1 septembrie 2026

Nielsen's cross-screen study with JioStar, conducted during the 2025 Indian Premier League, found audience overlap between linear television, connected TV and mobile stayed under 5%, while cross-screen campaigns still delivered incremental reach of 20 to 40%. With advanced digital targeting, that overlap fell to roughly 1%. The data lands as India's connected TV audience reaches 207 million viewers and advertisers increasingly ask the channel to justify itself against performance metrics such as cost per acquisition. Viewers are clearly watching connected TV. The harder question is how credit for the resulting sales gets split among CTV, search, social and mobile app campaigns. Frodoh CEO Russhabh Thakkar says advertisers should treat incremental reach and incremental outcomes as the real measure of a working media plan, and should watch for repeated exposure without payoff. Nielsen's Anil Goel says the industry needs a consistent cross-media framework connecting exposure, reach and frequency to business outcomes.

Nielsen applied seven simultaneous changes to the methodology behind its national Big Data Plus Panel television currency on August 31, 2026, covering co-viewing capture through wrist-worn wearables, a latency-adjusted DASH universe estimate, household demographic assignment, integrated weighting, Hispanic universe estimation, an ACR monitored tuning adjustment and householding for one big data provider. Nielsen called the update cautious and gave no guarantee that ratings would rise. The changes land after Nielsen's second-quarter Ad-Supported Gauge, published August 25, showed ad-supported viewing at 71.5 percent of total US television consumption in the April-June quarter, down from 72.8 percent in the first quarter and 74.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2025. Streaming took 48.2 percent of viewing, broadcast 26.6 percent and cable 25.2 percent. Because all seven changes take effect on the same date, buyers cannot isolate which one drives any shift in August delivery numbers.

Instagram will restrict the reach of creator profiles built around an AI-generated person unless the account carries the platform's new 'AI-generated profile' label. The tag replaces 'AI creator,' the label Instagram introduced in May, when the company said applying it had no effect on how the recommendations algorithm distributed a profile's content. Under the updated policy, an unlabeled AI persona profile will be treated as non-recommendable, cutting its reach and monetization. Instagram says the change addresses user complaints about discovering only after the fact that a seemingly human profile is AI-generated. Creators who use AI tools to produce content while presenting as themselves are exempt from the label requirement. The policy follows reporting from Wired, The New York Times and The Guardian, which each found AI-generated personas posing as human creators on Instagram, including accounts promoting a dating app and health supplements without disclosing their AI-generated nature.

The IAB and IAB Europe published a joint paper on November 3, 2025, defining incrementality as the additional business outcomes a campaign causes compared with what would have happened without it. The paper separates incrementality from attribution: attribution counts and distributes credit among touchpoints a customer saw, while incrementality tests whether removing a touchpoint would have removed the purchase. It sorts measurement methods into four tiers by causal strength, from experiment-based tests such as randomized control groups and geo experiments, rated strong though narrow in scope, down to hybrid proxies such as platform-reported incrementality, rated the weakest tier. The task force behind the grading included staff from Criteo, Meta, Instacart, Walmart, Uber and Google. Separately, IAB's State of Data 2026 report, published February 7, 2026, found up to 75% of buy-side decision-makers rate attribution, incrementality tests and mix models as underperforming.

Russians aged 12 to 24 spend just 1 hour 3 minutes a day watching TV, against 5 hours 39 minutes online, according to a new Mediascope study on media consumption by age. The pattern flips with age: the 55 to 69 group averages 5 hours 17 minutes of TV against 3 hours 28 minutes online, and Russians over 70 watch 6 hours 49 minutes of TV daily with 1 hour 30 minutes online. Series rank among the most popular genres, taking 23% of viewing time for the 4 to 17 group and 32% for the 55 to 69 group. Entertainment programs draw 16% to 23% of viewing time across age groups. Internet reach in the 55 to 69 group grew from 64% to 81% between 2022 and 2026, the fastest growth of any age segment measured. TikTok leads among viewers aged 12 to 24, and VKontakte leads among the 25 to 39 group.

RCS is linking its broadcast playout software to Triton Digital's programmatic ad-buying platform, opening over-the-air radio inventory to the same programmatic workflows advertisers use for streaming audio and podcasts. Station groups running RCS infrastructure gain access to digital ad budgets that previously bypassed traditional broadcast radio. Triton CEO John Rosso said the partnership gives broadcasters "a modern way to compete for the advertising dollars that have been flowing to digital media." RCS CEO Susan Larkin said the deal gives stations a direct route to the programmatic market on software they already operate. Triton frames the move as part of a broader plan to route every channel of audio advertising, streaming, podcast and broadcast, through one connected infrastructure.

Start's chief executive Ilya Alekseev says partner subscriptions became the main driver of Russian streaming growth in the first half of 2026, and the numbers back him up: Start's revenue rose 68% to 11.5 billion rubles in 2025 and its subscriber base nearly tripled to 9 million. Across the market, co-produced series shown on two or more platforms almost doubled year over year to eleven in the first half, plus nine more made jointly with TV channels. The number of series locked to a single platform fell from 17 to 13 over the same period. Kinopoisk, the market leader with roughly a third of revenue, increasingly resells partner catalogs inside its own app, while Wink and Kion keep investing in exclusive originals, with Wink's series budget up 12% in the first half. Total market revenue reached 99.5 billion rubles in the first half, up 31% year over year.

Three separate court cases have surfaced allegations that WPP executives ran an illegal rebate scheme for years through media buying arm GroupM, now rebranded WPP Media, according to Adweek. One case involves a whistleblower's wrongful termination lawsuit. A second centers on an alleged kickback arrangement. A third involves a conviction in China carrying a life sentence. Together the filings have revived a long-running industry argument over media rebates. Rebates can be lawful and are widely accepted in some jurisdictions. The Anti-Kickback Statute treats the practice as illegal when an agent keeps the money without the client's knowledge and consent. The three cases place that legal line at the center of WPP's mounting legal troubles.

Content generation gets most of the attention in AI marketing. Asana CMO Prachi Gore says the bigger payoff shows up in AI agents that reshape workflows, B2B buying and growth. Speaking on a podcast published by The Trade Desk, Gore describes AI-generated content as the visible layer of the AI shift in marketing. She points to agents restructuring internal processes and changing how business buyers research and purchase software as the more consequential change. Marketers who limit AI budgets to content tools risk missing where the larger transformation is happening, inside agent-driven workflows and B2B purchasing decisions. The distinction matters for teams sizing next year's AI marketing budgets.

Callaway pledged $1 million to organizations working to prevent violence against women after an ad for its new driver, produced with creator group Good Good, showed co-founder Garrett Clark shoving fellow creator Alexis Miestowski to the ground and telling her not to touch the club. Retailers pulled Good Good merchandise and the group withdrew as title sponsor of a PGA Tour event. Callaway CEO Chip Brewer said Good Good produced the ad and Callaway approved it, calling that approval a mistake. Good Good CEO Matt Kendrick countered that Callaway requested and approved the ad, then dropped the company in a coordinated media blitz, and said he is 'not opposed' to suing. Zappi, a market research firm, later ran the ad past 150 AI synthetic respondents and it scored the lowest possible rating, 1 out of 5, flagging the same warning signs human testers found.