Programmatic

Beast Industries Wants $44B of Programmatic Creator Buys, Not Influencer Slots

Beast Industries presented to advertisers on May 12, 2026, pitching a two-sided creator marketplace built on Vyro, the October-2025 distribution engine routing branded content across 100,000+ vetted microcreators on TikTok, Reels, and Shorts. CEO Jeff Housenbold framed it as solving three things the creator economy has missed: attribution, predictability,

Pop-art illustration of an AppLovin smartphone interstitial ad with a steep rising CPM curve, a June 2026 calendar page, and a $7B auction-demand price tag

AppLovin's $7B First-Year Math Explains Why the June Axon Window Closes Fast

AppLovin posted $1.84 billion in Q1 2026 revenue, up 59% year over year, and confirmed its Axon ad platform opens self-serve to all advertisers globally in June. CEO Adam Foroughi pegged the math at roughly $70,000 in first-year ad spend per new customer, which at 100,000 signups

Isometric illustration: USA Today masthead licensed to AI chatbots, dollar flow from AI to publisher, fading display ad and dropping programmatic CPM graph

USA Today Co. Made More From AI Licensing Than Display Ads in Q1

USA Today Co. reported $33.75 million in "other" digital revenue for Q1 2026, a bucket that includes AI licensing deals with Meta, Microsoft, and Perplexity. That figure grew 125.6% year over year and now sits ahead of the company's display ad revenue, which fell

Pop-art illustration of a stalled Roku direct-sales rate card overrun by climbing 40% growth chart and DV360, Trade Desk, and Amazon DSP demand bidding for the same CTV inventory.

Roku's DSP Spend Grew 40% YoY. The IO Premium Just Got Negotiable.

Roku reported $613M in Q1 2026 advertising revenue on April 30, with ad spend through third-party DSPs jumping more than 40% year-over-year. Programmatic now drives the majority of Roku video ad delivery, including expanded integrations with DV360, The Trade Desk, Amazon DSP, Yahoo, and FreeWheel. CTV buyers can match Roku&

Isometric scene of three holding company silhouettes walking offstage with audit folders while Stagwell stands alone with a Koa robot at Possible 2026

Jeff Green's Possible Olive Branch Came After Three Holdcos Walked Koa Beta

The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green told Possible 2026 in Miami Beach on April 28 that "every middle player needs to earn its fee" and that the ad supply chain saw more cleanup in the last month than the last year. The concession landed two weeks after three

Spotify Made Biddable a Third of Ad Revenue. Podcast Buyers Still Need an IO.

Spotify reported Q1 2026 results showing 761 million monthly active users and biddable programmatic ads now top one-third of ad-supported revenue. The mix is uneven: music drove the biddable growth through higher impressions sold, while podcast revenue still came from sponsorships in Spotify's Owned and Licensed shows. Self-serve

Pop art halftone diagram of Omnicom routing AI agents directly to SSP nodes with three DSP middleman boxes crossed out, money flowing past blocked ad tech vendors

Omnicom Picked the One Programmatic Protocol The Big Three DSPs Aren't In

Omnicom announced on its April 28, 2026 Q1 earnings call that it is wiring Acxiom data into its Omni operating platform and routing AI media-buying agents through the Ad Context Protocol, the new agentic-buying standard, in a bid to recover the 64% of programmatic spend the ANA found never reaches