August 16, 2026

AppsFlyer now tracks installs, in-app purchases and subscriptions generated by ChatGPT ad placements, following a new integration with OpenAI. Adweek reported the partnership on August 4, 2026. More than 40 brands are testing the setup, including Grubhub, whose install-to-order funnel makes it a clear fit for measuring post-install revenue events. The integration plugs ChatGPT into AppsFlyer's existing measurement environment, so performance marketing teams can compare cost-per-install and conversion rates from ChatGPT ads alongside data from other mobile channels without building separate reporting pipelines. Attribution data has been the missing piece for brands weighing whether to shift budget toward ChatGPT as an advertising channel. The next signal to watch is whether other major mobile measurement partners follow AppsFlyer with similar integrations, a pattern that typically marks a platform's move from experiment to established media channel.

Media Consulting Group (MCG) has partnered with TV agency Marketing Architects to combine upstream CTV and OTT supply optimization with AI-driven media buying. MCG structures premium streaming inventory across the U.S. and Canada ahead of the bid, organizing it around each buyer's objectives in near real time. Marketing Architects then activates that supply through Annika, its proprietary AI system that buys CTV and OTT media and applies full-funnel measurement to campaign results. Daniel Elad, Co-Founder and CRO at MCG, said, 'When our supply intelligence meets Marketing Architects' buying intelligence, the advertiser wins.' Nikki Erkkila, VP Media Partnerships at Marketing Architects, credits MCG's supply-side view with adding a layer of trust that shows up directly in client results. The partnership links supply-side curation to a buy-side AI system built to learn efficiency gains with every campaign it runs for advertisers.

Gartner forecasts that AI agents will intermediate $15tn in B2B purchases by 2028, handling supplier identification through order execution without a human buyer visiting a vendor's website. Michael McGoldrick, writing in The Drum, argues that B2B marketing teams have spent a decade blending different types of buyer signals, website engagement, review site activity, bidstream intent, publisher data, into single dashboards and scores. Human reps currently discount weak signals using judgment, quietly deprioritizing an account that looks unusually active based on inferred data. AI agents optimize against whatever inputs they receive and treat inferred behavior and observed behavior as equally actionable. McGoldrick writes that this replicates a flawed assumption across every account an agent touches, without the manual checkpoints that once caught the worst errors. He argues the competitive advantage is shifting toward organizations that build a deliberate hierarchy of buyer intelligence, ranking signals by how directly they were observed.

Global's podcast hosting platform Captivate is now fully compliant with version 2.2 of the IAB Tech Lab's Podcast Measurement Guidelines, Global Studios commercial director Sarah Ray said. Ray joined Bauer Media digital revenue operations director Nathaniel Francis and WPP Media associate director Adam Palfrey to discuss why the standard is gaining traction across podcast publishers and agencies. Palfrey said measurement progress, attribution especially, has moved real client budget into the channel, even as providers have competed to define their own delivery metrics. The IAB guidelines set a shared definition for a valid download, apply a consistent threshold, and strip out invalid traffic through bot and pre-load filtering plus ongoing auditing. Francis said the previous lack of consistent frameworks made podcasts hard to compare across media owners. Ray said standardized metrics now give advertisers a like-for-like view of inventory, reach and delivery when comparing publishers.

Koa has quietly optimized bids and paced budgets inside The Trade Desk's platform for years, processing signals across tens of millions of impressions every second. The company has now opened a closed beta that puts a conversational interface on top of that engine, letting advertisers ask questions instead of pulling reports across screens. Users can request a full campaign build from an uploaded media plan, ask which campaigns are under-pacing this week, find which creatives drive the most conversions, or ask why an ad group isn't spending money. Koa operates within a user's existing permissions and explains its reasoning before any change goes live, so approval stays with the marketer. An audience-building agent that converts plain-language descriptions into targeting segments, including commerce data, is coming soon. The Trade Desk plans to extend Koa beyond its own platform through the Open Agentic Kit, working first with a small group of partners.

Kelsey White, vice president of client services at GNW Consulting, argues that artificial intelligence makes existing analytics weaknesses harder to ignore. Reporting problems build up gradually, she writes, as platforms change, tracking definitions shift and reports get rebuilt to answer one-off questions, and analysts typically find workarounds long before anyone else notices the inconsistencies. AI has no way to make those same judgment calls, so it can produce polished, confident-sounding outputs from inconsistent underlying data. White points to a recent report showing 73% of B2B organizations track AI referral traffic while only 34% say they highly trust the metrics behind it. She raises a separate concern about revenue attribution models, whose assumptions are not always visible to the people reading the reports, and warns that AI's instant, authoritative-sounding answers can make those assumptions even harder to spot. White writes that automation helps most when measurement is disciplined and data ownership is clear.

Digital Budget's July data shows VK's ecosystem apps shed 1.35 million monthly active users. VKontakte's MAU fell 1.1% to 51.8 million, VK Music dropped 8% to 3.48 million, Mail fell 6% to 20.7 million, and VK Messenger declined 3% to 9.7 million. VK Play recorded the steepest drop, losing 27% of its MAU to fall to 14,600 users. Max's growth slowed to 0.2%, reaching 45.75 million users. The decline followed Apple's removal of VK apps from the App Store in late June, their disappearance from Google Play on July 16, and EU sanctions imposed on VK's parent structure and Max's developer on July 13. VK disputes that the removals caused the audience drop, pointing to Mediascope data showing VKontakte's app audience up 1% to 75.94 million and Max up 1% to 81.39 million.

Wildberries now shows advertisers expected reach, impressions and clicks for the Banner, Contextual Banner and Brand Shelf campaign formats before a single ruble gets spent. The three forecast figures appear in the top right corner of the setup screen as soon as geo, audience, bid, budget and format are defined, and they update in real time as those settings change. The calculation combines the campaign's own parameters with the level of competition in the chosen category or search queries, so denser competition for placements lowers the projected reach at the same bid. Because competition shifts week to week, the same settings can produce a different forecast later even without any change on the advertiser's side. Wildberries treats the number as a planning reference, valid at the moment of setup. Competitors raising bids, adding budget or pausing campaigns can move actual results away from the original estimate after launch.

YouTube captured 13.4% of total TV and streaming viewing in Nielsen's latest Media Distributor Index, a full point higher than a year earlier. Walt Disney slipped to 10.3% from 10.7%, while NBCUniversal and Versant Media held a combined 8.2% share, split 5.9% and 2.3%. Paramount Skydance dropped a full point to 7.9%, Netflix climbed to 7.8% from 7.5%, and Fox Corp reached 6.9%. Nielsen's forward look shows Fox's proposed acquisition of Roku would create a company with a 9.9% share, enough for third place behind Disney and up from the 9.2% the two would have posted a year ago. Separately, Nielsen's Gauge report for April 2026 put streaming at 47.6% of total TV usage versus 21.6% for cable, while broadcast fell below 20% for the first time, to 19.9%.

More than 80% of marketers say they see positive ROI from identity resolution efforts, according to new research from Acxiom conducted with eMarketer. Ninety percent of marketers already use identifiers to recognize customers across channels, and 61% plan to increase identity investment over the next 24 months. Execution still trails the ambition. Just 23% describe their systems as fully interoperable, 55% call their first-party data siloed or only partially connected, and 25% lack a formal identity strategy. Only half have built a private identity graph, and just 6% significantly increased first-party data spending since Google's partial reversal on cookie deprecation, though 52% held their investment steady. Keith Camoosa, chief product and technology innovation officer at Acxiom, argues brands need a connected first-party data foundation, interoperable multi-signal identity resolution, and a centralized identity strategy with clear ownership to close the gap.