Here are @WMediaResearch's Top 10 Trends in Advertising in 2026! 1. The Big Short: The Hidden Risks Lurking Beneath the Forecasts 2. There Will Be Blood: The Supply-Chain Shakeup 3. Honey, I Shrunk the Art Department: Gen-AI Taking Over 4. Advertising Wars: The Rise of AI Agents 5. Rules of Engagement: The Protocols Fueling the Agentic Era 6. No Country for Old Cookies: The New Identity Playbook 7. Measure for Measure: Can We Keep Up With Signal Loss? 8. The Verdict: The Post-Google Era Begins for the Open Web 9. The Day After Tomorrow: The Zero-Click Search Apocalypse 10. I, Agent: When Bots Buy - What Happens to Advertising? READ all 10 trends for FREE here: Everything Everywhere All at Once: The Advertising Revolution Of 2026 wmediaresearch.com/2025/12/0… Companies covered: @Adobe, @AdRoll, @Albertsons, @amazon, @AppLovin, @criteo, @Disney, @doubleverify, @epsilon, @Google, @humansecurity, @IABTechLab, @IndexExchange, @integralads, @Meta, @Microsoft, @MSAdvertising, @Novacap_HQ, @OpenX, @prebidorg, @PubMatic, @Rockerbox, @Sincera, @TheTradeDesk, @TikTok, @Yahoo.

Interesting.

Sixty thousand.

"In my best year with Star Trek, I made $11,000."

Pinterest just opened its ad inventory to Amazon, Google and Yahoo's DSPs, three days before earnings. On Monday, Pinterest made Programmatic Deals generally available across the Americas and Asia Pacific. Buyers can now access display and video inventory through Amazon DVA+, Google DV360 and Yahoo DSP, with Magnite as the primary SSP. PMPs and preferred deals are live; programmatic guaranteed is in testing. Ad Revenue Grows, But Revenue per Impression Stalls In Q2, Pinterest grew ad impressions 16%. Ad pricing grew just 1%. Revenue rose 18% to $1.2 billion, but Q3 guidance calls for slightly slower growth of 13% to 15%. ("Ad pricing" is Pinterest's blended average price per ad: ad revenue divided by impressions, across every buying model (CPC, CPM and others) and every region. ) With 640 million monthly users and over 80 billion searches a month, Pinterest has plenty of engagement. Its challenge is getting advertisers to pay more for it. The quickest way to attract buyers is to plug into the platforms they already use. Most trading desks live in DV360 and Amazon. This distribution deal lets Pinterest tap into that ready-made demand. The international opportunity In Q2, Pinterest generated $8.30 in quarterly ARPU in the US and Canada, versus $1.35 in Europe and $0.23 elsewhere. Programmatic offers a relatively inexpensive way to monetize international users without building a sales operation in every market. My bet is that international markets offer the greatest upside. Curiously, Europe is absent from Monday's launch, despite management discussing third-party demand testing there on its Q2 earnings call. Winners, losers and risks Magnite is an obvious winner. Pinterest inventory is also available through Magnite Orchestration, its infrastructure for buyer and seller agents. Amazon benefits too. A Moroccanoil campaign bought through Amazon Ads and Magnite reportedly delivered 15% incremental reach, just 1% audience overlap and 63% more new-to-brand buyers. Company-reported figures, so to be taken with a grain of salt, but directionally compelling ones for media planners nevertheless. The Trade Desk is conspicuously absent from the named DSP partners. But the additional distribution comes with a price: Once inventory becomes accessible through multiple DSPs, buyers can compare their price and performance against other media. PMPs and preferred deals give Pinterest some control over pricing and access, but buyers will still demand competitive economics. Pinterest's advantage is its unusually strong intent signals. People use it to plan purchases, often before choosing a brand. Preserving the value of those signals will be critical. One thing to keep in mind: almost three quarters of Pinterest users are female, the cohort of 18- to 34-year-olds being the biggest sub-group. What I'll watch on October 29 Pinterest reports Q3 earnings Thursday after the close. I'll be watching three things: whether ad pricing accelerates beyond low single digits, how much third-party demand contributes, and when Europe joins the programmatic rollout. @AmazonAds, @Google, @magnite, @Pinterest, @TheTradeDesk, @Yahoo

Never has my voting been that much fun, that fast, and so well-informed. I am using Grok to learn about the background of all candidates, especially the judges.

Walmart Connect Is Grading Its Own Homework @Walmart Connect has found a new way to answer retail media's toughest question: Did my ads work? It asks itself. Walmart's sales team is approaching brands directly ahead of the holidays, bypassing agencies to offer brand lift studies. Eligibility depends on spend, results can take nine weeks, and brands can't run the studies themselves. The Timing is the Strategy Q4 is when brands finalize budgets and CFOs demand proof that advertising works. Walmart is offering that proof. Why Bypass Agencies? Agencies are paid to be skeptical. They ask about holdouts, methodology, and whether shoppers would have bought the product anyway. Better to bypass that hurdle. Going direct also shifts control of the relationship. If Walmart becomes the authority on whether Walmart advertising works, agencies risk becoming order-takers. Grading Their Own Homework With Walmart's advertising business growing 38% last quarter, performance scrutiny was inevitable. How to manage that scrutiny? The answer: Better to shape the test yourself than failing someone else's. The only fly in the ointment: If every retail network grades its own homework, retail media measurement will resemble reviews on hotel websites: glowing, selective, and hardly independent. Credit Where Credit is Due Don't get me wrong: Walmart deserves credit for offering lift studies. Even if there is potential for bias, a brand lift study is better than none. However, things could be so much better. The solution: Third-party access to clean rooms, advertiser-controlled holdouts, and transparent methodologies. Walmart has the scale to establish that standard. It could open its data to independent incrementality testing and dare @AmazonAds to follow. Now that would be a competitive advantage. Until then, take the Walmart study. Read it closely, and remember who wrote it. digiday.com/marketing/walmar…

Containers could fundamentally change how programmatic advertising works - and who makes money from it. The implications of containerization could be profound. Lower infrastructure costs, faster auctions, better inventory visibility, greater control over publisher data, and a reshuffling of the competitive balance between DSPs, SSPs, and other intermediaries. But who benefits, who loses, and how much of the promise is real? READ more in this research note: wmediaresearch.com/downloads… @awscloud, @ChaliceCustom, @googlecloud, @IABTechLab, @IndexExchange, @OpenX, @TheTradeDesk, @WMediaResearch, @zillow.

Hm. I can see how LLMs work. But how do agents know to do just about anything, and much of it right (impressive given how early in the game we are).

Meta Q3 Earnings: Shocking Penalty, Ads Biz Great, the Street Worried About AI Spending On Wednesday morning a New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion for deceiving users about their data. By that afternoon, Meta had reported $63 billion in ad revenue for the quarter. When you have to pay more than a third of your revenue in penalties, you may want to take a long hard look at yourself in the mirror. The Fine is About Five Weeks Worth of Ads Let's do the math. $63 billion a quarter works out to more than $5 billion a week. The largest penalty ever imposed on Meta comes to roughly five weeks of advertising. The case goes back to Cambridge Analytica. A jury found 44 million violations of New Mexico consumer protection law, which in theory allowed a up to up to $219 billion penalty. The state asked for $35 to 40 billion, and Meta offered about $3.4 billion - the judge landed on $25 billion. Only in Big Tech does a $25 billion penalty count as a compromise. Of course, Meta will appeal, so the final number may be smaller. The Machine is Running Hotter Than Ever Now look at the other half of Wednesday, Meta’s earnings report. Ad revenue rose 26%. Impressions grew 10%, and the average price per ad jumped 14%. Advertisers keep paying more for the same scroll because Meta's AI targeting keeps getting better. Partnership ads with creators nearly doubled to a $15 billion run rate. About 10 million advertisers are letting Meta's AI generate their creative, a boon for SMB advertisers, same as on Amazon Ads. Wall Street Worried About AI Spending The stock fell almost 8% at Thursday's open. The worry is AI spending. Quarterly capex hit $35 billion, free cash flow went negative, and Meta created a new non-voting share class that investors read as a way to raise money for AI infrastructure. Well, at least it is money spent on something that is useful, as opposed to the DOA money sink-hole that was Meta Quest. (Nobody wanted Second Life. Why would one think anyone wanted Third Life?) Now add an almost $10 billion charge for the teen-harm settlement just in Q3 (the total settlement amount is up to $18.6 billion), and one can see why people start wondering about run-away expenses. What This Means for Advertisers If you buy on Meta, nothing changes this week. The auction works, the AI works, the prices go up. But consider your concentration risk. Meta's business rests on users trusting it with their data, and courts keep finding that trust was misplaced. One of these days a ruling may touch ad targeting itself, and then it'll do more than just move the stock. Until then, Meta will keep doing what it does: paying for both its future and its past at the same time.

Great catching up with @AdRoll's Hans Fischman, VP of Product and Partnerships. Hans has overseen a busy year for Adroll. They completely transformed their platform, rearchitected their data structures, added agentic tools which clients can access via an MCP server and closed a partnership with @OpenAI for ads on ChatGPT. More cool stuff is in the pipeline short-term.

Wow.

Netflix is in Trouble, But Getting Serious About Performance Ads Netflix just cut its 2026 advertising forecast by $300 million. It seems like building an ad business is harder than producing content. Q3 revenue rose 12% to $12.9 billion, earnings beat expectations, and operating margins reached 35%. Yet Netflix lowered its advertising forecast from $3 billion to $2.7 billion, blaming delayed ad products and partner integrations. Ad revenue is still growing over 80% this year, but Wall Street expected more. The advertising plumbing problem Netflix unveiled tools it should have launched earlier: a Netflix Pixel, an enhanced Conversion API tracking 20+ conversion events, improved attribution, and audience targeting through The Trade Desk. For advertisers, that's welcome news. Netflix is finally getting serious about performance advertising, moving beyond premium reach toward measurable business outcomes. But buyers should demand proof of incremental sales, not just prettier dashboards and expensive CPMs. The bigger problem: eyeballs Netflix has another headache. Viewing hours per member reportedly declined roughly 26% since 2023. Meanwhile, YouTube commands around 14% of U.S. TV viewing, versus Netflix's roughly 8%. Part of Netflix's problem is self-inflicted: too many underwhelming originals, too few must-watch hits. The disappointing content slate appears to have contributed to declining engagement and a management shake-up, including the departure of content chief Bela Bajaria and significant layoffs. Apparently, even Netflix can't algorithm its way out of bad programming. Competitors smell opportunity Formidable challenges are arrayed against Netflix. YouTube wins on engagement, scale, and established AdTech. Amazon brings shopping data and purchase attribution. Disney and Paramount/WBD compete for premium video budgets. Yet, Netflix still has tremendous brand appeal. But premium content alone won't guarantee premium advertising growth. Wall Street isn't laughing Shares fell roughly 5% following earnings, touching a two-year low. With the stock already down over 28% this year, investors are questioning Netflix's growth trajectory. Netflix remains an extraordinary entertainment business. But great shows attract audiences; great AdTech attracts budgets. Netflix needs both, and YouTube isn't waiting. @amazon, @Disney, @netflix, @ParamountPics, @TheTradeDesk, @wbd, @YouTube

Big things are happening on the supply side. Learn more with @OpenX's Supply-Side Intelligence Trend Report, conducted by my W Media Research.

Remember when streaming took off we got some of the best TV in decades? Not anymore.

.@FTC clears @PublicisGroupe $2.2B LiveRamp deal. The approval comes with conditions. For five years LiveRamp has to give rivals equal access, Epsilon is walled off from its data, and an auditor checks compliance. Publicis expects to close by year-end. ftc.gov/news-events/news/pre…

Late Friday, OpenAI announced bigger ChatGPT ad cards, full-width mobile images, upcoming multi-image ads, better conversion dashboards, weekly performance summaries and new measurement partners, including Northbeam, Rockerbox and several mobile measurement partners (MMP). Every ad channel goes through puberty. First, it's a shiny experiment funded from marketing's petty cash drawer. Then finance asks what it actually delivers. Third-party measurement is a new platform's ticket out of the play pen. Nobody likes to commit serious money to a platform that grades its own homework. Independent conversion data will help turn ChatGPT Ads from an interesting novelty into a routine budget line item - eventually. Bigger visuals follow the Meta playbook: more pixels per impression, using existing creative. OpenAI is testing what is both effective and tolerated by users. If you're buying ChatGPT Ads, connect independent measurement and run a holdout. @AirbridgeHQ, @doubleverify, @incrmntal, @kochavaofficial, @Meta, @northbeam, @OpenAI, @Rockerbox, @TenjinMMP