The cross-channel picture: strategy, maturity, and the tool stack that ties it together.
The joint draft agrees on what Google must build and splits on when, where, and who checks. The gaps are six months on Prebid access, a separate 24-month clock outside the United States, and most of the monitor’s powers.
A federal court dismissed the Chegg and Penske Media antitrust suits over AI Overviews because an expectation of traffic is not an agreement. On the same day, Cloudflare opened two ways to charge AI companies, and neither reaches the crawler that matters most.
The court refused to break up Google’s ad tech stack and ordered interoperability instead: AdX bids into Prebid and rival ad servers, exportable data, and a monitor for six years. The order reaches worldwide, and on the buy side it binds Google Ads, not Display & Video 360.
Seventeen percent of chief marketing officers (CMOs) have cut marketing jobs because of AI. Thirty-six percent expect to within two years. The gap between those numbers is where the restructuring is actually happening.
In 2026 the billboard reports back. Programmatic buys the majority of digital out-of-home, measurement moved from impressions to incrementality, and outdoor screens now compete for performance budgets, not just awareness lines.
Streaming is now nearly half of US TV viewing, but connected TV still draws only about 8% of ad spend. The gap is the last piece of underpriced reach in video, if you can survive the measurement and frequency chaos to claim it.
Pay 10% on every affiliate sale and a chunk of those buyers were coming anyway. The 2026 shift is away from coupon volume toward deeper partnerships, but the number that decides whether the program pays is the one nobody prints on the invoice.
The most cited number in marketing came from analyzing 996 campaigns and taking the mean. It was never a law, and applying it to a three-year-old brand burning runway is how good research becomes bad strategy. The rule is real. The dogma is the problem.
