June 12th-June 18th // Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes
In This Edition!
The quick brown Fox jumps over the lazy dog
Ad companies are letting agents in instead of sending their agents out
Check out the latest AI Edge Podcast episode with Chris Kelly, Founder & CEO of the brand outcomes measurement platform Upwave!
We talk about Siri’s new (old?) AI capabilities, all of the AI IPOs, AI’s impact on the marketing funnel, and much more!
Top Headlines🔥
Fox announces TV industry's 'first end-to-end agentic ad platform🔒
Source: Adweek
June 17th, 2026
Summary: Fox Advertising built a network of AI selling agents that can plan, buy, and activate ads across linear and streaming TV, letting agencies' buying agents securely talk directly to Fox's selling agents. Fox tested the system with WPP and Horizon Media for audience targeting, with Comcast's Universal Ads on digital buys, and with Simulmedia on linear buys. The news comes a few days after Fox announced it's buying Roku for roughly $22B.
Opinion: While AI is drastically changing how ad creative is built and how campaigns are planned and measured, AI has yet to make a major dent in how ad campaigns are bought and sold outside of the walled gardens. The value proposition for AI in media activation is clear—media buying and optimization on the open web can be arduous and tech-intensive, and AI, in theory, is a great solution. But in reality, applying AI to media activation is tricky because of the commercial and technical considerations at play across numerous companies (e.g. complicated programmatic transactions). This kind of agent-to-agent experimentation is important, but don’t mistake it for mass adoption. A lot of work still needs to be done.
New Products & Features 🚀
Yahoo DSP is launching an ‘agent network’🔒
What It Does: Yahoo is putting in the work, too. This network connects Yahoo's DSP to AI-powered tools from 23 ad tech partners — including DoubleVerify, IAS, LiveRamp, and Kochava — covering audience targeting, campaign activation, creative, and measurement workflows through open APIs and MCP integrations.
Quick Take: Yahoo positioning itself as the “bring your agents to our platform” company is smart given how its competition (Google, The Trade Desk, Amazon) is still trying to lock buyers into their platforms.
What It Does: LiveRamp too! The LiveRamp Agent Builders (“LAB”) program lets companies plug purpose-built agents directly into LiveRamp's platform via APIs and MCP servers—so marketers can access agents for audience building, measurement, data transformation, and media activation without leaving the LiveRamp environment.
Quick Take: LAB could become an operating system of sorts for agentic marketing data work. If LAB scales, LiveRamp becomes a place where data, identity, and execution converge in the AI era, which would be a dream scenario for LiveRamp’s new overlord Publicis.
What It Does: Adobe-owned Semrush's AI search intelligence (nearly 300M real-world AI prompts) combines with Adobe's content optimization tools to help marketers track and improve their brand presence across AI surfaces like ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Copilot, and Perplexity—and automatically deploy content fixes from a single workflow.
Quick Take: Traffic to U.S. retail sites from AI platforms surged 1,324% between October 2024 and May 2026—and most brands have no idea how they're showing up (or not) in AI answers. Enter GEO (Generative Engine Optimization). Adobe’s positioned well to be a major player in this space.
What It Does: Pinterest is launching four AI products ahead of Cannes Lions. Business Assistant is an AI assistant in Ads Manager that surfaces trends and top Pins for advertisers. Pinterest MCP connects the platform's campaign and intent data directly into agency AI tools, with partners like Dentsu and Omnicom's Jump450 testing it now. A new Performance+ creative model picks the best ad variant for each ad impression, lifting click volume 7.5% in testing. Ask Pinterest is a new app for multi-step shopping tasks like planning a dinner party or furnishing a room.
Quick Take: Pinterest MCP is smart: It puts Pinterest's valuable user data inside the AI tools agencies already use, which helps Pinterest show up favorably as agencies plan, activate, and measure media.
What It Does: Nexxen now lets outside AI tools, including Claude, connect straight into its ad buying and optimization system. An agency's AI assistant can talk to Nexxen's system directly instead of a person clicking through Nexxen's dashboard. At one agency, an AI agent🔒 turned an RFP into a campaign plan, connected to Nexxen to pull in live performance data, and adjusted the buy in-flight. Nexxen isn't charging for it yet.
Quick Take: Big buyers (like PMG) used to skip smaller platforms like Nexxen because campaign management in yet another platform was time-consuming. Remove the operational burden, and smaller platforms can compete on more important differentiators, like inventory quality, unique access, data, and more.
What It Does: DoubleVerify has launched DV Neura, an AI system that powers two new agents inside its measurement platform. The Insight Agent analyzes campaign quality and performance data and answers questions about it in plain language, and it already works through Claude, with Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot support coming. The Activation Agent goes a step further and can make approved changes to a campaign on its own, within boundaries that the advertiser sets.
Quick Take: DoubleVerify, Nexxen, and Pinterest are all making the same bet within days of each other: connect to Claude and other AI tools through MCP rather than build their own proprietary AI tools. The Trade Desk🔒 and other companies have also done this in recent months. It’s becoming the default move for ad tech platforms.
What It Does: Databricks is entering marketing tech with CustomerLake, a customer data platform (CDP) run by AI agents that continuously analyze customer behavior and make decisions. Profile Agents pull together a customer's data into one profile, and Campaign Agents build audiences, recommend the next marketing action to take, and launch marketing campaigns on their own. CustomerLake connects to tools like Adobe, Meta, The Trade Desk, and LiveRamp and is now in private preview. CDP HighTouch also announced its pivot into being an agentic CDP.
Quick Take: This puts Databricks in competition with CDPs like Adobe, Salesforce, and Segment, but Databricks is coming at it from the data warehouse side instead of the marketing side. Its pitch to enterprises that already store their data in Databricks: Why pay for a separate CDP when your data's already sitting in our platform?
AI Use Case of The Week💡
How AMC is using AI as a "creative sparring partner," to move from mass appeal to specific fandoms
The Setup: AMC Networks built its content strategy around deep, passionate fandoms instead of chasing mass appeal, with niche streaming brands like Shudder for horror fans and Acorn TV for international mysteries. To find and connect with those fans, the marketing team turned to AI to find opportunities and expose gaps in the marketing strategy.
The AI Solution: AMC used AI to dig into audience data to flag who its marketing strategy might be leaving out. For "Dark Winds," a psychological thriller about Navajo tribal police, the original campaign leaned heavily male, built on the assumption that the show's subject matter would mostly appeal to men. The AI model pushed back, identifying a sizable group of women the strategy had left out. AMC responded by building a second creative track aimed at that audience, with different character dynamics and emotional stakes, and ran it alongside the original campaign.
The Results:
• Expanded female viewership.
• Nearly 30% higher season-over-season subscriber acquisition for "Dark Winds"
Why This Matters: Many marketing teams make assumptions about their target audiences, usually inherited from past campaigns or category norms. But the narrower a brand's niche targeting, the more that unchecked assumption can cost, since there's no broad audience left to absorb the miss.
Your Action: Before your next campaign, pull the creative brief and ask an AI tool to identify which audience segments the brief misses or treats as secondary, then ask it to argue the opposite case. Feed in your audience or performance data. If it surfaces a segment your team hadn't planned for, build it as a parallel creative lane rather than a full replacement, and measure it against your original assumption instead of betting the whole budget in either direction.
Other Notable Headlines📌
Anthropic export ban sounds alarms for AI industry - The White House restricted access to Anthropic's newest model using “export controls," and analysts say that move could spook companies from signing long-term contracts with any US AI lab, not just Anthropic.
Shopify Wants To Be Merchants’ Built-in AI Agency🔒- Shopify is pushing into marketing services territory by offering AI-powered campaign management and creative tools directly inside its platform.
OpenAI moves to automate ad creative🔒 - OpenAI updated its ad tools policy to let advertisers generate and modify ad creative directly on the platform, rather than only uploading creative they made elsewhere.
ChatGPT’s market share slips below 50% for first time - ChatGPT's share of the AI assistant market fell to 46.4% by the end of May, down from over 50% in January, as Gemini (27.7%) and Claude (10.3%) gained ground, according to Sensor Tower.
Taboola expands DeeperDive into an ad network for AI apps and agents - Native ad network Taboola is helping any chatbot or AI app insert sponsored recommendations into its conversations.
Smartly and Roku bring AI-driven social performance playbook to CTV - Smartly's creative ad platform is connecting directly to Roku Ads Manager via API, letting advertisers run CTV campaigns using Smartly’s AI tools and adapted creative assets they already use for social.
Ad revenue stands to grow 8.9% this year, and AI might be why - WPP predicts AI ads will hit $100B faster than any other ad channel in history, sometime around 2030.
WPP puts a different type of ad talent to the test with new studio Hex - WPP launched Hex, a roughly 50-person studio of Gen Z creative technologists who work with clients to build AI workflows and train internal teams.
As AI reshapes search, TikTok turns discovery into a performance pitch🔒 - TikTok, citing daily searches up 40% year over year, is launching a global campaign called "TikTok Funnel HQ" to convince marketers it drives full-funnel performance, not just brand awareness.
OpenAI launches the OpenAI Partner Network - OpenAI is investing $150M in a new partner program with firms like Accenture, McKinsey, and BCG to help enterprises deploy AI, with a goal of training 300K certified consultants by the end of 2026.
StackAdapt Drops Minimum Spend Commitment for ChatGPT Ads - StackAdapt killed its $50K minimum for ChatGPT ads on its self-serve platform, shortly after Criteo dropped its own floor from $50K to $10K. The race to the bottom on minimums is not surprising, given all the companies that can sell ChatGPT ads now.
That’s It For This Week 👋
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