Amazon Ads and Global announce new integration
Amazon Ads and Global, the Media & Entertainment group, have announced a programmatic integration which gives advertisers using Amazon DSP access to the UK’s biggest commercial audio brands including Heart, Capital, and Smooth.
The programmatic partnership integrates Amazon DSP directly with DAX, Global’s pioneering digital ad exchange, which offers market-leading programmatic and data capabilities. It brings Amazon’s trillions of shopping, streaming, and browsing signals together with Global’s millions of listeners, enabling advertisers to reach engaged audiences at scale with full-funnel measurement and attribution.
From today advertisers in the UK will be able to access these audiences online, on mobile, via the Global Player app, and on smart speakers, including Alexa through Amazon DSP.
The integration is the latest collaboration between the two companies, building on a relationship that began with Global’s first audio ad on Alexa in 2017. It delivers a better advertising experience when listening to Global on Alexa and makes it easier for brands to reach relevant audiences at scale.
ITV Brings ITVX to In-Car Entertainment through partnership with Xperi
ITV has announced a landmark partnership with Xperi to launch ITVX, the UK’s leading commercial BVOD service, on the automotive video platform DTS AutoStage Video Service, Powered by TiVo. The agreement will see ITVX available in a wide range of BMW and MINI vehicles from today, with additional vehicles from Mercedes-Benz receiving the services in the near future.
This marks ITVX’s first launch in the in-car entertainment distribution sector, building on the numerous different platforms where the service is currently available, including connected TVs, streaming platforms, mobile devices and gaming consoles. ITVX is technically enabled by utilising the existing ITVX platform for the in-car environment, delivering viewers a seamless experience.
ITVX is the first UK Public Service Broadcaster streaming platform to launch on DTS AutoStage Video Service, Powered by TiVo as ITV makes a debut in the growing in-car entertainment market. DTS AutoStage Video Service, Powered by TiVo is designed to help automotive brands deliver a high-quality, content-first entertainment solution while retaining control of the user experience.
Loop Me tops IPA Digital Media Owners Spring 2026 Survey
IPA agencies and digital specialists have named Loop Me as the best overall media owner to work with, according to the IPA Digital Media Owners Spring 2026 Survey, published today (22 April).
In the survey, which details which media owners deliver the highest levels of service, and which have shown a commitment to continually improving their digital standards, 90.5% of respondents said that their overall experience of working with Loop Me was a good one.
In addition to securing the overall top spot, Loop Me also led for Ad Networks/Exchanges, DSP and Sales Houses. Meanwhile, Reddit came top among Online Pure Plays and Mail Metro Media was the best-performing Crossover Media Owner.
Five other media owners had an overall score of 80% or above: Reddit (87.3.%), GumGum (86.3%), Blis (83.8.%), Mail Metro Media (83.3%) and Captify (82.9%).
Taboola launches Realize+
Taboola (Nasdaq: TBLA), a global leader in delivering performance at scale for advertisers, has launched of Realize+, the next phase of Taboola’s performance marketing platform, Realize.
Realize+ is an agentic system that helps performance marketers unlock more conversions beyond search and social. It continuously makes and executes campaign decisions, helping drive incremental results, while reducing manual effort.
Taboola estimates that around 80% of marketers would increase investment in the open web if it offered automated, AI-powered campaign solutions that they get from the walled gardens. Additionally, nearly 86% say they would allocate up to a quarter of their performance budgets to the open web if such capabilities were available.*
Realize is a technology platform that helps advertisers achieve outcomes at scale, leveraging Taboola’s unique supply, first-party data, and AI. It enables performance campaigns across many of the world’s largest and most trusted publishers, OEMs, and apps.
Canva launches AI-powered automation in Affinity
Canva, the global AI and design platform, today announced at Canva Create a sweeping expansion of its Professional Suite. The new features deliver on Canva’s commitment to become the definitive platform for professional creatives, bringing together everything from first sketch to final delivery in one place.
With new Affinity functions, AI integrations, and the addition of Cavalry’s professional motion tools, Canva now represents a complete professional creative stack.
This news forms part of Canva’s wider announcement of Canva AI 2.0 –transforming Canva into a conversational, agent-powered AI system: enhanced by Canva’s frontier AI lab and years of investment in foundation models for design.
Canva recently acquired Cavalry, the professional motion design tool long trusted by leading studios for its procedural, high-quality animation capabilities. Today, the company announces that Cavalry’s full range of features – many of which previously required a subscription – are now available for free for all creatives. Cavalry can also be accessed under SSO as part of a Canva Enterprise seat.
Users can simply log in with their Canva account to get access from today.
TripleLift Launches TL Spark
TripleLift, a Creative SSP designed to orchestrate creative, data, and supply for measurable outcomes, has announced the launch of TL Spark, its coordinated intelligence layer. By unifying the essential levers of advertising performance – supply, creative, audiences, measurement, and optimisation – TL Spark offers an effective system for driving outcomes in the agentic era.
According to advisory firm Madison and Wall, AI-based ad spending is expected to grow to $57 billion in 2026. And IAB reports that two-thirds of ad buyers are focusing on agentic capabilities for both buying and execution. Proposed workflow standards like the IAB Tech Lab’s Agentic Advertising Management Protocols bring clarity to how buyer, seller, and other adtech agents can interoperate, but too many adtech offerings introduced in the market feel like limited automation solutions that fail to build off of AI’s learning potential.
Rather than simply accelerating existing tasks through automation, TL Spark focuses on intelligence to better understand the relationship between creative assets, supply paths, audience segments, and measurement outcomes.
TripleLift’s sell-side proximity means that curation, publisher first-party data, and supply-path choices increasingly determine how effectively budgets translate into results. TL Spark can then see and influence how spend moves through inventory and reallocate it toward creative, audience, and supply combinations that drive outcomes.
ChannelSight launches the ChannelSight.AI Platform
ChannelSight today announced the launch of a new platform, ChannelSight.AI, designed to help brands gain real-time visibility and to optimise how they are discovered, understood, and recommended by AI tools and Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.
Consumer behaviour is shifting from traditional search to AI-generated recommendations and agentic commerce, in which an AI agent searches, compares and completes the purchase for the user.
AI tools surface products based on data quality and content structure, not ad spend. For marketing and brand teams, the model that drove growth for years is breaking down. Brands know there is a problem – if a product is not understood by AI, it won’t be recommended – but few know where to start when trying to solve it.
ChannelSight.AI is built to solve this. The platform audits how a brand’s products appear across AI systems, scores their discoverability and produces specific, actionable, recommendations for improvements, each tied to a quantified revenue impact. With access to a powerful suite of tools, brands can see exactly where they stand and what they need to fix to improve their products’ AI discoverability.
ChannelSight.AI is available now. Brands can book a free demo at ChannelSight.ai to see how their products currently appear across AI systems and where they are losing ground. Agencies looking to support clients in this space can get in touch to explore the ChannelSight to explore the partner programme.
Algomarketing opens ‘Centre of Evolution’ in Lisbon
Algomarketing has announced the launch of its Centre of Evolution (CoE) in Lisbon, Portugal – a new hub designed to develop and embed 200 professionals into AI-enabled marketing roles across the tech sector over the next two years.
The Centre is built around a simple idea: the best way to build AI capability is to apply it to real work. Marketers based in the Lisbon hub will support live marketing programmes for technology organisations, using AI tools and automation as part of day-to-day delivery.
Algomarketing has already begun recruiting for more than 40 roles in the first phase of the programme, with a further 50 expected by the summer. This is expected to scale to 200 roles over the next 24 months, supporting a range of global technology organisations. The company’s current clients include the likes of Google, Zoom, Stripe, and Reddit.
Professionals joining the hub will work across a range of marketing roles, from junior to senior levels. Alongside their day-to-day responsibilities, they will receive structured enablement to help them use AI confidently and responsibly in their roles, including practical tool training, guided support to improve ways of working, access to playbooks and templates, and pathways to earn relevant industry credentials.
Firefly expands programmatic capabilities through integration with VIOOH
Firefly, an out-of-home (OOH) advertising company, has announced an integration with VIOOH, a premium global digital out-of-home (DOOH) supply-side platform.
The integration provides an additional programmatic pathway for advertisers to discover and activate Firefly’s inventory through VIOOH’s global platform. Buyers can access Firefly’s network via major demand-side platforms (DSPs), enabling seamless, data-driven campaign execution across high-impact, street-level environments.
Through this integration, advertisers can now access Firefly’s moving fleet and digital car top network via VIOOH’s platform, enabling streamlined, data-driven campaign activation across mobile OOH formats. The partnership connects Firefly’s inventory to a global ecosystem of demand-side platforms, allowing brands to plan, buy, and optimize campaigns in real time within familiar programmatic workflows.
By complementing stationary placements with mobility and route-based urban coverage, Firefly enables campaigns to extend beyond fixed locations and reach audiences continuously as they move through the city.
Firefly’s network of more than 60,000 screens delivers coverage across key urban environments, reaching consumers throughout their daily journeys. By integrating with VIOOH, Firefly extends its existing programmatic footprint, enabling advertisers to activate campaigns that move with audiences across neighborhoods, transit corridors, and high-traffic areas.
impact.com expands YouTube collaboration with Creator Partnerships API adoption
impact.com, a commerce partnership marketing platform, is expanding its collaboration with YouTube as an early adopter of the YouTube Creator Partnerships API, giving brands and agencies another direct, reliable way to manage creator marketing campaigns on YouTube.
The integration enables brands to discover creators, manage sponsorships, and measure performance in one place using verified, creator-consented data. This provides brands with more reliable, first-party insights, helping them better evaluate and select creators while improving confidence in campaign measurement.
As creators become a core part of the media mix, brands are expressing increasing desire to treat creator marketing like any other performance channel, with clear visibility into who drives results and why. At the same time, as discovery shifts toward AI-driven recommendations and answer-based experiences, the role of creators is expanding. Creator content not only influences decisions, it increasingly determines how brands are discovered in the first place.
impact.com’s integration with YouTube addresses both of these shifts by giving marketers direct access to real audience insights and performance data, enabling better partner selection and clearer performance attribution.
The integration also enhances creator discoverability, helping brands more easily find and partner with the right creators, while enabling secure sharing of performance data to demonstrate value and unlock new partnership opportunities.
UniLED Software and AdMOTO join forces on mobile DOOH advertising
UniLED Software and AdMOTO have joined forces to set a new standard for transparency, accountability and performance in mobile digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising.
This strategic partnership will see UniLED’s third-party verification platform, UniLIVE, rolled out across AdMOTO’s digital mobile billboards on its 350 strong fleet of AdScooters.
By meticulously tracking and monitoring ad plays, the UniLIVE platform will ensure AdMOTO’s clients have access to independently verified campaign delivery data. This will provide media agencies and advertisers with the additional reassurance that their mobile DOOH campaigns have behaved as they should – playing in the right place, at the right time.
Additionally, this accurate and impartial performance data will ensure that mobile DOOH measurement and post-campaign reporting is as accurate as possible. As a result, agencies and advertisers have a more truthful and transparent picture of the effectiveness of mobile DOOH campaigns, and is further proof of this innovative media channel’s worth.
Venatus Partners with Roblox as Official Reseller for Rewarded Video Across the UK, France and Germany
Venatus has announced its agreement with Roblox to partner as the official reseller for Rewarded Video across the UK, France and Germany, providing brands with premium access to Rewarded Video inventory within one of the most influential platforms shaping Gen Z culture.
Venatus now provides advertisers with a premium access point to Rewarded Video inventory across all three markets, backed by a direct commercial relationship with Roblox, ensuring scalable access across highly engaging environments.
Roblox has rapidly evolved beyond a gaming platform into a cultural hub for Gen Z, with the 18+ age demographic a key growth area, expanding by over 50% year-on-year, highlighting its shift toward a more mature, commercially valuable audience.
Through this partnership, Venatus enables advertisers to reach these audiences via opt-in Rewarded Video ads, where players earn in-game value in exchange for viewing an ad. These formats align directly with how Gen Z prefers to engage: opt-in, value-driven, and seamlessly integrated into the experience.
Mirakl Connect accelerates Lacoste’s expansion on premium marketplaces
Mirakl Connect, the AI-powered multichannel selling solution, has been selected by Lacoste — the iconic house founded in 1933 and present in nearly 100 countries — to accelerate its growth on major fashion marketplaces, including Galeries Lafayette and El Corte Inglés.
This partnership marks a significant milestone in Lacoste’s distribution strategy and confirms a fundamental trend: the world’s leading fashion houses are turning to the platform economy to accelerate their growth. Retailers leveraging marketplace infrastructure record 34% annual growth — nearly four times faster than traditional e-commerce — according to Mirakl’s 2025 Marketplace and Dropship Index. During that year, marketplace growth advanced nearly 3 times faster than traditional e-commerce, and brands operating across multiple channels achieve an average business volume 17.5 times higher than those present on a single channel.
Mirakl Connect will support Lacoste at every stage of its multichannel selling journey. Right from onboarding, the AI-powered Catalog Transformer, built on Mirakl’s proprietary language models, reduces time-to-market from several months to just a few weeks by automating product catalog optimization at scale.
Bedrock debuts containerized DSP deployment on Index Cloud
Bedrock Platform has debuted the world’s first containerized demand-side platform (DSP), hosting an instance of its bidder atop Index Exchange’s Index Cloud infrastructure.
The integration introduces a new model for how DSPs host their bidders at scale on the open internet, reshaping the economics of programmatic buying while preserving the independent roles of DSPs, SSPs, agencies, and media owners.
By containerizing its ad decisioning and running its bidder atop Index Cloud, Bedrock can operate more cost efficiently, participate across a broader share of available opportunities, mitigate the loss of reach created by downstream QPS constraints, and significantly reduce the overhead typically associated with operating at scale. The result is a shift in the cost curve of programmatic buying, reducing the dependency between infrastructure spend and market access.
While running its bidder within Index Cloud, Bedrock maintains full control over its decisioning and bidding, with its platform and strategy remaining fully its own. A group of leading independent agencies, including InterMedia Group and Bay Street Media, and the advanced marketing platform Navigator are among the first to test the integration.
Stagwell (STGW) Becomes First Partner to Adopt The Trade Desk’s Koa Agents
Stagwell (NASDAQ:STGW) and The Trade Desk have announced the expansion of their global partnership, with Stagwell becoming the first global marketing network to adopt Koa Agents, The Trade Desk’s new alpha agentic AI capabilities for media planning, buying, optimization, and measurement across the open internet.
Koa Agents introduce a simpler way to run advertising: instead of manually configuring campaigns step-by-step, marketers can describe their goals and direct AI-powered agents execute, optimize, and continuously improve campaigns in real time with visibility and control. Tasks that once required days of setup and analysis now happen automatically and adapt as conditions change, enabling faster decisions and stronger performance.
As part of this first to market partnership, Stagwell will connect the AI capabilities within Stagwell Media Platform with Koa Agents through Open Agentic Kit, The Trade Desk’s agentic integration framework. Through integration with Open Agentic Kit, StagwellMedia Platform and The Trade Desk bring their agentic capabilities together to create a unified system that powers custom, automated workflows seamlessly connecting planning, activation, measurement, and optimization.
Stagwell will also be among the first to adopt The Trade Desk’s conversational user experience, enabling traders to ask why campaigns are under-pacing or performing, identify drivers of results, and receive clear, actionable recommendations instantly. Stagwell expects to make these Koa Agent capabilities available to select clients in closed beta later this summer.
Fifty5Blue to deliver TV and Online Video Audience Measurement service in Ireland
Fifty5Blue has been selected by TAM Ireland as its new provider of audience measurement services for the Irish television and video market.
Subject to the completion of final contract negotiations, Fifty5Blue will be responsible for delivering a modern audience measurement solution designed to meet the needs of broadcasters, advertisers and agencies, while maintaining the high standards of robustness, transparency and independence that underpin the Irish trading currency.
Fifty5Blue will establish a nationally representative panel of 1,050 households using its latest measurement technology – combining People Meter and Focal Meter – to deliver cross-platform viewing measurement across TV sets, tablets, PCs and smartphones. Recruitment for the panel is expected to begin shortly with the new service planned to launch in January 2028.
The new partnership will support TAM Ireland’s commitment to innovation, unparalleled methodological rigour and broad industry collaboration, as audiences continue to engage with content across an increasingly complex video landscape.
Clarks launches curated marketplace powered by Marketplacer
Marketplacer has revealed it is the platform behind the newly launched Clarks Marketplace, enabling the global footwear brand to expand its digital offering through curated third-party selling.
The Clarks Marketplace marks a significant evolution in how one of the world’s most recognised footwear brands expands its digital offering — enabling third-party sellers and complementary brands to trade within a single, unified environment, without compromising the experience customers trust.
Powered by Marketplacer’s technology, the platform gives Clarks the infrastructure to onboard, manage, and scale third-party sellers seamlessly, unlocking category expansion and revenue growth while retaining full control over a curated portfolio of brand and seller partners.
Traditional retail expansion requires significant capital, inventory risk, and supply chain complexity. The Clarks Marketplace model sidesteps these barriers entirely — allowing Clarks to broaden its assortment through carefully selected partners, giving customers more reasons to shop within a single, trusted brand environment.
Pharmacy2U announces Loose Women lead sponsorship
Pharmacy2U, the UK’s largest online pharmacy, has announced a year-long lead sponsorship of flagship ITV panel show, Loose Women.
The campaign, planned and executed for Pharmacy2U by IMA, launches 27 April. It will feature a series of bespoke idents and YouTube content designed to reflect real-life health conversations across the UK and promote Pharmacy2U’s range of services, including its dedicated women’s health section.
The announcement comes after a standout year for Pharmacy2U, which recently broke through the two million patient milestone. In the last 12 months, the Leeds-based company has launched its new app and health hub, relaunched its Pet Health service The PharmPet Co under the Pharmacy2U brand, and completed a series of strategic acquisitions, including Care Quality Pharmacy, one of the UK’s largest care home pharmacy providers.
The sponsorship is IMA’s first campaign for Pharmacy2U since the agency’s appointment to support the brand across comms strategy, campaign creative, ATL media and production. The sponsorship will be amplified across Pharmacy2U’s website and social platforms.
GoodGym’s ‘Workout for the Future’ campaign goes live on Sky
GoodGym has unveiled its new Sky TV advert, “Workout For The Future”, launching on 20 April 2026, encouraging people across the UK to get active while supporting their local communities and the environment.
The campaign follows GoodGym’s Grand Prix win of the Sky Zero Footprint Fund, which awarded £2 million in advertising to organisations aiming to drive positive environmental change, with GoodGym receiving the top prize of £700,000 in media value. Delivered in partnership with Sky Media, the campaign brings purpose-led storytelling to a national audience at scale.
The campaign reflects Sky Media’s continued commitment to championing organisations driving meaningful environmental and social change, while supporting GoodGym at a pivotal stage of growth. With plans to expand into 20 new areas and reach millions more people across the UK, the campaign taps into a growing appetite, particularly among younger audiences, for activities that combine physical wellbeing, social connection and real-world impact. GoodGym’s research supports this shift, with 83% of young people prioritising social connection and community impact ranking as the strongest motivator for getting involved.
MLB and built-for-CTV ad platform Adte renew their partnership for 2026
Major League Baseball (MLB) and Adte have renewed their partnership for a second year as the built-for-CTV advertising platform continues its expansion beyond free, ad-supported content (AVOD) and into live streaming.
Again in 2026, Adte has purchased an undisclosed amount of 15-second and 30-second midroll advertising inventory on MLB TV – MLB’s streaming service – for the platform to make available to its wide base of advertisers.
Adte is using its built-for-CTV platform, a proprietary demand-side platform (DSP) for brand-direct partnerships, to grow its live inventory and scale its advertising demand and performance. After all, an increasing number of brands now want to reach the audiences that have turned live-streamed sporting events into the new appointment television.
