Hot List: YouTubeTV’s Fumble And Paramount’s Comeback

Data & Measurement
Written By Jason Damata

“The team is hard at work both on the separation transaction and on following the board's direction to evaluate strategic alternatives... It's fair to say that we have an active process under way.” - David Zaslav, President and CEO, Warner Bros. Discovery

  • Trade Desk earnings have revenue up and strong guidance, but stock is down 18% in 30 days. Maybe word is getting around about Amazon’s low take rates?

  • Warner showed $9b in Q3 revenues last week, blaming TV for modest losses while stoking fires that something may happen soon. Will Zas sell to Netflix? Apple?

  • Paramount is on fire, up 100%, check back next week for takes on their earnings today.

The TL;DR

YouTube locks sidebar on mobile ads, removing close option [Search Engine Land]

  • TL;DR: YouTube removed the “X” close button on mobile horizontal video ads, keeping shoppable panels fixed throughout horizontal video ads. For advertisers, this increases the persistence of visibility; for viewers, it reduces control and may impact the viewing experience.

Roku Jumps On The API Bandwagon For Its Self-Serve Ads [AdExchanger]

  • TL;DR: Roku launched its new “Ads API,” a free, open toolkit that plugs directly into its self-serve Ads Manager and lets developers integrate reporting, audience targeting and conversion signals right from their systems. At launch campaign and creative management aren’t included yet but are promised later this year—marking a push toward making CTV advertising feel more like digital/social‐media buying.

Advertisers react to holiday creep by pushing TV spend earlier [Digiday]

  • TL;DR: Media buyers say that brands are moving up their TV and upper-funnel spend into October (even August for some) to get ahead of consumers who are shopping earlier than ever—and avoid being left behind when “holiday” actually starts. Rather than simply increasing total budgets, many are stretching campaign durations—starting earlier and extending later—to match a longer shopping season—and potentially avoid heavier cost spikes during the traditional peak.

​​CTV Manufacturers Have A New Tool For Catching Spoofed Devices [AdExchanger]

  • TL;DR: The IAB Tech Lab announced a new “device attestation” feature within its Open Measurement SDK, allowing manufacturers (e.g., Apple, Amazon) to affirm that ad impressions are delivered on real connected-TV devices—not spoofed ones. This deterministic signal (vs. probabilistic heuristics) gives advertisers and platforms a clearer path to weed out invalid traffic and faked inventory at scale.

LG Ad Solutions Introduces Agentiv, an AI-Powered Advertising Technology Platform [Business Wire]

  • TL;DR: LG is rolling out “Agentiv,” a platform of AI agents intended to streamline media-planning and campaign execution, reducing time for reports from days to hours. The development shows a shift toward “agentic advertising” — media buying where AI tools play a larger role in operational workflow while humans still handle strategic decisions.

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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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