The Gradient

A more diverse customer set could give big media companies like Comcast the same resilience to market shocks as Meta and Google enjoy, but persuading enough performance-minded brands to try CTV — and they’ll need a lot of them — takes constant effort.

For Comcast, that effort means stacking up a slew of feature announcements and developing out its SMB-focused Universal Ads business even as its media execs attempt to court big-ticket advertisers during upfront negotiations.

Last week, Universal Ads released an MCP (Model Context Protocol) extension, following a similar policy change from Meta in April. The move means that small teams of marketers can connect home brewed AI media agents built with Claude or Gemini directly with Universal Ads, allowing them to build tools for campaign optimization or data analysis.

Earlier this month, it inked a partnership with commerce media firm Koddi that allowed small business advertisers to use retail data to target audiences using Fox, NBCU and Paramount inventory. The week prior, it added linear inventory to the Universal Ads self-service platform, allowing SMB advertisers to run commercials (some made using AI tools) against broadcast TV.

All of this is intended to tempt small businesses, like Camillo’s Italian Restaurant Pizzeria & Bar, to take their paid social, search and direct mail dollars into CTV. The Kutztown, Pa., restaurant was part of a recent test run by Slice.com, a company that provides digital ordering and fulfilment to family-owned pizzerias, using Universal Ads to put pizza ads against coverage of the Winter Olympics.

20 pizzerias including Camillo’s (alongside Jersey Pizza Boys, El Centenario Pizza and the Prima Pizza Kitchen in Staten Island, NY) targeted viewers within their own zip codes, spending around $500 a month each over a three-month period.

“This is the first time that these businesses ever imagined that they could be on the larger screen in the home,” said Terrance Morash, vp of marketing at Slice. The campaigns delivered more than prestige, though.

Slice and UA compared the sales performance of the pizzerias in the test with similar pizza joints that decided not to run ads. By comparison, the campaigns delivered an average 3.2% incremental sales lift – and crucially, a 16.8% rise in sales after the campaign had ended, suggesting the ads had provided a long-term awareness effect hard to replicate through digital performance channels. After all, it’s all about outcomes these days.

While more smaller and mid-sized brands are biting, Comcast isn’t the only company competing for the industry’s long tail.

Half of Netflix’s ad revenue, for example, now comes via programmatic buys through third-party DSPs, rather than the direct deals favored by large brand advertisers. Amazon’s audience and commerce data, combined with a live sports portfolio it’s opened up to smaller advertisers, make it an attractive option.

“If you’re a small to medium sized business, and you need more bang for your buck, then you might look for the FAST channels of the world; something like Tubi and Pluto where people are watching a lot of content, but the CPMs are a lot cheaper,” said Lauren Anselmo, group director of paid media, Moroch.

Meanwhile, YouTube offers a halfway house for marketers just beginning to branch out from paid social and performance channels into streaming and TV.

Finch, a mental health and wellness app, began running its first ever brand campaign — an animated hero film extolling the virtues of everyday self care — earlier this month after focusing for years on paid social and search inventory.

“Connected TV kind of gives us something that we have never really had before, which is time, attention, and more of a captive audience,” said Katie Shill, vp of marketing at Finch. She told Digiday the company was running ads on Roku and YouTube.

With an annual media budget of $10-20 million, the company is at the high water mark of the mid-sized category. But it’s the kind of firm media owners want to sell ads to.

Shill said Finch had allocated 40% of its campaign budget to CTV and upper-funnel activity, and kept back 60% for the performance oriented channels such as Google and Meta that its team was used to.

“We didn’t want to completely flip it,” she said. “This brand buy is a layer on top of our existing performance budget.”

Buffalo-based full-service agency Crowley Webb, which works with local and regional advertisers like M&T Bank and Sullivan Tire & Auto Service, has been working to usher more smaller brands into CTV. Jessica Carroll, vp of media, said that’s typically meant using Hulu, Peacock, Disney+ and Amazon Prime.

Where clients are spending on both paid social and TV, Carroll said it’s still a 70/30 split in favor of the platforms. That ratio is gradually tilting, however. “The entry into CTV is lower now for clients. The targeting is increasingly getting better as more people shift to watching streaming. It means that [the] scalability [of campaigns] is increasing,” she said.

Meta, Google and Universal Ads’ streaming peers aren’t the end of that competition. Smaller advertisers also favor mobile app inventory like that offered by Applovin and Unity.

While the former already boasts a large ad network (its Q1 revenue rose 59% year on year to $1.84 billion), the latter’s leadership is working to expand its own ads business, which contributed to a Q1 revenue of $352 million this year.

Recent Universal Ads measurement features have been aimed at dislodging some of those mobile dollars. Last week, it finalized a deal with Adjust, AppsFlyer, Branch, Kochava, and Singular to allow brands to run campaigns on its CTV inventory that track mobile app users installing an app after they’ve seen an ad.

In other areas, Comcast has invested in its programmatic capabilities and opened up more sacred-cow inventory like the Olympic Games to programmatic buyers. Alongside streaming companies, it’s moved to build out menus of commerce-oriented ad formats like shoppable and interactive units. It’s also been one of several media firms to develop an AI creative tool intended to reduce production costs as a barrier to entry.

Those features will go some way to making the case for CTV to smaller and mid-sized businesses. The Slice pilot has given Universal Ads a playbook with which to back up that case. Michael Duchin, head of ad partnerships at Universal Ads, said: “That’s the guidance we’re giving: [take] three months to build awareness, drive recall, and build frequency within specific markets.”

For Comcast to create the broad base it’s aiming for, Universal Ads doesn’t just need a critical mass of small advertisers, but for those advertiser to stick with campaigns for weeks and months. Just like the pizza business, consistency is the key, and can lead to more dough.

OpenAI’s ads push has been met with intense scrutiny. It’s a potentially huge revenue driver, and it also raises questions about privacy, personalization, and bias in its chatbot.

Business Insider viewed data on tens of thousands of recent ChatGPT prompts collected by two adtech companies to examine how Sam Altman’s company is beginning to serve up ads. While only a tiny fraction of the chatbots’ responses include ads, trends have already emerged: tons of software and travel ads, and few for health. And a whole lot depends on how you phrase your questions.

At ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022, OpenAI kept responses ad-free as the tool gained steam. Then this year, that started to change. OpenAI launched tests in February with a select group of advertisers, and in May, it cracked the door wider by launching a new ad-buying tool and said more businesses could apply to begin bidding for ad placements.

Google, Meta, and Amazon have shaped their ad products over years of fine-tuning, turning their systems into some of the tech world’s largest money-makers. An OpenAI spokesperson told Business Insider that while it’s still early days for the ads effort, the team has been encouraged by signs that ads can be useful yet non-intrusive. Advertisers don’t get access to conversations or personal data, the spokesperson said. They didn’t respond to questions about the adtech firms’ data.

With ChatGPT’s weekly user base nearing 1 billion, advertisers see a huge opportunity. Jasman Singh, lead analyst at AI marketing startup Profound, told Business Insider his startup’s customers see ChatGPT as “one of the biggest surface areas for advertising in the history of technology.”

ChatGPT isn’t like TikTok, X, or Google.

When Singh scanned 66,000 ChatGPT ad placements from Profound’s dataset of opted-in users, he found a glut of software ads.

ChatGPT isn’t dominated by a bunch of TikTok-style ads for sunset lamps or selfie sticks. Software companies make up the largest share, accounting for 34% of the ads Singh analyzed, and ads for creator, design, and media tools account for another 15%.

Singh said this aligns with people’s usage of ChatGPT. While people use it for information or shopping, about 40% of the prompts he saw were work-related. ChatGPT serves ads to people as they seek the chatbot’s help with building things.

“The advertisers and the types of software that they sell to customers are really around tooling that helps customers do the work,” Singh said.

OpenAI appears to consider users’ intent as they search, Singh said. In the data, he found that questions with a commercial intent, such as “buy a swimsuit,” were slightly more likely to trigger an ad than questions seeking information or generating work. Only slightly, though — nothing like Google, which stuffs ads into the results on every commercial query.

Singh also said that only 1% to 2% of ChatGPT prompts yielded ads, and across ChatGPT conversations with an ad, 83% had only one. That could easily change. For now, OpenAI has avoided plugging up its product with too many sales pitches.

Not seeing ads on ChatGPT? Here’s why.

In mid-May, the British adtech company Adthena sent 90,000 prompts to ChatGPT to measure the chatbot’s behavior.

Adthena found that prompts with the “buy” structure yielded ads 15% of the time, more than “best X” (12%), “near me / service / installer” (10.3%), and “X vs Y” (8.5%). For example, if you ask “buy a used electric vehicle,” you’re more likely to get an ad than on a search for “used Tesla vs used Lucid.”

That approach makes sense, said Ashley Fletcher, Adthena’s chief marketing officer, because users would likely prefer that in a private conversation with a large language model.

ChatGPT looks more similar to Google when it comes to travel. Fletcher found that travel-related questions had more ads across more marketers than clothing or consumer electronics questions. He counted 31 different advertisers, including Expedia, Airbnb, Hilton, and Royal Caribbean.

On the flip side was health: “No telehealth, no Rx, no GLP-1, no large insurers,” Fletcher wrote. This was ChatGPT’s biggest difference from how Google serves ads.

For both users and advertisers, ChatGPT’s ad tools are in flux. While speaking with Business Insider, Fletcher refreshed the OpenAI ads manager page and got some good news: Adthena’s application to advertise had just been approved.

Over the last year and a half, the reasoning models of the world’s leading AI labs have grown more sophisticated, better at adhering to instructions, and capable of completing multi-step processes. That has resulted in a surge in demand for AI agents, bots capable of autonomously executing 10-plus-step processes on behalf of users.

Agents are taking over the internet. Last year, automated traffic spiked 23.5% from the previous year, eight times the rate of human traffic growth, according to research from Human Security. Retail sites have seen especially high surges, with traffic from AI sources up almost 400% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2026, per Adobe.

Historically, agents weren’t able to connect to external servers or complete commerce transactions—the pipes simply weren’t there. To enable AI agents to connect to external tools and data sources without existing APIs or custom integrations, Anthropic in late 2024 established Model Context Protocol. MCP, overseen by the Linux Foundation, which has since become the de-facto technical standard for agent-to-tool compatibility; it’s the universal adapter that allows agents to move across the web and work across different environments.

In the year and a half since the debut of MCP, there’s been a proliferation of technical standards—many of which are enabled by MCP—designed to facilitate agentic advertising and commerce. Brands, agencies, platforms, and publishers have expressed growing interest in agentic advertising and commerce, which could theoretically enable simpler navigation of the fragmented programmatic ecosystem and lead to more efficient, transparent, and cost-effective transactions.

But the explosion of specs is a lot to keep up with. Here’s a simple guide to some of the leading technical standards and how they differ. Note that this list is by no means exhaustive and there is a longtail of ad and commerce standards emerging from various industry players.

The infrastructure layer

Rolled out in November 2024 by Anthropic and now governed by the Linux Foundation, MCP is the foundational standard that enables AI agents of all kinds to connect to external tech, data, and services. It works by linking an MCP client, which is typically an agent built on a major large language model, with local data sources or remote servers, allowing them to speak the same language.

Introduced by Google in April of 2025, A2A is like MCP in that it is universally accessible and now managed by the Linux Foundation. However, rather than helping agents connect to external tech and data, A2A is a universal standard to agent-to-agent interactions. It allows agents to connect and communicate without exposing their internal logic, memory, or technical specs. A2A has gained widespread support from major SaaS players, including Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, SAP, Salesforce, and IBM. A2A was built atop a variety of popular standards including HTTP, SSE, and JSON-RPC.

Agentic advertising protocols

Created in October of 2025 by a consortium of organizations including Yahoo, PubMatic, and Optable—and helmed by Scope3 CEO and AppNexus co-founder Brian O’Kelley—AdCP is an open-source protocol that allows agents to communicate, as well as plan, negotiate, and execute media buys across different ad platforms. Built on MCP, AdCP is meant to standardize agentic digital ad transactions. The standard is overseen now by an independent industry group, AgenticAdvertising.org.

Designed in November 2025 as an alternative to AdCP, the IAB Tech Lab-created ARTF embodies a different approach to agentic media buying. Whereas AdCP provides a shared language for agents to negotiate ad campaigns with platforms, ARTF seeks to update the infrastructure of real-time bidding to accommodate both agents and more efficient standard media buys. It does so by offering a containerized framework that lets agents operate within existing SSP and DSP environments but promises lower latency auctions.

“It is doing overdue modernization [of real-time bidding infrastructure], as well as opening the gateway for the agentic world to be able to transact with the supply chain,” Shailley Singh, executive vice president of product and chief operating officer at IAB Tech Lab, explained to ADWEEK upon the launch of the framework.

ARTF has since become the keystone of the IAB Tech Lab’s wider Agentic Advertising Management Protocols (AAMP), an initiative that houses a range of agentic protocols for connecting buy- and sell-side tech, agentic guardrails, and an agent registry system.

Introduced originally by LiveRamp last year and donated to the IAB tech Lab, UCP, later rebranded as Agentic Audiences, provides a framework for agents to exchange user-level data in a privacy-safe way. Using the infrastructure, one agent can speak to another and swap identity and contextual signals—in essence, information about who a user is, what they are doing, and how they respond to given content—without exposing sensitive data on the user.

And instead of trading huge datasets about the user, Agentic Audiences lets agents use condensed machine-readable embeddings, which allows interpret data faster and with reduced energy expenditure. The framework is part of the IAB Tech Lab’s AAMP. It has been integrated with OpenRTB and Prebid to help seed industry adoption.

Created by CloudX before being donated to the IAB Tech Lab and folded into AAMP, Agentic Mobile takes the logic of agentic digital ad transactions and translates it to mobile.

Other lesser-known standards, such as Agentic Ad Object (a derivation of AdCOM), and various buyer and seller reference agents, also live within AAMP alongside ARTF, Agentic Audiences, and Agentic Mobile. These are part of a management layer that establish rules for how buy- and sell-side agents discover, negotiate, and complete orders.

Agentic commerce protocols

Introduced in September of last year by OpenAI and fintech company Stripe, ACP launched in tandem with ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout feature, letting autonomous agents assist users in completing purchases within the chatbot’s interface. The open standard provides the connective tissue between AI, merchant, and payment systems, enabling payment detail verification, order confirmation, and purchase approval.

In March of this year, OpenAI announced that Instant Checkout purchases would migrate to third-party applications. Now, users can discover products inside the ChatGPT experience, but OpenAI will no longer own the entire transaction; purchases will be handled on the retailer’s own site or app. ACP still links ChatGPT to merchants.

Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)

Debuted in January, UCP is designed to support agentic commerce across the shopping journey from product discovery and price negotiations to checkout and post-purchase support. It sets out a universal system for agents and tech to work together across consumer interfaces, business platforms, and payment tech. Created by Google in conjunction with a commerce partners iShopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, and Walmart, UCP is compatible with a variety of other agentic protocols, including MCP, A2A, and AP2.

Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Stripe all joined the UCP Tech Council in April 2026. Today, UCP is by and far the most dominant commerce protocol.

Created by Google in collaboration with Coinbase, PayPal, Mastercard, American Express, and others, AP2 lets AI agents securely exchange information and conduct commerce activity on users’ behalfs. It is built to keep real people in control, with mechanisms for verifying both the fact that a given user authorized a specific purchase (confirmed with a series of cryptographically signed mandates), and that the payment information provided is valid (confirmed with the help of the infrastructure partner that actually transfers funds). AP2 provides the answer to both of these factors in a format that any network or merchant can easily verify. AP2 is positioned as a payments layer add-on to A2A and MCP.

Established by Coinbase and Cloudflare and folded under management of the Linux Foundation in April of this year, x402 is a reimagined, crypto- and AI-friendly version of the HTTP 402 “Payment Required” status code. The standard lets AI agents make payments using stablecoins. Rather than requiring a user or agent to sign up for an account, input their payment information, or manage an API, an agent or or human user can pay for a product or resource directly inside a standard HTTP request workflow using stablecoins, primarily USDC. It is blockchain-agnostic.

Founding members of the protocol include Google, Mastercard, AWS, American Express, Microsoft, Stripe, Circle, and Fiserv. Google integrated x402 into AP2 to act as the default stablecoin transaction rail last September.

TAP, released in October 2025 by Visa in partnership with Cloudflare, creates a secure connection between agents and merchants throughout each step in an agentic commerce transaction. It is also meant to help merchants distinguish between trustworthy agents working on users’ behalfs and malicious or fraudulent bots. With TAP, an agent signs up and gets a cryptographic key tied to its unique identity; then, for each request that an agent sends using that key, the given merchant or infrastructure provider can check a reliable registry to pinpoint which agent sent the request, ensure its validity, and make sure that agent has been authorized to take actions. If all these criteria are met, the merchant can allow the agent to browse or check out. TAP relies primarily on traditional web cryptography, the most central being HTTP message signatures. Early adopters of include Coinbase, Microsoft, Shopify, Stripe and Worldpay.

Announced in April of 2025, Mastercard Agent Pay acts as a payments and trust protocol, similar to AP2, TAP, and x402. ith Agent Pay, Mastercard swapped a user’s card with a unique token assigned for an approved agentic interaction. Then, the system proves to the merchant that a real user authorized an action and that the agent followed the instructions it was given. Users remain in control, setting their own permissions and spending limits, helping to keep agents in line with authorized decisions only. The company is working with leading financial institutions like Citi, U.S. Bank, and other global organizations to make the tech more widely available, and in mid-2025, teamed up with Google to use UCP as the underlying common language for agentic commerce.

Introduced in March by agentic commerce platform Azoma, ACP is an enterprise-focused merchant protocol that offers a centralized system that brands and retailers can use to easily establish how their product catalogues are understood and acted upon by AI agents. The idea is that while platform-tailored standards like OpenAI’s ACP and Google’s UCP enable seamless agentic transactions, but don’t give brands control over how their products are represented or evaluated. It’s possible, in theory at least, that systems like ACP and UCP incorrectly score product data or even get product information wrong. AMP, which isn’t meant to replace those standards but work in collaboration with them, was created to act more as a brand governance layer, letting merchants establish a central source of truth about their products to then feed into other protocols.

TheFly reported on May 14 that TD Cowen reiterated its Buy rating on NFLX and maintained a $112 price target. The firm highlighted disclosures from NFLX’s upfront presentation showing continued expansion of its advertising-supported tier, with global monthly active users rising to 250 million from 190 million in November 2025. The company also outlined plans to expand the ad-supported offering into 15 additional markets starting next year while enhancing programmatic advertising tools for advertisers. TD Cowen noted that NFLX expects advertising revenue to reach $3 billion in 2026, contributing a significant share of incremental growth and reinforcing the importance of the ad-supported segment in its overall monetization strategy.

On the same day, it was reported that Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX) has been developing an internal production studio called INKubator focused on using generative artificial intelligence to produce short-form animated content. The initiative appears to be in early stages, with hiring activity reported across roles such as producers, software engineers, and computer graphics artists based on recently posted job listings.

Although the company has not formally announced the project, online professional profiles suggest the studio began operating quietly around March. The effort reflects NFLX’s exploration of AI-assisted content creation tools and expanding its internal production capabilities for animation and digital storytelling formats.

Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX) is a global streaming platform that offers TV shows, movies, documentaries, and games to hundreds of millions of subscribers worldwide.

While we acknowledge the potential of NFLX as an investment, we believe certain AI stocks offer greater upside potential and carry less downside risk. If you’re looking for an extremely undervalued AI stock that also stands to benefit significantly from Trump-era tariffs and the onshoring trend, see our free report on the best short-term AI stock.

At major advertising award shows, most of the work lives or dies in the entry’s case study—the compressed two-minute film explaining why an idea mattered, how it worked and why it deserves to win. Because these films are one of the industry’s highest-pressure forms of storytelling, they have spawned a cottage industry of specialists—and few are as sought after as Brei Monteiro.

Curt Garner, chief strategy and technology officer at the chain, explains how a “Summer of Extras” effort builds on and gamifies its recently relaunched rewards program

Chipotle Mexican Grill is bringing back its “Summer of Extras” promotion as a way to build on its recently relaunched rewards program, per details shared with Marketing Dive. Running from June 1 through Aug. 31, “Summer of Extras” follows a similar 2025 effort that drove 6.4 million activations and incremental sales estimated at more than $12 million, per the company.

“We’re really pleased with the response that we had last year with ‘Summer of Extras,’” said Curt Garner, president and chief strategy and technology officer at the chain. “We learned a tremendous amount of what matters [to consumers].”

Those learnings informed how consumers this summer can earn points, badges and free food through the rewards program, which has nearly 23 million active members. Interactive, gamified features include monthly streak tracking; local, state and national leaderboards; limited-timed “Side Quests”; exclusive offers; and gamified badges and progress tracking.

Last year, leaderboards, badging and other competitive elements resounded with the brand’s super fans, helping the promotion to generate nearly 38 million earned social impressions as consumers shared stats and rankings. Internally, Chipotle tracks “attractiveness ratings” for different parts of its app, experience and rewards program that measure where consumers dwell and what they click through.

“Knowing the engagement that people have with the brand and where and how they like to engage, coupled with the fact that we’ve already got this really strong value proposition, gave us a freedom within that framework to figure out how we plus-up the rewards, how we offer more choice, how we make it more enticing to join, and how we give people more flexibility and do all of those things without increasing the number of points it takes to get a reward,” Garner said.

Refreshed rewards

The “Summer of Extras” promotion will be an early test of how Chipotle can leverage its rewards platform, called “Rewards on Repeat,” which launched in April alongside a redesigned in-app experience. The rewards program is the chain’s latest effort to engage Gen Z consumers, who made up nearly half of all restaurant loyalty program signups in 2024.

Playing House

Review of Chanel Spring 2026 Ad Campaign by Matthieu Blazy with Creative Director Sheila Single and Photographer Alec Soth with models Aditsa Berzenia, Awar Odhiang, Bhavitha Mandava, Cathy Simmons, Josephen Akuei, Latahlia Hickling, Loli Bahia, Marta Freccia, Noor Khan, Trinidad Castaño, Waleska Gorczevski, & Xiuli Jiang

For his first campaign at Chanel, Matthieu Blazy does not storm the gates of history so much as quietly open the front door. Set within La Pausa, Gabrielle Chanel’s beloved Riviera villa built in 1928, the Spring 2026 campaign feels less like a declaration and more like an invitation – to wander, to play, to linger. Photographed by Alec Soth with creative direction by Sheila Single, Blazy’s debut unfolds with a kind of soft confidence, one rooted not in spectacle, but in spirit. If Chanel has spent recent years orbiting celebrity gravitational pull, this campaign gently turns the gaze back toward fashion itself – and, refreshingly, toward models.

There is something delightfully unfussy about the imagery. A model lounges across Coco Chanel’s bed as though she accidentally stayed too long after breakfast. Another leaps mid-air, hair wild, grin uncontained, transforming a grand bedroom into a stage for spontaneity. Outside, figures climb olive trees, gather in sunlit courtyards, and drift between rooms in a choreography that feels half family portrait, half artistic retreat. It is impossible not to notice the echo of those historic black-and-white photographs of Gabrielle Chanel herself playfully balancing in the branches with friends. Matthieu Blazy, wisely, does not imitate the past. He converses with it.

That sense of dialogue may be the campaign’s greatest strength. Chanel has always been a House built on contradictions – masculine and feminine, discipline and ease, polish and rebellion – and Blazy seems instinctively aware of this tension. Tailoring softens against movement. Embellished evening pieces mingle with effortless shirting. Models lounge, dance, and perch rather than pose stiffly. The clothes appear lived in rather than worshipped from afar. One gets the feeling that Blazy is interested not merely in preserving Chanel’s mythology, but in loosening its collar slightly.

There is also something quietly radical in his choice of casting. In an era where fashion campaigns often lean heavily on celebrity shorthand, Blazy instead assembles an ensemble of compelling models – Awar Odhiang, Bhavitha Mandava, Loli Bahia, Xiuli Jiang and others – allowing personality and collective energy to drive the narrative. The result feels democratic without losing aspiration, populated by women who appear to belong to the same world rather than simply sharing a frame.

Visually, Alec Soth proves an inspired partner for this first chapter. His photography embraces warmth over gloss, atmosphere over perfection. The light at La Pausa drapes the collection in softness, while the villa itself becomes more than a backdrop – it is a character, whispering reminders of Coco’s life among artists, dreamers, and provocateurs. Yet the campaign avoids becoming archival nostalgia. It remains contemporary because movement keeps interrupting reverence. Someone is always mid-step, mid-turn, mid-thought.

If there is a critique, it is only that the restraint may leave some viewers hungry for a stronger jolt of Matthieu Blazy’s own visual signature. The campaign is elegant, intelligent, and beautifully calibrated, but intentionally quiet. Then again, perhaps that is precisely the point. Chanel hardly needs another loud introduction. It needs trust, clarity, and a designer willing to listen before shouting.

For a first conversation, Playing House feels like a charming beginning. Matthieu Blazy hasn’t rearranged the furniture just yet – but he has opened the windows, let in some sunlight, and reminded us that even legends occasionally benefit from kicking off their shoes and climbing a tree.

“YouTube is not a social-media site,” a spokesman for the video platform’s parent company said last month after it lost a major trial focused on social-media addiction.

It is, however, a great place for ad dollars redirected from social media, television and more, according to the many YouTube executives and creators who will take the stage at its big upfront sales event on Wednesday.

“We think TV budgets could be spent on YouTube. We think quote-unquote ‘social budgets’ could be spent on YouTube,” said Sean Downey, president, Americas and global partners at YouTube parent Google. “We think ‘discovery’ budgets could be spent on YouTube. We think performance budgets could be spent on YouTube.”

YouTube for many years has competed for TV ad dollars with inventory served in and around videos posted by legions of amateur and semi-pro content creators around the world. Now the creator economy that it played a large role in building has also spawned rival ad businesses on platforms like TikTok and Meta Platforms’ Instagram. And brands and creators can post sponsored videos without necessarily paying platforms for ad inventory.

The streaming colossus’s ad presentation this year will include a number of new AI offerings as well as products such as YouTube Shorts, its vertical videos in the style of TikTok, and “creator partnerships,” where brands turn clips of a video creator’s material into ads and pay YouTube to amplify. One example is Coach’s recent campaign with creator Haley Pham.

YouTube has also been working more closely with creators to develop calendars of upcoming content, like Kareem Rahma’s “Subway Takes” series, so it can sell packages of ad products around themed programming from top names, much as TV networks are promoting their upcoming shows and big stars this week at their annual ad presentations.

YouTube has approached sports events in a similar way by tying packages of sports-adjacent creator content, from Shorts to video podcasts, to an upcoming game or tournament that’s of interest to advertisers, along with standard ad formats.

“That will be a big part of our behind-the-scenes discussions with advertisers,” said Downey. “We’re bundling anything on YouTube that works for them.”

The company will further press its one-platform-fits-all strategy with a new AI tool that it says will custom-build ad inventory based around cultural events that interest advertisers but aren’t on YouTube’s calendar. If a marketer wants to reach people interested in a tour by pop star Olivia Rodrigo, for example, YouTube’s AI can help identify content in proximity to the concerts that matches the brand’s needs, according to a YouTube spokeswoman.

The tool will be exclusive to upfront buyers, the spokeswoman said.

Focusing on products like creator partnership ads and Shorts makes sense in supporting Google’s goal of taking market share from Meta and TikTok, but doesn’t address the most pressing concerns of marketers who want more basic guidance about using YouTube as a springboard to reach larger audiences and ensure returns on their investments, said Nitin Sinha, head of media planning at ad agency Noble People.

“At the highest level, they just know that the more people they get onto that, the more revenue it ultimately is for Google,” Sinha said of YouTube’s AI tools and new products. “In an ideal world it would have been nice to just have a return to fundamentals.”

YouTube may also find itself in a sort of uncanny valley with buyers as elements of its business increasingly resemble traditional media but remain different in key ways.

The platform has invested heavily in sports and other live events, buying the rights to National Football League games for its YouTube TV service and signing a five-year deal to carry the Oscars starting in 2029, but it has no specific strategy regarding live content as opposed to the on-demand material that accounts for the vast majority of its videos, according to Downey. Nor does the company intend to move into production or develop higher-budget content like TV networks do, he said. And Google doesn’t operate a dedicated sales team for YouTube, despite the differences between advertising on Shorts and in Google search results, for example.

All that presents a challenge for advertisers that would like it to be a little more like the legacy media sellers that originated the TV upfronts decades ago, according to Jamie Gutfreund, founder of consulting firm Creator Vision.

“What doesn’t exist in an easily accessed way is that layer of premium inventory,” Gutfreund said. “If you step back, there is not yet any HBO or ESPN built on YouTube,” she said.

The responsibility increasingly lies with creators like MrBeast and podcaster Alex Cooper of “Call Her Daddy” fame, many of whom are attempting to build full-fledged media companies complete with their own sets of advertisers and sales teams.

Jimmy Donaldson, the creator known as MrBeast, on Tuesday held an upfront-week event for advertisers that emphasized not only his main YouTube channel but the Amazon Prime Video show “Beast Games” and his company’s platform to connect brands with creators.

YouTube will inevitably offer an impressive lineup of big-name creators and creative projects to upfront attendees. But most of its business still happens far from that stage, according to Downey.

“They’re most familiar historically with doing some of the upfront TV-type buying, and we certainly put that spike in front of them,” he said. “But for the majority of our advertisers, they’re still running through the auction on our AI-powered formats.”

If your growth model still depends on paying for search, you’ll soon be out of luck, a strong brand is needed to navigate industry changes.

There will be plenty of hip thrusts and pyrotechnics as the semifinals of the Eurovision Song Contest get underway in Vienna on Tuesday night. But this year a controversy around Israel’s participation in the campy celebration of music has the potential to overshadow the annual show of Schengen-area unity. As contestants were getting ready for the first round of competition, an unsettled scandal from last year resurfaced, creating a new cycle of headlines and another round of controversy.

In May 2025, Austrian singer JJ won Eurovision. Israel’s contestant, Yuval Raphael, came in second. But there was a major discrepancy between the official juries’ votes, which put Raphael in 14th place, and the results of the fan vote, which she won. This disparity led several members of the European Broadcasting Union, which operates the contest, to call for an audit and transparency with the data. (The director of the song contest told the BBC that “an independent compliance monitor reviews both jury and public vote data to ensure we have a valid result.”) Others floated theories that Israel had inappropriately influenced the results by boosting its contestant, but in a secret ballot, members of the EBU voted to enact rule changes, a result that permitted Israel to continue competing.

On Monday, The New York Times published an investigation revealing the extent of the Israeli government’s efforts to ensure the country remained in the competition as the war in Gaza became a subject of international controversy. Senior Israeli diplomats reportedly contacted officials and members of the EBU directly to make their case, one part of a broader effort to help Israel’s chances. The paper also alleges that a campaign boosting the country’s competitor might have been enough to change the outcome of last year’s contest.

According to records from the Israeli Government Advertising Agency, per the Times, the government of Israel spent at least $800,000 on ads to promote its Eurovision contestant in 2024. The Times says that an even larger campaign took place in 2025, though the outlet also reports that it did not find evidence of bot voting or other covert tactics having been used to directly manipulate the vote.

Israel has competed in Eurovision since 1973 and also hosted the competition in 2019, following its win in 2018. Doron Medalie, an Israeli songwriter who previously wrote for the country’s Eurovision acts, told the Times that the government has been running media campaigns to support its competitors since at least 2018. “Everybody is jealous and triggered because Israel is achieving great results,” he told the Times. Medalie denied that the government did anything inappropriate. (The Israeli government did not respond to the Times’ requests for comment.)

There have been some heated moments at Eurovision over the last decade, mostly related to pro-Palestinian sentiment appearing on air during the contest. In 2019, Iceland was fined after the members of its competing act held up scarves featuring the Palestinian flag on air. But generally, Eurovision has proceeded apace—until this year. After the 2025 voting controversy and amid the war in Gaza, Iceland, Spain, the Netherlands, Ireland, and Slovenia announced that they would not participate in 2026’s Eurovision as long as Israel remained in the competition.

Spain’s decision to bow out was particularly notable; that country was one of the big five that provided the most financial support to Eurovision, alongside the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Italy, and thus was automatically advanced to the finals. Its historically high status at Eurovision made the nation’s choice especially pointed.

The discontent is also playing out on the ground in this year’s host city. According to the AP, several pro-Palestinian demonstrations are planned for Vienna, and additional forces have been deployed from Germany to help with crowd control. It’s unclear if the tension will also make it inside the arena. This year’s contestant from Israel, Noam Bettan, will be taking the stage about halfway through the night on Tuesday, after Estonia’s entrant, Vanilla Ninja. Will he be glad he has extra experience performing to a booing crowd?

These figures may reflect the extremes. But independently, several CMOs confirmed to me that their search traffic is down sharply — and maintaining it now costs significantly more than it did two years ago.

Google is becoming the destination

As ChatGPT, Perplexity and the like are eating into search, Google is doing everything it can to keep users inside its own interface.

With AI Overviews, the platform is moving from a traffic distributor to an active intermediary that captures attention, shapes decisions, and monetises both.

Brands are no longer just competing with other brands. They are competing with the interface itself.

For two decades, marketers treated Google like a demand vending machine: insert budget, select keywords, receive customers. We built an entire profession around tweaking websites and keywords, so that brands show on Google page one.

In a world where you can’t reliably pay platforms to send customers your way, a strong brand will remain the best insurance policy.

Search marketing worked because of an implicit agreement: Google passes people on.

That agreement has now been cancelled – and it’s just a preview of what comes next.

Increasingly, AI agents can make purchasing decisions on behalf of humans. The platforms will no longer just be intermediaries. They could turn into buyers.

Marketers are again flocking to optimise for this. Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) trainings are full. Sure, GEO is a no-regret move. But growth from such optimising still rests on one assumption, that in the future, platforms will still send customers your way.

Brands and relationships

As optimising auctions becomes harder, strong brands and direct customer relationships will decide the winners.

People search “Porsche”, not “fast car”. “Swiffer”, not “disposable duster”. “PlayStation”, not “computer game”. If customers look for your brand instead of the category, you have already won half the battle.

Where does the AI learn what the customer prefers? From the human’s past behaviour. If your brand is already preferred, the machine learns that preference and acts on it. If your brand is unknown, the machine sorts by price and availability. You become a commodity by default.

For years, marketers have shifted budgets away from brand building into so called “performance marketing”. It was easier to do that traditional campaigning, as it was quick and promised easy returns.

In a world where you can’t reliably pay platforms to send customers your way, a strong brand will remain the best insurance policy.

A good image and salience aren’t enough. Strong brands build preference — the third step in the funnel after awareness and consideration. Preference is what makes someone ask for you by name, before they even check out alternatives. You can’t buy that. You can’t GEO-optimise your way to it. Building preference requires the full 4Ps marketing toolkit — as well as insight, creativity, and consistency.

There’s another path to thrive outside the platforms and that’s direct customer relationships. Not attribution models, not dashboards — actual connections. Be that email lists, loyalty programs, apps, user groups, subscriptions. Every direct relationship you own has compounding value.

From L’Oréal to Air France to Adobe, brands worldwide have made the shift to direct relationships. It won’t work for all categories. B2B or service brands will, admittedly, find this easier.

And building customer relationships is much more work than paying a platform to send people to you. You have to earn the opt-in. But the return is a feedback loop and an audience no platform can take away.

A refocus on brands and relationships doesn’t mean abandoning Google. To the contrary. To build brand preference and relationships, marketers must deploy the most effective channels — online and offline — including social, AI agents, YouTube, TV, and more.

For strong brands, the switch will be easier. For weaker ones, it means surviving the search drop while building brand strength and relationships simultaneously. It’s harder. But it’s the only switch worth making.

As the semifinals get underway, a new investigation returns to the controversial 2025 finals—and reveals exactly how far Israeli diplomats allegedly went in an effort to keep the country in the contest.