Digiday

CTV is growing fast, but many advertisers are still measuring it the wrong way, or not measuring it at all. Last-touch attribution was built for a click-based world, and CTV operates differently. When the measurement doesn’t fit the channel, campaigns that are working get defunded and campaigns that aren’t get scaled. Budgets stay capped — not out of skepticism, but out of an inability to operate CTV with the same confidence as digital.

This Future of TV Briefing covers the latest in streaming and TV for Digiday+ members and is distributed over email every Wednesday at 10 a.m. ET. More from the series → This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at Comcast-owned FreeWheel enabling streaming ad sellers to directly show-level reporting to programmatic ad buyers. For the better part of the past decade (at least), many streaming ad buyers have complained about not knowing what shows their ads appear in when purchasing programmatically.

By Seb Joseph and Kimeko McCoy  •  July 29, 2026  • Omnicom CEO John Wren just said the quiet part out loud: nobody’s actually priced AI yet. The admission came on the holdco’s Q2 earnings call yesterday, in response to an analyst question on where AI is driving the biggest cost savings, and, more pointedly, whether those savings are flowing back into client marketing budgets or leaking out elsewhere. Wren’s answer focused less on savings and more on cost.

Buoyed by the shift of sports programming to streaming, ad spend on digital video continues to climb, but that growth comes with greater scrutiny around transparency and business outcomes. Case in point: A major beverage company is conducting an independent audit of its digital media ads — including CTV and online video — that ran across the World Cup. It is a move toward transparency and accountability that Blockboard, one of its vendors being audited, welcomes.

By Krystal Scanlon  •  July 28, 2026  • OpenAI may want to own parts of the ad tech stack, but vendors won’t be the collateral damage of it. Two job postings on OpenAI’s career’s page spell out how. A head of scaled ads solutions will design the reseller model from scratch, picking priority vendors and markets, running RFPs and contracting as well as managing partners against commercial and quality standards.

This article is part of a special research series on where CMOs are investing. More from the series → This is an excerpt from our Digiday+ Research report “The marketer’s 2026 guide to creator marketing, including Duolingo, Ulta and YouTube,” which analyzes the types of campaigns marketers are partnering with influencers on, their top success metrics for those campaigns and the challenges they face with influencer campaigns.

By Kimeko McCoy  •  July 28, 2026  • Subscribe: Apple Podcasts • Spotify The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) just dropped another industry acronym — as if the media biz needed another one — but this one may prove useful. Earlier this month, the IAB released its Redefining Media Types (RMT) Standard framework that aims to add clarity to the convoluted digital video space.

This Ad Tech Briefing covers the latest in ad tech and platforms for Digiday+ members and is distributed over email every Tuesday at 10 a.m. ET. More from the series → The recent rise of would-be adland challengers, such as OpenAI, and the expected hegemony of the social giant Meta have led to a comparative absence of the name “Google” from headlines in the media landscape as of late.

By Sara Jerde  •  July 27, 2026  • This story was originally published on sister site, Modern Retail. One of the best-known arts and crafts retailers in the U.S. has lifted the curtain on how its new Google Gemini-powered AI assistant has performed so far. Michaels formally announced “Ask Mike” — its first customer-facing AI shopping assistant — on July 21.

Last week, streamer Kai Cenat (who has tens of millions of followers across Instagram, Twitch, and YouTube) hosted the second-annual Streamer University, a five-day creator bootcamp at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas that was streamed live on Twitch and YouTube.