For decades, the alcohol category has been a reliable driver of trips and revenue for grocery retailers. But today, that consistency can no longer be taken for granted. According to NielsenIQ, alcohol sales in U.S. retail fell by nearly 3% in 2024 - one of the sharpest year-over-year declines in recent memory. Tariffs on imports and the popularity of non-alcohol alternatives and CBD products are creating headwinds.
With a limited timeframe to maximise publicity and attendance for the Season 3 premiere of Daryl Dixon, AMC Networks International Southern Europe, and its agency Avante, turned to programmatic DOOH for the very first time. To drive mass awareness, they used Adform's intuitive visual inventory map to cherry-pick 61 of the most relevant Clear Channel screens around Madrid's iconic Cine Callao. Instantly, the team could view available locations, screen specifications, and optimise placement.
He doesn't work for an ad agency (he's a motion graphic designer), nor did he have any kind of experience producing ads. What he did have was access to a collection of AI models that could produce text, voiceovers, images and video - all of the key ingredients he'd need in order to cook up a parody of a TV commercial. There wasn't any kind of pay involved with the project; he just wanted to experiment and possibly make his friends laugh.
Vudoo, a global provider of commerce media technology, and Kargo, a leader in delivering breakthrough omnichannel ad solutions across premium publishers for global brands, have announced a strategic partnership that makes scalable, shoppable advertising experiences accessible across leading digital environments. The alliance represents a key moment in the evolution of commerce media, shifting it from early innovation to a core, full-funnel capability for brands and agencies.
Ad tech has always lived in a world where money moves slower than the ads it sells. Everyone's floating - fronting payments to publishers while waiting weeks, sometimes months, for agencies and advertisers to settle up. The cost of doing so is only rising.
Brands have always been able to look at macro industry and cultural trends. But being able to balance those against granular, real-time data on what people are engaging with in social, through emails, and via their browsing and purchasing habits, gives a much more complete picture about the types of products and experiences that are really resonating. And now, with AI agents, AI search and other tools taking curation to an entirely new level, it's become even more important that products present a unified front.
"I think it especially helps our smaller advertisers activate on the platform, because they really appreciate the simplicity and the automation," Reddit's COO Jennifer Wong told Digiday. "We've been working on this for a while, and we're really excited to make our ad platform easier to activate on." Still for now, as Wong put it, the alpha is just a small piece of Reddit's advertiser base, "It's still a small test, more than two hands of advertisers," she said, adding that so far it's received "encouraging feedback."
Marc Sirkin is a former CEO, CMO, and digital transformation leader known for driving growth, innovation, and exits at iconic brands including Microsoft, PwC, and Autism Speaks. As Founder of Marc Sirkin Consulting and host of the "Playbook Broken" podcast, he helps executives navigate existential change by integrating AI, aligning teams, and accelerating outcomes. He led the integration of Third Door Media into Semrush post-acquisition by preserving editorial independence while transforming virtual events and launching AI-powered products.
Communications can no longer rely on rigid quarterly plans or static message calendars. The most resilient organizations are building what can be called "adaptive communications"-a system that continuously learns from audience signals, cultural shifts and algorithmic trends. To plan effectively, you should: Structure modular budgets that can be reallocated across earned, owned and paid channels depending on performance. Embed data interpretation into day-to-day operations so that insights directly shape messaging.
The second annual connected packaging study from Appetite Creative polled 968 marketing execs at the start of 2023 and found a sharp rise in practitioners willing to invest in the medium. 88% of respondents say they are planning a connected packaging campaign this year and 92% agree that it is increasingly important. Last year, only 59% planned such a campaign and only 85% considered it important.
When AI is a bubble, and talking about AI being a bubble is a bubble ... what do you do? Right, you start talking about AI agents. And AI... agentic... what does it matter? Once you put out a new message, you quickly find a small group of people most likely to respond. You harvest that group fast, performance drops, you change the message, find a new cohort, repeat.
"After a few years of existential hand-wringing, the company has found its rhythm again by doing what it does best: scaling attention and monetizing it with ruthless efficiency," said Jeremy Goldman, eMarketer's senior director of briefings, in emailed comments. "While everyone else is still pitching AI moonshots, Meta has quietly turned AI into margin. Its ad tools are sharper, its targeting smarter, and its short-form video business is finally paying off."
Marketers today contend with many challenges when measuring the impact of their efforts. Part of that complexity comes from the proliferation of marketing channels they engage with: Running campaigns across TV, digital, social, and offline channels, it's tough to know what's working and what's not. Using MMM in combination with Lift Measurement will provide additional validation of your overall results, as both tests will indicate relative performance.
Some of our clients are including experiential marketing in their 2026 strategies. The use of AR and VR at these types of in-person events and activations is a great opportunity to engage communities and leave a lasting impression. It's also an easy way to introduce AI to events in a way that feels authentic and not scary. The real-world application of these strategies inspired me to dive into AR and VR in a marketing context for this piece.
The example was harmless. But it neatly captured the anxiety running through marketing departments right now: where's the boundary between automation that helps and automation that hurts? A made-up RV is one thing. An AI-generated image that shows a soda brand as the cause of rotting teeth is another. Those are the kinds of errors that can erode years of brand building in an instant.
Adslot Ltd has reported significant progress in its operations for the first quarter of fiscal year 2026, following a strategic turnaround involving cost management and restructuring. The company has seen growth in its customer pipeline and is activating new synergistic opportunities. The StoreFront platform, launched in late 2024, is expanding its reach with global publishers like Rakuten Viber and Vox Media, showing month-on-month growth.
Many WPP clients find the company's offerings "very complicated" and are looking for a simpler user experience, Rose told investors during the earnings report. What does a solution look like? "We need to be a little less holdco and a little more co," she said. This means more integration throughout the firm and more agency consolidation, as WPP focuses on simpler enterprise and tech solutions.
The Verizon Media-owned company commissioned Sparkler to conduct various studies across the UK, France and Germany in which they asked over 6,000 participants to determine the value of native ad formats via behavioural tests for a set number of brands. In the UK, 31% of people said the native ads they were shown across mobile and desktop devices drove purchase intent, for banner ads the figure was 27%.
