Tim Cross

French agency group Publicis in recent years has chosen one key message to hammer home as the industry gathers in Cannes. Last year it was the power of creators, as the holding company highlighted how creator campaigns can reach Super Bowl-sized audiences for a fraction of the cost. The year before, it issued a call to “cut the BS from AI”, promoting a ‘BSBot’ which would analyse text from speeches, press releases, and articles to assess the veracity of any AI claims made.

UK broadcaster Channel 4 this morning announced it is significantly opening up programmatic access to video on-demand inventory on its eponymous streaming platform, launching five new partnerships with ad tech partners. Amazon Ads, FreeWheel, Hawk, PubMatic, and Yahoo DSP will now all have direct access to Channel 4’s on-demand offering, significantly expanding the route available to advertisers to run campaigns with the UK broadcaster.

The UK government will begin preparing for a managed withdrawal of the country’s digital terrestrial television (DTT) broadcast infrastructure, planning to either wind DTT services down by the end of 2034, or set a time-limited extension lasting until 2044 at the longest, according to a new government green paper.

Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Axel Springer SE, The Telegraph’s new owner.

B2B marketing has become very focused on the more measurable lower-funnel portion of customer journeys says Andrea Sexton, CEO of Ledger Bennett. As a result, some advertisers are wary of investing in harder to measure upper-funnel activity, seeing it as a leap of faith. But that’s not the case, says Sexton, and in fact by focussing too heavily on the bottom of the funnel, B2B brands end up missing out deals which they don’t even know are happening.

In the modern advertising world, two things are really crucial

Total European digital ad spend grew by 10.5 percent in 2025 to reach €131.1 billion, according to IAB Europe’s latest edition of its AdEx Benchmark Study, and as has consistently been the case in recent years, video is one of the primary drivers of growth. In fact, IAB Europe’s latest data shows that video now accounts for more than half of all display investment in Europe for the first time, a significant milestone for video advertising. Meanwhile total video investment, at €34 billion, accounts for just over a quarter of European digital ad spend.

As it works to retain subscribers and grow its audience, Netflix has been broadening the types of content it hosts over the last few years. It’s begun airing major sports and other live events, commissioning content starring social media-based creators, and hosting video podcasts.

Everyone knows that AI is rapidly transforming many parts of the advertising industry, TV advertising included, and we’ve heard plenty of speculation over the past few years around where we’re going to see the most impact. But AI has the potential to affect buyers, sellers, and viewers in different ways. The question arises, therefore, of whether these three groups are aligned in their hopes and expectations for AI.

“It’s no secret that we’ve seen declining CPMs for streaming inventory,” says Greg Bel, VP of Global Revenue & Partnerships at Publica by IAS. But streaming content is very expensive to produce, so it’s very important that CTV publishers are able to get a good return in terms of ad revenue, or else they won’t keep investing.