TVREV

Blake Richards (BR): Who am I here with today and what do you do? Tom Dunlap (TD): I'm Tom Dunlap. I'm the Chief Content Officer and founding partner of SuperBloom House. We are a creative and production company based out of Los Angeles and New York. We work with brands and advertising, do brand entertainment, social advertising campaigns, and I oversee all of our content creation, creative, and production. BR: What is Superbloom House?

Meta agreed to pay around $17 billion to a collection of 47 states and some U.S. territories this week as penance for what the attorneys-general of said states and territories claimed was its decision to allow minors to use its social media platforms despite purposely designing them in a way that made them addictive and thus harmful to said youth. The settlement further requires Meta to put into place a system that would restrict usage and late-night notifications for those under 18.

This week, Tatari’s Dana Delle wrote a great piece here on TVREV asking why ad buyer behaviors on YouTube fail to mimic the platform status as an audience behemoth. It’s a reasonable question, especially when you look at how much ground YouTube proper (not YouTube TV) has gained on actual television screens in recent years. Even as the social video platform leans into shorter-format viewing, it hasn’t stopped viewers from watching more from their living rooms.

A $3.25 million station deal announced last week offers a surprisingly useful illustration of the peculiar state of broadcast television regulation. Sinclair has agreed to acquire four stations from Howard Stirk Holdings that it already operates under a shared services agreement (SSA).

These are the same networks, the same brand-safe programming brands already trust, reaching a dramatically larger audience on YouTube than in the time slot advertisers are paying to be on TV. Why the Disconnect Persists Part of the disconnect is structural, and part is just habit. YouTube has historically lived in the "digital" line of the media plan, run by tools built for programmatic and Google buying, built to answer bidding and targeting questions.

The creator war between YouTube and the streamers — and the bill brands are footing YouTube just doubled the thresholds for its Partner Program: starting February 1, 2027, creators will need 8,000 watch hours a year or 20 million Shorts views in 90 days — double the previous bar. That same month, Netflix added the Stokes Twins to its roster of non-exclusive creator deals, following Ms. Rachel, Mark Rober, the Sidemen, Rhett & Link, and Nick DiGiovanni.

Tim Hanlon: How's it going? You are In the Vicinity. Welcome to the proceedings. My name is Tim Hanlon. I'm the founder and the CEO of the Vertere Group here in Chicago, where we consultatively advise and provide guidance to tons of companies in and around the media and technology spaces. Some of them large, some of them small, and as we say, some of them very much in between.

TVREV sat down with Wurl CEO Dave Bernath to drill into the particulars of his keynote from this year’s StreamTV Show. It was a wide-ranging discussion, touching on why FAST is so different than cable, why the TV OS matters so much (check out TVREV’s newest report for more on that) and why discovery continues to be such a problem for CTV in general and FAST in particular.

Walmart Boosts Full-Year Guidance Following 38% Ads Growth [Adweek] TL;DR: Walmart's global ad revenue grew 38% in Q2, with Walmart Connect up 43% in the U.S. excluding VIZIO, helping drive total revenue to $187.9 billion and adjusted EPS of $0.81, beating estimates.

That’s not their core competency, however. Shorts and vertical video are primarily where creators live. And as a result, media companies find themselves constantly playing road games to keep up with the attention and approach games that individual creators are already excelling at. Yet, there’s a shifting tide for these media companies (especially the largest ones) to just cut out the middleman and utilize the creators themselves. Amazon Prime Video didn’t just partner with MrBeast a few years ago.