August 27, 2026

YouTube began rolling out shoppable connected TV ads on Thursday, letting viewers browse and buy products directly from ads playing through Google's Smart TV app. The format runs through Display and Video 360 and pulls images and pricing from an advertiser's Google Merchant Center feed, turning them into a clickable carousel with QR codes that link to each product page. Google Performance Max and Demand Gen campaigns both support the new ad type. Google also launched Attributed Branded Searches, a Demand Gen metric that tracks branded search volume on Google and YouTube tied to a campaign, plus Travel Feeds, which build video ads from a brand's Hotel Center data. LG Electronics used Demand Gen to post a 24% higher conversion rate than its paid social campaigns, at a 91% lower cost per acquisition. YouTube CEO Neal Mohan said Shorts now averages 200 billion daily views.

Taya Christianson, an OpenAI spokesperson, confirmed to Adweek that the company is testing new exclusion controls for ChatGPT ads with a small group of advertisers. The feature would let advertisers flag contexts they do not want their ads to appear next to, a capability many buyers have been asking for. OpenAI declined to give a timeline and says the product remains in development. Four ad-buying executives and one AI visibility platform told Adweek that current controls on ChatGPT ads are limited. Buyers struggle to describe target audiences to the system, have few options for choosing where ads run, and get limited visibility into where those ads actually appeared. Exclusion targeting would give advertisers a mechanism to steer their ads away from contexts they consider unsuitable.

Broadpeak has launched Click2Cart, a feature that lets connected TV viewers add a product to their online shopping cart with one click of the remote during a streaming advertisement. The France-based vendor built the tool as the next stage of its Click2 interactive advertising platform, moving past its earlier click-to-notification format. Click2Cart works across pre-roll, mid-roll and non-linear formats such as L-Banner, and it connects directly with third-party retail platforms so viewers complete the purchase through the retailer's own cart. Broadpeak pairs it with its Spot2Spot ad-replacement and BannersIn2 nonlinear insertion tools, aiming to open new inventory and revenue across the 150-plus telecom operators it works with worldwide. CEO Jacques Le Mancq said the launch gives streaming companies and broadcasters the tools to compete for performance advertising on a level playing field. Broadpeak will demo Click2Cart publicly for the first time at IBC2026 in Amsterdam, September 11-14.

Yandex Direct has begun beta testing 'Discount Management,' a tool that uses a machine learning model to decide which shoppers see a discount and how large it is within Search ads. The model analyzes anonymized buying behavior to calculate a personalized discount before a user clicks through to the retailer's site, so the reduced price appears directly in the search results. Retailers set the product list, total discount budget and maximum discount size, and the algorithm allocates the budget across shoppers, mixing an open discount available to any buyer with the kind of personalized offer usually reserved for repeat customers. The tool is free during the closed beta and available to a limited group of companies for now. Payment on discounted purchases runs through Yandex Pay with any bank card. Yandex plans to extend the discounts beyond Search ads into organic listings and Alice conversations later.

People Inc.'s core web traffic fell 22% year over year in the second quarter of 2026, including a 40% drop in Google search traffic, while revenue not tied to page sessions grew 16%, chief financial officer Tim Quinn said on the company's earnings call. That non-session revenue, which spans social and native ad campaigns, events, sponsorships, email, the D/Cipher ad targeting tool and content licensing, rose from 39% of People Inc.'s total digital revenue in Q2 2025 to 43% in Q2 2026. Session-based revenue slipped from 61% to 57% of the total and stayed flat year over year as ad revenue held steady. Publishing executives at People Inc., Forbes, Raptive and Future told Digiday that AI crawlers and declining search traffic are pushing publishers toward stronger brands and revenue sources beyond page views, even as AI content licensing deals remain ad hoc and have not scaled fast enough to offset losses in impression-based ad revenue for some publishers.

Digitas has assigned YouTube Shorts ad buying to its programmatic team, ending an internal debate over whether the short-form video format belongs to social, search or video units, Leah Askew, the agency's svp and head of precision media for North America, told Digiday. Wpromote's head of programmatic and video, Skyler McGill, and Tinuiti's senior director of TV, audio and display, Brian Binder, described similar splits at their agencies, where paid search, programmatic and social teams all touch YouTube spending. Askew said Digitas' investment team now works with its social unit on strategy and creative for Shorts, calling the lines between the teams "blurred." Tinuiti's Binder called the pattern of applying social tactics to Shorts a "lift-and-shift" strategy that raises questions about how it fits with agencies' broader YouTube, search and streaming plans.

Proximic by Comscore has integrated transcript-level content intelligence across five major podcast platforms: Spotify, SiriusXM, Triton Digital, Acast and Libsyn. The technology analyzes full episode transcripts to surface episode-level context beyond broad show or genre labels, translating results into IAB content categories enriched with Predictive Audiences and brand safety and suitability classifications. Buyers can activate these signals as pre-bid segments programmatically, using the same targeting methodology already applied to display, video and CTV. Spotify's global head of automation sales, Anne Bouttier, told AdExchanger the added flexibility helps audio play a larger role in the media mix. Comscore campaign measurement data shows audio inventory contributes about 10% of incremental, exclusive digital reach on average. The integrations give buyers one consistent framework for evaluating podcast inventory at the episode level across publisher relationships.

LTK this week rolled out an AI-powered offering that structures campaigns, identifies creators and recommends next steps, joining a wave of platforms and holding companies automating influencer marketing. The commerce platform built the tool on 15 years of data and more than 100 billion commerce signals, according to co-founder Amber Venz Box. Agency executives describe an efficiency gain: the dashboards let brands manage many creators inside one system, reducing the need to negotiate deals with each influencer separately. Unilever works with roughly 300,000 creators, a scale where such tools can matter. Reach Agency CEO Gabe Gordon warned that over-reliance on automation risks producing content resembling AI slop, since creator partnerships range from sponsored posts to product collaborations, live experiences and spokesperson roles, none as standardized as programmatic ad inventory. Collectively's Natalie Silverstein said creator marketing "has always been some combination of art and science."

OpenAI, Amazon Ads, TikTok and Roku have all hired senior product and sales executives from Meta as they build out advertising platforms. Ten percent of OpenAI employees list Meta somewhere in their LinkedIn experience, according to AdExchanger, including ad solutions head David Dugan and monetization VP Benji Shomair, who each spent about a dozen years at Facebook. Amazon Ads brought in former Meta VP Kelly MacLean to lead its DSP product and engineering; she says her goal is to keep simplifying the platform. TikTok counts roughly 700 ex-Meta employees on staff, including VP of product David Kaufman and former sales lead Blake Chandlee. Roku named Patrick Harris, who spent nearly a dozen years at Meta, as its SVP of advertising and partnerships this spring. Meta's market cap has grown to more than $1 trillion from a $500 million Series B valuation.

NBCUniversal and YouTube signed a multiyear global distribution deal that folds Peacock's ad-supported tier into YouTube Premium subscriptions at no additional cost, starting in 2027. Amy Geary, EVP of platform distribution and partnerships at NBCUniversal, said the tie-up aims to reach younger audiences who already spend time on YouTube and to grow Peacock subscriptions and watch time. NBCU is also preparing to spin off from Comcast into its own publicly traded entertainment company. Geary described a parallel strategy built around what she calls "immediacy": live sports and appointment-style entertainment that viewers feel they must watch as it happens. NBCU brought MLB back to NBC and Peacock this year and added more NBA games, giving the network a marquee sports slot most Sundays. NBCU also uses FAST channels to extend the reach of its existing library and measures distribution deals primarily by incremental reach and frequency.