The Federal Trade Commission this morning announced agreements with three big agency holding companies — Dentsu, Publicis and WPP -- to discontinue what the FTC described as "unlawful collusion that imposed uniform standards on brand safety.

Its central finding is clear: longevity, not initial virality, determines cultural impact. While TikTok’s rapid content cycle sees trends rise and fall within days, those that spread across three or more countries are typically rooted in shared emotions, everyday behaviours or repeatable cultural cues.

Despite evidence suggesting that teen social media bans in Australia are not yet having the intended impact, officials in the EU are pushing ahead with their own plans for teen social media bans. Bloomberg reported that Emmanuel Macron, president of France, is leading the charge to implement EU-wide rules on teen app access.

A major new study has found that social media advertising delivers 11% lower attention and engagement during the day, when consumers are most active out of the home. The findings highlight a clear opportunity for advertisers to get the most from their social campaigns and position out of home (OOH) as a channel to prime and amplify social media campaigns.

Connected TV demand is strong, budgets are growing and premium inventory continues to command attention. Yet, for publishers, the growth of CTV has complicated how deals get done. This is the point CTV has now reached, and it explains why the channel is becoming the first proving ground for agentic trading.

The IAB’s 2026 Connected Commerce Summit in New York City felt to me like the retail media industry’s first sit-down explanation to a child who is now a “big kid” and must act accordingly. Not the birds-and-bees-type conversation by any means. But an important reality check. And I’m not the only one to think so.

Google will replace Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) with AI Max for Search, an AI-powered solution, for all advertisers. The news, announced Wednesday, focuses on all campaigns using DSA, automatically created assets (ACA), and campaign-level broad match.

YouTube is making changes to the way it delivers ads during popular livestream sessions, deciding to rely on artificial intelligence to pause ads entirely when a creators’ viewers are engaging with the video most.

As I've written before, AI-generated content has long passed the Turing Test, and traversed the Uncanny Valley, and the only thing separating our perception of what is AI vs. human-made — watermarks aside — is the context we perceive it in. Omnicom Media and Zefr's just-released "AI Slop or Not" report delves into a lot of that

It's been a year since I first began asking ad industry execs — chief investment officers, pure-play digital techies, brand marketers, anyone who will answer me — to predict what share of ad spending will be targeting AI agents — not humans — in five years.

A cadre of media strategy leaders has founded a membership organisation to organise training and debate for the next generation of planners. The Media Planning Group (MPG), launched today, will serve as a “new home” for media planners and strategists. It sits alongside the non-profit Account Planning Group (APG), a similar membership organisation founded in 1979 to support creative account planners in advertising agencies.

There’s MMM and MTA, but no single ad measurement works for brands with multiple points of sale. On Tuesday, Northbeam launched an incrementality tool to complete what it calls “the trifecta of digital attribution.”

“The Government is taking decisive action to tackle the community and public health concerns associated with gambling,” said Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. “We’re getting the balance right here, letting adults have a punt if they want to but also making sure Australian children don’t see betting ads everywhere they look. “What we don’t want is kids growing up thinking that footy and gambling are the same thing.”

Lloyds Bank has used connected TV with postcode targeting (and twice-daily campaign optimisations) to drive downloads of its app among its Scottish Widows workplace pension customers. Sam Taylor, head of marketing at Lloyds Banking, explains how CTV worked harder than email and direct mail (DM) and proved to be a powerful multiplier for DM performance, too. “Who would have thought television is a CRM channel?” he asks.

AI has settled the debate. First-party data isn’t just preferred; it’s structurally necessary. And the capital is already moving: IAB’s State of Data report found that 71% of brands, agencies and publishers are currently or planning to grow their first-party data sets, nearly double the rate from two years earlier.