Hot List: Lots To Cover

Data & MeasurementAdvertising
Written By Jason Damata

“It’s time to start treating the ad tech industry as a national security threat.”- Sen. Ron Wyden

This weekend my teenage son Rio asked me to go to a movie with him—called Backrooms — I said yes without knowing what that is. And much to my surprise, there were only a few open seats available anywhere on LA’s West Side, despite plenty of showings. The movie (which topped the box office over Star Wars) was weird, visually engaging and intentionally incoherent: “It’s a YouTube thing, not corporate slop,” he explained. Touché.

Speaking of teens, we’ll be back at Cannes with Explain It to a Teenager. If you have a teen who wants to participate or you want to put your company in the hat to be featured you can sign up on the site.

And we’ll be kicking off sessions at the Stream TV show again this year, let us know if you’re attending and look for a discount code below.

Alas, enjoy a bundle of original articles and dozens of headlines from a busy time in TV, below.

Walmart names Yahoo and Magnite as partners in its ad tech tuneup [Ad Age]

TL;DR: Walmart is expanding its CTV advertising ambitions by integrating Yahoo and Magnite into Walmart Connect, making its retail shopper data and VIZIO inventory easier for advertisers to buy and measure across more platforms.

Roku Revamps Its Home Screen To Appease Both Consumers And Advertisers [AdExchanger]

TL;DR: Roku unveiled a new home screen featuring a "Top Picks for You" section, easier access to subscriptions, and a new search function, all designed to personalize the viewing experience — with Roku, VIZIO, and Samsung all competing to help advertisers reach viewers during the content discovery phase before they land in ad-free streams.

Google, Netflix, and Amazon Set to Dominate CTV by 2030 [MediaPost]

TL;DR: According to research firm Omdia, global CTV advertising is projected to nearly double from $44 billion in 2025 to $81 billion by 2030, with Google/YouTube (26%), Amazon (13%), and Netflix (9%) collectively accounting for half of that market.

The Trade Desk’s Fall From $69 Billion Digital-Ad Darling [The Wall Street Journal]

TL;DR: The Trade Desk has seen its market cap fall from a peak of nearly $69 billion in December 2024 to around $10 billion today, amid slowing revenue growth, executive turnover, and intensifying competition from Google, Amazon, & Meta.

Pirated Sports Streams Are Warping TV’s Most Important Ratings [AdExchanger]

TL;DR: A new report from ad tech auditing firm Adalytics found that illicit livestreaming services are distributing unauthorized streams of major sporting events, like the Super Bowl, to hundreds of thousands of devices, making it nearly impossible to accurately measure total viewership.

US Sports Converged TV Advertising 2026 [EMARKETER]

TL;DR: Live sports advertising is set to become a more than $20 billion business in 2027, growing far faster than the broader television market even as audiences fragment everywhere else, according to a new report.nearly $25 billion by 2030, according to the report.

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Jason Damata

Jason is the founder and CEO of Fabric Media, a media incubator and talent consortium. The company serves leading-edge TV disruptors- from data and analytics platforms to TV networks to emotional measurement companies. Damata has traveled the country for C-SPAN, where he worked with MSOs, produced educational political programming. He has served as CMO of Bebo when it was the world's 3rd largest social network, led marketing for Trendrr until it was acquired by Twitter and helped build the world's largest LIVE broadcast offering at explore.org where he built up a global syndication network. He is an analyst for companies on the edge of TV innovation such as iSpot, Inscape, Canvs, TNT and more.

http://linkedin.com/in/jasondamata
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