U of Digital Newsletter - 6/18/25 (premium)

June 12th-June 17th // Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes

Below is a roundup of last week’s notable industry news, with summaries and our opinions. Cannes we partner?

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Top Story 👁️

What’s Happening At Cannes?
Source: Multiple

Summary: The Cannes Lions International Festival of Digital Advertising Creativity kicked off Monday in the South of France, and we're seeing all kinds of interesting hookups:

• Amazon and Roku Unite to Target 80M Authenticated Households🔒: Beginning in Q4, advertisers will be able to use Amazon’s demand-side platform (DSP) to combine user data from the Fire TV and Roku operating systems and Prime Video and The Roku Channel streaming apps. In testing, the shared data set boosted unique reach by 40% and reduced ad over-frequency by 30%. 

• Disney Advertising And Amazon Ads Join Forces To Give Streaming Buyers New Options: Amazon is also partnering with Disney. Disney's Real-Time Ad Exchange (DRAX) will be integrated with Amazon's DSP to give advertisers direct access to premium inventory across Disney+, ESPN, and Hulu while combining data from both companies for more precise targeting.

• Omnicom strikes partnerships at Cannes Lions with Disney and Walmart around harnessing live🔒: The Disney deal focuses on live sports, using Disney's "Magic Words" tool and The Trade Desk to trigger ads during key plays like touchdowns or lead changes. The Walmart partnership will match the retailer's purchase data to influencers' followers to identify influencers who can drive sales.

• Advertisers Can Soon Target CVS Shoppers on Reddit🔒: CVS and Reddit will combine data from CVS's 90M loyalty program members with Reddit's 108M daily active users in a clean room partnership launching in Q4. Advertisers will be able to target CVS shoppers on Reddit and track any resulting conversions. 

• Netflix, Yahoo in Pact to Expand Programmatic Ad Sales: Netflix is adding Yahoo DSP as a new DSP partner, joining The Trade Desk, DV360, and Microsoft in enabling programmatic access to Netflix's ad inventory and audience data. The partnership will go live later this year across all 12 of Netflix's ad-supported countries.

Opinion: Turns out that a little rosé and sunshine get the partnership juices flowing!

The deals announced at Cannes represent a fundamental strategy shift away from companies wanting to build walled gardens and towards companies wanting to forge strategic partnerships. This shift is being driven by three trends: 

1. Marketers have Google fatigue

   Non-transparent walled gardens are not cool right now. Also, no company wants to end up in antitrust court.

2. Privacy is no longer a legitimate reason to put up walls

   For years, the walled gardens built moats by hoarding data behind their walls, often using privacy as cover. But the privacy movement in advertising seems to have run its course (long live cookies), at least for now.

3. Everyone wants AI, and AI wants as much data as possible

   AI is changing the ad game entirely—success now depends on accessing the largest possible data sets to train AI.

Amazon seems particularly leaned in to partnerships with their frenemies. It’s obvious that Amazon wants to be the next dominant player in the industry (à la Google), but it seems like they want to do so in more of a “hedged garden” way. Hence the partnerships with major competitors like Disney and Roku. When large rivals start sharing their crown jewels, it signals a tipping point where data collaboration beats data hoarding.

This shift is great for advertisers and the industry at large. It means no one company has so much leverage that it can shut partners out and ignore customer demands while continuing to amass market share. It means antitrust is (kind of) working. It means competition is healthy, which breeds partnerships, which creates more openness, which helps marketers, which lifts all boats. 

That these announcements dominated Cannes—a creativity festival—tells us everything about industry priorities. We're entering the “partnerships era”; where technical integration and data scale enables true marketing creativity.

Other Notable Headlines

WhatsApp is officially getting ads - Facebook said it would keep WhatsApp ad-free when it bought the messaging app for $22B in 2014, but things have apparently changed. WhatsApp is officially getting ads within its Updates tab where users can post disappearing status messages with friends and family. Meta says the ads will be customized to user interests using location, language, and channel preferences, but won't access private messages, calls, or groups for targeting purposes. Meta is also introducing promoted channels in the Explore section and paid channel subscriptions, creating multiple new revenue streams.

Inside Index Exchange's multimillion-dollar start-up investment pact🔒- Index Exchange's investment arm IX Labs has committed to a decade-long partnership with FirstPartyCapital as the fund launches its $67M Fund 2, which will target early-stage ad tech and mar tech companies. Index Exchange will offer FirstPartyCapital's portfolio companies like Bedrock, LightboxTV, and Lumen access to infrastructure services, platform integration, and go-to-market strategy support beyond just capital injection. The move positions Index Exchange as "the platform of choice" for these emerging sell-side technologies.

DoorDash Dashes Deeper Into Ads With Its $175 Million Acquisition Of Symbiosys - Symbiosys is a two-year-old retail media platform that helps brands and retailers work with eachother to buy offsite ads. The company will help DoorDash a means to grow its offsite ad business by helping brands expand their reach into search, social, and display. It will also make DoorDash a retail media platform company, competing with the likes of CitrusAd, Criteo, etc. Founded by former Google Search Ads 360 director Bashar Kachachi, Symbiosys has been working with DoorDash since its early days along with major retailers like Best Buy and Chewy. DoorDash also announced it has surpassed $1 billion in ad revenue over the past 12 months, highlighting how food delivery platforms are becoming major retail media players along with traditional grocers.

Dentsu Goes All-In With MiQ, Claims Industry-First Integration - The agency holding company has named MiQ its official Intelligence Partner and will integrate MiQ's AI-powered Sigma platform into its media practice. Sigma uses OpenAI, Gemini, and Claude, and was trained with 15 years of MiQ’s programmatic trading data. A few days later, Dentsu announced that it has also named Criteo the data partner for all of its commerce media buys. Criteo's retail audience data will be integrated into Dentsu's data and identity product Dentsu Connect. This will give Dentsu visibility into product inventory, pricing, and SKU-level performance across retailers.

Advertisers Can Buy Product Placement Ads Through The Trade Desk🔒- The DSP warned us last week that it would be unleashing a slew of announcements, and here are a couple more. First, The Trade Desk is integrating Rembrand's generative AI tech into its Kokai platform to let advertisers buy product placements across video, audio, and social content on the open web. Rembrand's tech scans videos to find suitable spots to inject brand messaging, and then makes these slots available for purchase programmatically through The Trade Desk's DSP.

Second, The Trade Desk unveiled the Connector App on Snowflake to help advertisers tie sales and conversion data from a merchant to campaign optimization in the DSP. 

Other Notable Headlines
(that you should know about too) 🤓 

Viant Swipes at The Trade Desk With a Billboard in Cannes🔒- Forget about good vibes and collaboration and partnerships at Cannes. Viant showed up ready for a fight vs. their rival DSP The Trade Desk. Burn!

Trump set to grant another extension to avoid TikTok disruption - The social media company has another three months to find a non-Chinese buyer.

PMG Acquires Momentum Commerce - PMG will integrate Momentum's AI-powered Velocity commerce tech and data platform into its deep ad tech stack.

Marriott Launches Bespoke Retail Media Net - Marriott Media will tap into data from Marriott Bonvoy's 237M member loyalty program.

Lyft launches new ad formats - The new formats include Sponsored Map Vehicles (full-day takeover of the Lyft map with custom vehicle icons), Sponsored Rides by Mode (brands can subsidize rides), and Vertical Video (full-screen, non-skippable video shown in the Wait and Save option). Creative!

Nielsen’s The Gauge Streaming Ratings for May 2025: Streaming Passes Linear🔒- For the first time ever.

PayPal Debuts Shoppable Ads for Publisher Sites🔒- Storefront Ads are a shoppable format that lets consumers buy directly through the ad without leaving the website or app.

UK Launches Formal Probe Of Omnicom-IPG Merger - The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority will investigate whether the Omnicom-IPG merger would hurt competition in the country. It will decide by Aug. 13 whether to continue to the next phase of the investigation or approve the merger.

Sens. Sanders, King propose legislation to ban direct-to-consumer ads for prescription drugs - If the bill is signed into law, drugmakers would not be able to promote prescription drugs through television, radio, print, digital platforms, and social media.

AdExchanger founder John Ebbert launches tipsheet.ai - The free publication will cover the evolution of advertising and marketing through the lens of AI.

Taboola Unveils DeeperDive, a Gen AI Answer Engine Built for the Open Web, Connecting Readers with Unique Publisher Content, Empowering Publishers to Defy Abuse by Gen AI Search - Instead of having their content scraped by AI search engines for free, publishers can now offer AI-powered answers using their own articles and monetize the experience with targeted ads.

Walmart Bets Big On Generative And Agentic AI With ‘Sparky’ - The generative AI-powered shopping assistant can compare products, recap reviews, and recommend products for special occasions like birthdays. Sparky also loves Canada and works as a scare actor during Halloween season.

That’s It For This Week 👋

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