meta and TikTok have forged ahead with AI-powered tools, while streamers like Tubi have looked to 

 AI-powered content recommendation into their platforms. Spotify, which last month announced a push into generative AI ads and has partnered with Google to expand its programmatic capabilities, made an appearance Monday in the form of 

, “your friendly neighborhood Spotify AI DJ,” who introduced the show.

During a keynote ahead of Google’s presentation, David Cohen, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the organization behind the NewFronts, emphasized the changing technologies and the opportunities they could present to the industry.

“Converging trends of AI, of commerce media, of streaming, and of social media are like the new Big Bang,” he said. “All of that change means there’s a lot of money up for grabs—and ‘tis the season when brands and agencies make decisions on where to place their bets.”

 One of the other big bets marketers are making is the booming opportunity represented by retail media, where spending is forecast to increase by 88% from 2024 through 2028 toh $98 billion annually, according to 

. To that, Google also had an answer: the tech giant is rolling out a full commerce and media offering in DV360, which will allow brands to use retail media network data and audience segments across DV360 inventory and YouTube. Google has partnered with Costco, Intuit, Regal Cinemas, and United Airlines’s retail media network, Kinective Media, Andrew Hotz, Google’s director of programmatic media, announced onstage, providing “new ways to activate your data with brands without having to share it with your competitors,” he said.

 Google continues to ink more deals with other media companies and content creators. As part of one of those partnerships, live TV inventory, including YouTube TV’s NFL Sunday Ticket games and other live sports inventory from media companies like NBCU and Disney, will be transactable on DV360.

Outside of live inventory, Google is furthering partnerships with major streamers like Disney, Netflix, and Tubi, as well as gaming platforms like Roblox, to increase its programmatic inventory on DV360 even more.

 There were a few elephants in the room, including what could happen to Google’s businesses pending the remedy stages of two federal antitrust trials that have ruled that Google’s search-engine business and advertising technology business were both operating as 

. The DOJ is seeking to require Google to 

 as a potential remedy in the former case; Google has said it will appeal.

Also looming over the presentation—and the week of presentations—is the general economic volatility and its 

, which are, like the rainy New York weather this week, forecast to be gloomy. While Google’s presentation largely sidestepped the economic reality, Cohen said during his keynote that he felt that the sentiment is eerily similar to that felt during the pandemic.

“Now is not the time for fear. Now is not the time for hunkering down and short-term-ism,” he said. “Yes, things are in flux. Yes, things are unpredictable, and yes, we are on the verge of big changes. It is better to be an optimist who’s occasionally wrong than a pessimist who’s right all the time.”

 It’s not Google’s last time in front of advertisers this month. On Thursday, YouTube is hosting a creator-centric presentation, and next week, YouTube will host its annual 

 during upfronts week, when TV networks vie for advertiser attention and dollars.

Google logo with binary code and ai elements