August 13th-August 19th // Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes

Below is a roundup of last week’s notable industry news, with summaries and our opinions. Rough week for The Trade Desk…

The Trade Desk Claps Back at Reports That Walmart Is Pulling Back: ‘We’re Fully Committed’🔒 
Source: Adweek
August 15th, 2025

Summary: The Information reported last week🔒 that Walmart renegotiated its deal with The Trade Desk and removed its exclusivity clause, which will let advertisers use Walmart's shopper data through other DSPs. The retailer is reportedly so annoyed with The Trade Desk's high fees that it is looking at other buying platforms and may even build its own. TTD is pushing back hard on the idea that Walmart is retreating from their four-year partnership.

In response, TTD issued a statement emphasizing they're "fully committed" to and even planning to expand the partnership. The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green also touted the partnership during its recent earnings call. 

The timing couldn't be worse for The Trade Desk. Its stock has nosedived nearly 40% since early August following a weak Q2 earnings report that spooked investors about Amazon's growing competitive threat. On the earnings call, Green noted "a record amount of spend was influenced by retail data" on both TTD's platform and Walmart DSP, but the market clearly isn't convinced about the partnership's future.

The Walmart partnership has been crucial for TTD's ability to compete with Amazon's rival DSP, which has taken millions from The Trade Desk this year. With exclusivity now gone, TTD faces even more pressure from Amazon's growing threat in the ad tech space.

Opinion: Not much else to say right now about The Trade Desk, other than, when it rains, it pours.

For Walmart, The Trade Desk partnership was always meant to be their ad tech training wheels. For four years, Walmart has been watching how The Trade Desk sells their data, learning which advertisers bite, understanding pricing dynamics, and, most importantly, seeing just how much programmatic demand exists for Walmart's shopper data. The exclusivity clause gave them a risk-free way to test the waters while TTD did the heavy lifting of building advertiser relationships and proving market demand.

Now that the test has proven successful (TTD reported "record" retail data spend in their statement), Walmart is ready to graduate. They’ll almost certainly look at owning their ad tech—the question will be whether they'll buy their way in or build from scratch. Given that quality ad tech companies are trading at distressed valuations and Walmart needs speed to market to counter Amazon's growing programmatic dominance, we think acquisition makes infinitely more sense than a multi-year build.

For now, Walmart's decision to kill exclusivity is great news for advertisers who will have more flexibility to use Walmart's 240+ million weekly shoppers' data while transacting through other DSPs. Exclusivity deals have always been about platforms securing competitive moats, not about serving advertiser interests. That said, this could be a temporary reprieve for marketers until Walmart stands up its own walled garden. 

Companies to keep an eye on as potential Walmart acquisition targets are those that have been in the rumor mill recently: Yahoo, Criteo, and Adform. Of course, Walmart could always pull off a surprise acquisition for a dark horse that we aren’t even thinking of; perhaps a company such as Teads or maybe even Instacart?

ANA Finds Programmatic 'Waste' Has Increased 34% In Two Years - The Association of National Advertisers' (ANA) latest transparency report reveals a conundrum: While the industry has successfully slashed spending on low-quality made-for-advertising sites, wasted ad spend has climbed 34% since 2023. The ANA pegged wasted programmatic spend at $26.8B annually, up from $20B two years ago. MFA spend came in at 0.8%, compared to 15% in 2023. CTV share of programmatic spending has increased to 44% from 30%, but that has come with "lower media productivity scores, widening efficiency gaps," according to the ANA. To help marketers boost efficiency, the ANA has released a new real-time benchmark tool for advertisers to track performance and optimize quickly. One step forward, two steps back?

Learn more about the industry’s supply quality problem and solutions (including the ANA benchmark tool) through this FREE U of Digital course built in partnership with the ANA.

Mediaocean Partners With The Internet Watch Foundation To Report CSAM Content - Mediaocean's ad-verification arm, Protected by Mediaocean, has teamed up with the nonprofit Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) to bolster safeguards against child sexual abuse material (CSAM) appearing alongside programmatic ads. The partnership comes after Adalytics exposed CSAM being monetized through programmatic advertising earlier this year, prompting congressional letters to major ad tech companies demanding explanations. While both Protected by Mediaocean and IWF already had internal screening processes, the collaboration gives Mediaocean access to IWF's twice-daily updated list of live CSAM URLs, which major platforms like Meta, Google, and Microsoft also use for blocking. 

Google Debuts New Ad Formats and AI-Powered Bidding Tools for iOS App Marketers🔒-  The rollout provides two new ad formats and bidding capabilities to help app marketers improve performance and measurement. The new products include co-branded partnership opportunities that let brands collaborate with YouTube creators for in-feed and Shorts campaigns, along with playable ads now available through AdMob that will appear following video content in apps. Google is also introducing automated bidding strategies where advertisers can set their return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) goals and let machine learning handle the rest. AI can also give app campaigns a boost by automatically resizing video for multiple formats and screen sizes. This expansion comes as Apple's ecosystem continues to grow, with the App Store generating $91.6B in consumer spending last year. That's a 24% increase, underscoring the value of reaching iOS users. 

AppsFlyer in advanced talks to be acquired at over $3.5B valuation - The Israeli mobile attribution unicorn is working with Goldman Sachs on a potential sale to a private equity firm, marking a significant jump from its last $2B valuation in 2020. Since then, the company has tripled its revenue to around $400M annually while maintaining profitability and positive cash flow. The timing follows AppsFlyer exploring an IPO earlier this year. AppsFlyer recently streamlined its workforce by 7% to invest more heavily in AI capabilities; it now has 1,300 employees worldwide. Founded in 2011, the company helps app developers track which marketing channels deliver the most valuable users across platforms like Google, Facebook, and traditional media.

Meta Further Consolidates Ad-Targeting Options - The social media giant is eliminating some manual targeting control in a nudge to move advertisers toward AI-powered automation. Some advertisers will need to tweak their settings or their campaigns will stop delivering after January 15, 2026. The granular targeting options weren't widely used, according to the company, and removing them increased the median cost per conversion by 22.6%. This move aligns with CEO Mark Zuckerberg's broader vision to fully automate advertising across Facebook and Instagram, where machine learning would handle everything from audience selection to creative development and performance measurement. Zuck said that AI is driving 5% more conversions on Instagram and 3% more on Facebook. 

Google's AI Overviews Linked to 25% Drop in Publisher Referral Traffic, New Data Shows🔒- When Digital Content Next surveyed 19 of its member publishers, it found that median year-over-year search referrals were down 10% overall over eight weeks in May and June. Non-news brands were hit harder at -14% compared to news brands at -7%. The data contradicts Google's recent claims that third-party measurements "inaccurately suggest dramatic declines." The findings also align with recent Pew research showing AI summaries make users less likely to click through to original sources. Hope for publishers may come from pending DOJ antitrust remedies that could force Google to separate its AI crawler from its search indexing crawler, potentially allowing sites to block AI scraping without disappearing from search results entirely.

More US Ad Spend Comes Direct From Brands Than Through HoldCos as AI Reshapes Media Planning and Buying - Advertiser Perceptions research reveals that agency holding companies controlled just 28% of US ad spend in 2024, down from nearly half in 2019, while brand direct spending has tripled to 30% during the same period. The shift was already underway before Mark Zuckerberg's recent push to use AI to automate campaigns. Programmatic automation and walled-garden platforms have made it easier for brands to handle campaigns themselves, particularly as marketers focus on lower-funnel performance metrics that tech giants can provide (even if they're grading their own homework). Smaller brands in particular, have found the Big Tech platforms' reach and scale attractive. Google, Meta, and Amazon now capture nearly 59% of total US advertising dollars. While agencies traditionally excelled in upper-funnel brand building, even connected TV is moving toward performance-driven approaches that favor direct platform relationships.

Is the traditional agency model dying before our very eyes?

Databricks Raising Funds at $100 Billion Valuation🔒- Investors have been champing at the bit to put money into the data-analytics software company, which is booming thanks to AI. Databricks was valued at $62B in December. 

‘It’s the worst execution I’ve seen’: Confessions of a marketer on pulling every client off Google’s PMax🔒- An agency vet says PMax campaigns usually fail to produce incremental revenue for advertisers. In response, they've moved their clients back to Google Shopping.  

WPP Media Snatches Mastercard’s $180M Global Media Account From Carat🔒- It's a nice win for an agency holding company not named Publicis, especially after WPP’s recent string of client losses.

Viant Integrates with Wurl to Enable Scene-Level CTV Targeting and Measurement - Viant says the integration makes it the first DSP to give advertisers scene-level contextual insights across CTV so they can align with on-screen context in real time. 

Nexxen Ups VIDAA Stake, Expands Data and Ad Rights - Nexxen now has a $60M stake in VIDAA, a CTV operating system found in TVs from companies like Hisense and Toshiba. The stake gives Nexxen exclusive access to VIDAA’s ACR data and monetization rights to VIDAA's CTV and native display inventory.

Nexxen (🤷): Speaking of Nexxen, revenue was up 3% to $90.9M, beating estimates. Programmatic revenue was up 8% to a record $85M. The DSP launched nexAI, a suite of AI-powered assistants and features. Shares ended flat after rising 2%.

TV-Station Owner Sinclair Proposes Merger With Tegna🔒- Tegna had already agreed to be acquired by rival Nexstar for $6.2B, but Sinclair followed up with a higher offer.  

TikTok steps away from free traffic, will require advertisers to pay for visibility - The shift away from offering free traffic to US merchants could hurt smaller advertisers that leaned on the platform for reach and affordability. 

Ulta and Target will end deal for in-store beauty shops next year - Ulta Beauty's 600 in-store shops were promoted as a way to drive foot traffic. The retailer’s revenue has flatlined and share value has been cut in half since 2021.

MSNBC To Change Name To MS NOW As Part Of Split With Comcast - Ahead of its spinoff from Comcast, MSNBC will become MS NOW, short for My Source News Opinion World. The network will no longer be affiliated with NBC News.

Our reaction…

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