mediaindustrynews

For soft-drink brand Poppi, fans come before consumers. The Pepsico-owned brand has bottled up an innovative approach to social media that’s beginning to be picked up by the marketers behind the industry’s largest brands, but it carries risks, too. “We’re community first. I like to say it’s pop culture,” said Sophia Sesto, who leads the team behind the brand’s social media, creator and ambassador operations.

Chartbeat's Kiran Paranjpe says the next phase of media isn't transformation—it's calibration. Publishers must blend programmatic efficiency with direct relationships and premium positioning to compete against platforms.

Macro uncertainty and soft conditions continue to depress Dentsu’s efforts to get international markets all back up and operating at a profit and will mean some markets remain loss-making in FY2026, the holdco has acknowledged.

Building on AI Max's "one-click" experiments late last year, Google unveiled new A/B testing tools for search ads using a demo that took ten clicks to execute.

On Monday, YouTube announced it was changing how it measures public video views across its platform globally. From 24 August, YouTube will count a view “the moment a video begins to play—from the very first frame.”

The Big Four global agency holding groups reported mixed results in the second quarter, ranging from a narrowing of WPP’s decline to mid-single-digit organic revenue growth for both Omnicom and Publicis Groupe. All of the groups have raced to develop a similar set of AI tools and data integrations which have quickly become table stakes for their respective businesses

Search volume misses high-intent AI prompts. Prioritize sub-questions, entities, and buyer decisions to earn citations and drive conversions. Most teams have changed how they write for AI, but far fewer have changed how they decide what to write about in the first place.

Every company in our space is wrestling with what their agentic AI strategy is. The answer that seems obvious is to wire up an LLM, give it access to Meta or Google through MCP and put it to work. The reality is more complicated, and the complications matter a lot when it’s your budget on the line. Here are three lessons from running automated advertising at scale.

Marketers are treating generative engine optimization as a new form of SEO to improve large-language-model visibility, but GEO scores are based on synthetic queries rather than real user data, rendering them unreliable for content strategies, writes Andrew Bolton, chief customer officer at Knotch.

The ratings provider says the changes in co-viewing measurement, TV universe estimates and other areas will bring more accurate data to clients. Nielsen will incorporate a slate of updates and “enhancements” to its TV ratings product for the 2026-27 season, including a change to its monthly snapshot of viewing across various platforms that sparked a small controversy earlier this year.

Google is expanding its AI assistant, Ask Advisor, with new agentic capabilities across Google Ads and Google Analytics, aiming to help marketers uncover insights faster, automate analysis and make decisions without leaving the platform. The updates are designed to reduce the time spent interpreting data while keeping advertisers in control of campaign decisions.

Community discussions are focused on individuality, personal discovery and experimental makeup looks, according to a new report from the app. Reddit published a new beauty trends report, which looks at how U.S. consumers are discussing beauty and fashion-related topics in the app. The report also examines how these topics relate to niche marketing approaches.

Instead of buying media against age, gender or income bracket, the pitch is that advertisers can now buy against cultural signals. That means inside the communities and content where people’s actual interests live.