April 22nd-April 28th // Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes
Below is a roundup of last week’s notable industry news, with summaries and our opinions. Data + CTV was the trend of the week!
< 2 Weeks Left To Secure Your AI Accelerator Seat!
The best AI bootcamp in the industry will help you level up on all things AI for marketing & advertising, fast.
Our sponsor, Hightouch, just launched Ad Studio, giving performance marketers everything they need to go from creative insights to creative buildout to campaign launch using AI agents. They'll share tips on how to use AI to create on-brand creative and cut weeks off campaign timelines.
Enroll now using promo code EarlyBirdsLearnAI for 20% off!
Top Stories 👁
CTV is everyone's growth strategy
Source: Digiday, Adweek
April 24th-27th, 2026
Summary: In the past week, Pinterest, Meta, Walmart, HP, and PayPal made moves into streaming advertising (or are planning to). CTV is where ad revenue is growing, and everyone wants a piece of that growth.
Pinterest 🔒 launched a CTV audience extension product off the back of its recent $300M+ tvScientific acquisition. The move will make its 600M monthly users targetable on third-party streaming inventory for the first time. Early tests showed 27% better performance.
Walmart 🔒 launched Connect Select, a streaming TV marketplace inside Walmart DSP. It's geared toward small advertisers who can now buy CTV ads alongside search and display, and measure it all in one place. The goal is to democratize TV for advertisers who've never had the budget or agency relationships to access it. At launch, much of the ad inventory will come through Vizio, which Walmart acquired in 2024. Walmart’s DSP is powered by The Trade Desk.
Meta 🔒 seems to be kicking the tires on building a Facebook Audience Network for the living room. Sources say Meta, which is projected to become the world's largest ad company in 2026, has been meeting with Magnite, FreeWheel, and TV manufacturers since early 2025 about plugging its demand into existing CTV pipes. No product or plans have been announced yet.
HP 🔒 quietly launched HP TV+, a free ad-supported streaming (FAST) service for laptop users. It's part of HP's broader Media Network ad business, which already reaches 76M PCs. This move positions HP in competition with smart TV OEMs like Vizio, Samsung, and LG for streaming ad dollars.
PayPal 🔒launched Curated Ads, offering its transaction data for streaming TV targeting and measurement. Inventory partners include Warner Bros. Discovery, Spectrum Reach, and Tubi. PayPal sees data from 25B transactions across 30M merchants annually, which can be used to target audiences and verify whether an ad drove a sale.
IAS launched Total TV, a CTV measurement suite offering show, genre, and program-level transparency across Disney, Prime Video, NBCU, and Paramount.
Opinion: These moves tell us a few things about the state of CTV right now.
Data is starting to become the great CTV differentiator. More and more streaming inventory is becoming available through a multitude of activation platforms. As the inventory becomes a commodity, data takes center stage (kind of like what happened in open web display). Pinterest has intent data. Walmart has purchase data. Meta has identity. HP has device data. PayPal has transaction data from across the commerce ecosystem. To compete in CTV, you now need something compelling to offer from a data perspective.
The performance advertising opportunity in CTV is still wide open. It’s one reason we’re seeing data take center stage; to help CTV advertisers measure performance. But performance data in CTV is still fragmented and hard to match back to CTV ad exposure. All of these players (and incumbents) are attemping to close the performance measurability gap in order to win CTV market share.
The industry’s focus is on mid- and long-tail demand. Companies like Vibe, JamLoop, MNTN, Comcast’s Universal Ads, and many more are doing well because of their focus on smaller advertisers. Partly because TV dollars from smaller advertisers are new, incremental dollars. And partly because every company wants to build a self-service ad business with thousands of advertisers like Meta and Google, instead of being beholden to fewer, high-touch, agency-driven partnerships with large advertisers. That’s proven difficult with other digital channels like display, online video, streaming audio, etc. because smaller advertisers don’t quite ‘get’ them and performance pales in comparison to search and Meta. But you know what everyone ‘gets’? Even your local car wash and salon and bakery?
TV! With AI democratizing TV creative production and data closing the performance measurability gap, the race to own CTV for the mid-market is on.
Q1 Earnings Time!
Comcast (👍): Revenue was up 5% to $31.46B, beating estimates. NBC's "Legendary February," which included the Super Bowl, Winter Olympics, and NBA All-Star Weekend, drove US ad revenue up 135% to $3.45B. Peacock subscribers were up 12% to 46M, with revenue nearly doubling to $2.1B. Peacock will approach profitability for the first time next quarter. Shares rose more than 6%.
Spotify (👎): Revenue was up 8% to $5.3B, beating estimates. Monthly active users were up 12% to 761M, and premium subscribers were up 9% to 293M. Spotify noted healthy engagement from new users, reactivations, and existing users in Q1. But Q2 guidance for premium subscriber growth and operating income missed expectations. Shares fell over 13%.
Omnicom 🔒 (🤷): Organic revenue was up 3.9% for its "core operations," or the parts of the business that Omnicom plans to keep; Omnicom will sell 20+ agencies within the next year following its IPG acquisition. Shares fell nearly 2% before rebounding.
WPP 🔒 (🤷): Organic revenue was down 8.9%. The UK-based holding company says it's on track for a turnaround due to new client wins and retentions like Estée Lauder, Wendy’s, and SC Johnson. WPP expects organic revenue to start showing signs of improvement by H2. Shares closed 1.5% higher.
Opinion: It's been a fairly strong earnings season thus far, with many major players beating revenue estimates, but the market seems to be in a punishing mood. Beating estimates isn't enough; companies need strong forward-looking guidance in order to be rewarded by investors. In the holdco race, there's still a gap between Publicis and the others, as Omnicom continues to digest IPG and WPP remains in turnaround mode.
Other Notable Headlines
Roku launches Roku Curate, bringing commerce data into CTV advertising - Speaking of data and performance measurement in CTV, Roku has assembled a roster of commerce data partners to help CTV advertisers measure whether their ads are driving purchases and other real-world actions. The lineup includes electronics purchase and browsing data from Best Buy Ads, ticket purchase and entertainment discovery data from Fandango, shopping and browsing data from Criteo, retail purchase data from Fetch, grocery purchase data from Kroger Precision Marketing, and shopping data from Instacart.
China blocks Meta's acquisition of AI startup Manus - Beijing has given Meta several weeks to unwind its purchase 🔒 of Manus, a Singapore-based AI agent building platform that was founded in China before relocating. Meta had already integrated Manus into parts of its business, including Ads Manager. Manus investors had already been paid out following the $2.5B acquisition, which was announced in late December. Now, Meta will have to remove any Manus data and tech and restore Manus's assets to their former state. China's top economic planning body cited national security concerns for its decision to block the deal without offering much further explanation.
The Trade Desk opens its DSP to Skai and Pacvue users - Mutual clients of The Trade Desk and commerce media platforms Skai and Pacvue can now access TTD's DSP directly within those platforms. This enables open web programmatic inventory be planned, activated, and measured alongside search, social, and retail media campaigns in a single workflow. In other TTD news, the company is phasing out the periodic table UI 🔒 in its Kokai platform. Starting next month, buyers will be able to customize which tiles they see, effectively replacing the periodic table with something that looks more like a spreadsheet. The company says the changes are driven by advertiser feedback. Some programmatic traders described the periodic table as a friction point that ate into time better spent on strategy and optimization.
Even PayPal Ads has its own ID now - Another move from PayPal this week. Its new PayPal Ads ID is an omnichannel identifier built entirely on its PayPal and Venmo customer base. Every user profile in the graph has banking information and / or credit card attached. That is different from many other ID graphs, which are still largely built by probablistic modeling of user data and anchored to transient identifiers like cookies, IP addresses, etc. PayPal is making the ID available for free to any data or ad tech vendor with a commercial relationship with PayPal Ads. Initial partners include Magnite, Rokt, Taboola, and PubMatic, and advertisers can use the ID to buy any programmatic inventory through these platforms.
YouTube taps SiriusXM as its exclusive US audio ad rep - SiriusXM Media, which represents SiriusXM, Pandora, and a network of streaming and podcast properties, will now sell all of YouTube's audio advertising inventory in the US. The deal gives advertisers guaranteed audio ad impressions against YouTube audiences at scale, with targeting and measurement capabilities consistent with the rest of YouTube's ad products. The inventory covers audio-first content on YouTube, including podcasts, music, and talk shows, which collectively reach more than 212M monthly US listeners. Buying will be powered by AdsWizz's ad tech platform (also part of SXM). The arrangement is set to launch in fall 2026.
Other Notable Headlines
(that you should know about too) 🤓
Meta is cutting 10% of its workforce, roughly 8K employees, starting May 20 - The company is also leaving 6K open roles unfilled, citing a need to run more efficiently while funding major AI investments.
SiriusXM, iHeartMedia eye merger - Satellite radio is struggling, traditional radio is declining, but podcasting is booming for both companies, so maybe together they stand a better chance. Apollo and Irving Azoff are in the mix as potential deal facilitators.
Albertsons is bringing its shopper data into YouTube and DV360 advertising - Brands can now reach Albertsons' 50M loyalty members and 36M weekly shoppers on YouTube and across the open web through Google’s DSP DV360, with SKU-level sales reporting tied back to ad exposure. Keurig Dr Pepper is a launch partner.
Gary Vaynerchuk is launching a new agency called Tamara Group, named after his mother 🔒 - The shop spans always-on social content, creative strategy, and experiential work, kicking off with nearly 100 employees and clients like Ulta Beauty, Mrs. Meyer's, and Method. The acronym Tamara stands for “The Attention, Media, And Relevance Agency”.
Stagwell and FreeWheel give Stagwell agencies a more direct path to premium CTV inventory - The integration connects Stagwell's media buying interface to FreeWheel's supply-side tech, consolidating preferred publisher relationships into a single deal marketplace called Stagwell Curate.
Meta launched a Snapchat copycat app called Instants - Photos disappear after a single view and expire within 24 hours, with no editing or camera roll uploads allowed. Users can share and view content from either the standalone app or directly within Instagram. Evan Spiegel must still be VP of Product at Meta.
That’s It For This Week 👋
The U of Digital Weekly Newsletter is intended for subscribers, but occasional forwarding is okay!
To subscribe visit Uof.Digital/Newsletters or contact us directly for group subscriptions.
And remember, U of Digital helps teams drive better outcomes through structured education on critical topics like AI, programmatic, CTV, commerce media, and much more. Interested in learning more about how we can supercharge your team? Drop us a line!
Thanks for reading!
