August 12, 2026

MediaHills, part of the Mediascope group, is now feeding audience analytics into UMG.team's ad ecosystem for Smart TV campaigns booked through uSSP, uDSP and uAdEx. The measurement relies on pixel-tracked impressions in the ad creative, verified through MediaHills' own technology and partner networks of telecom operators. Buyers can plan placements by socio-demographic audience segments and read results in impressions, reach and frequency, the metrics standard in digital campaigns. Protected Media's anti-fraud system already screens UMG's Smart TV traffic for technical validity. The MediaHills report comes standard with all packaged Smart TV placements on UMG's network, and licensees of the UMG ecosystem can request it on demand. UMG.Team's Vladilen Sitnikov said the goal was data comparable to familiar Mediascope metrics, to plan Smart TV placements in the same logic as classic TV. No additional fee applies: the service is included in the placement price.

Cossa published an analysis showing that Yandex Промостраницы and UrbanAds generate up to 45 percent of the assisted conversions behind sales that Yandex Direct closes, an effect last-click scoring misses entirely. A typical path runs through a Промостраницы article, a UrbanAds banner inside Yandex Go or Eda, then a purchase closed via Yandex Direct search or on Wildberries and Ozon. Промостраницы lower first-touch cost 20 to 30 percent and push up to 35 percent of readers to a site or marketplace. UrbanAds banners lift branded search volume 15 to 25 percent over the following 7 to 14 days after a single impression. Yandex Direct conversion climbs 1.5 to 2 times, with CPA down 30 to 35 percent, once it captures an already warmed audience. Removing that upper layer drops branded search volume 30 to 40 percent within three to four weeks.

Tim Vanderhook, CEO of Viant, told Beet.TV at Cannes Lions that unwatched CTV ads amount to billing without an audience: 'If an impression gets served in a room where nobody is, it's not an impression, it's an invoice.' Viant's TVision panel technology tracks presence, co-viewing and eye-tracking attention at the pod and slot level, and feeds that data into Viant's demand-side platform to set what the company calls an attention-adjusted CPM. Vanderhook gave an example: Peacock content running at 80% attention justifies a $35 CPM, while a fast channel at 40% attention gets normalized to a lower rate. Viant's Iris TV acquisition adds show-level content classification for bidding decisions. The company also launched a publisher-facing portal that shows sellers their household ID rates, Iris data and, soon, TVision attention scores inside Viant's DSP.

Meta's Ads Manager gained a new customer list type: exclusion-only custom audiences, which work only to remove people from an ad audience. A regular custom audience can add and remove people from targeting, but an exclusion-only audience works in one direction, and once created it cannot be converted into a regular one. Meta says the tool is meant for advertisers who want to avoid serving ads to specific groups, including people who have opted out of their services or are already self-excluded, people covered by a legal or regulatory obligation not to be targeted, and audiences advertisers want a standing guardrail against accidentally including. Meta frames the update as a way to help marketers refine ad-targeting practices and reduce wasted ad spend.

Similarweb tracked generative AI platforms drawing an average of 9.5 billion monthly web visits between June 2025 and May 2026, up 70% year on year. Unique visitors reached 655 million, a 57% rise, while mobile app downloads climbed 58% to 4.4 billion. ChatGPT keeps the largest share of web chat traffic, though Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and DeepSeek are all gaining ground. Brands mentioned in AI-generated answers get visited two to four times more often than unmentioned competitors, and the sources AI cites shift by category: e-commerce in beauty, reviews and user content in travel, specialized publishers in finance. Advertising inside ChatGPT is spreading across major markets, with almost two-thirds of ad impressions appearing after a user's second prompt. Click-through rate sits near 0.5%, and 65% of sessions continue after an ad appears.

Avito Reklama now offers keyword targeting for advertisers on its platform. The feature is meant to help advertisers work with real user intent on Avito, the platform's team said, and runs on a machine learning model that processes 73 million search queries every day. Advertisers can combine the resulting keyword-based audience with other segments, setting intersections with look-alike models, uploaded CRM databases and additional targeting options. The tool is configured through the "Audiences" section of Avito's advertiser interface. Building an audience from actual search queries gives media buyers a direct way to reach people already showing intent on the platform.

Research from The Trade Desk shows the modern travel booking journey now stretches beyond 64 days, spanning connected TV, audio, mobile and AI touchpoints before a purchase happens. Kelly Covato, the company's general manager of business development for travel, described the shift to Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, saying sophisticated travel brands now build strategies around a continuous loop of inspiration, research, price comparisons and booking. The Trade Desk positions its UID2 identity solution to recognize the same traveler across channels and keep messaging relevant throughout that loop. Covato also cited Expedia Ads research showing travelers spend more than $500 between booking a trip and taking it, on items like clothing, luggage and credit cards, a signal that travel media networks from United, Marriott, Expedia and Booking are now selling to advertisers outside the travel category.

Adindex has confirmed the lineup for a panel titled "Marketing effectiveness: how to prove business the value of investment in an era of total savings" at its TV conference. The session brings together five speakers: moderator Andrei Alekseev, marketing and business development director at ON Media; Anton Klimenko, marketing director at HONGQI Russia; Oksana Voloshchuk, commercial director of non-financial services at T-Reklama; Evgenia Davydova, co-founder and chief operating officer of ARDA; and Vyacheslav Masenkov, development director at OMI (Online Market Intelligence). The panel will address how marketers can measure real returns from media partners and defend marketing budgets to business leadership as traditional metrics lose relevance amid tightened spending.

YouTube will require new creators to log 8,000 watch hours in the past year or 20 million Shorts views in the past 90 days to join the Partner Program, effective February 1, 2027. The new bar doubles the previous threshold of 4,000 watch hours or 10 million Shorts views in 90 days. YouTube said creators already enrolled in the Partner Program keep their current status. Channels that fall below the 10 million Shorts views mark stay in the Partner Program and earn only from long-form videos until their Shorts views recover. YouTube attributed the update to platform growth, citing more than 200 billion daily Shorts views and more than 1 billion daily hours of TV viewing. The company also said Premium Lite, its ad-light subscription with offline downloads, will expand to every country where it is currently available.

Advertisers committed nearly $33.8 billion to this year's TV upfronts, according to consulting firm Media Dynamics, with streaming budgets up 30% year over year. Broadcast and cable commitments declined, while the streaming increase pushed the overall market up 9.1%. Streaming CPMs fell 4.9%, a steeper drop than the 4.2% decline in broadcast CPMs, a sign that streamers gave up more pricing power to capture the extra spend. Live sports became the main way media companies held prices up: Disney, Fox, Amazon and Netflix all pointed to sports coverage for double-digit gains in commitments, with Netflix citing the 2027 Women's FIFA World Cup as a key driver for next year. Warner Bros. Discovery, which missed a major sports season this year, reported sharp linear losses last quarter.