MiQ acquires in-app specialists Rocket Lab
Global programmatic media company MiQ has announced it is acquiring Rocket Lab, a mobile app growth hub. The acquisition combines Rocket Lab’s deep in-app expertise with MiQ’s omnichannel offering to deliver an end-to-end solution for clients across all media channels.
MiQ has chosen Rocket Lab to accelerate in-app performance as a core product capability. This strengthens MiQ’s omnichannel proposition and enhances Sigma — its AI-powered operating system — by integrating critical mobile and regional data into its 700 trillion signals ecosystem.
This announcement follows MiQ’s recent acquisition of Adsmovil, positioning the company as the leading independent programmatic player for brands and agencies across Latin America, with a strong regional footprint including Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Uruguay.
MiQ clients will now benefit from Rocket Lab’s app growth solutions, while MiQ will support Rocket Lab in scaling across its fastest-growing regions, particularly in APAC.
Rocket Lab will operate as an independent business unit under MiQ’s ownership and continue to be led by Juan Echavarria Coll as CEO, ensuring continuity for clients, partners, and employees. There will be no changes to the organizational structure of either company.
JCDecaux teams with Sea Cleaners to remove “branded litter”
A recent study published in the Journal of Business Research, and validated for the local market by Nielsen, shows that when a brand appears as litter, people are willing to pay less for its products. 2% less.
Now, New Zealand based charity Sea Cleaners and JCDecaux, the global outdoor media company, have teamed up to combat litter and take those ads out of rotation. They have launched Reverse Media Schedules, a new media product designed to help brands understand and respond to these negative impressions. It treats litter as a form of unplanned media and measures the value of removing it.
Developed by Dentsu Creative and Carat, along with advisory partners Finch and audience data experts Nielsen – they have combined litter audits, audience data and media modelling to calculate where branded waste is appearing, how visible it is and the potential impact on consumer perception and purchasing behaviour.
Already gaining momentum, brands in New Zealand including Heineken, Export and Monteith’s have invested in Reverse Media Schedules, committing a valuable financial contribution to help expand ocean clean-up efforts.
The initiative introduces a new way for brands to think about sustainability. Rather than treating clean-up as a charitable activity, it reframes it as a media investment that can help protect brand value while delivering measurable environmental impact.
Samsung Ads’ TotalView™ bridges linear and streaming for advertisers
Samsung Ads, the advertising arm of Samsung Electronics’ media division, has announced the launch of TotalView™ , a new solution that provides a unified view of total ad reach across the Samsung Smart TV ecosystem, spanning both linear and streaming. TotalView™ is designed to help advertisers eliminate blind spots and enrich their planning, targeting, and measurement with a comprehensive dataset that captures the full picture of TV campaign performance.
The TotalView™ dataset can be applied throughout the campaign lifecycle — from pre-campaign planning, where it helps identify untapped audiences and forecast deduplicated reach, to in-flight activation for incremental reach targeting on Samsung Smart TVs, and post-campaign reporting, where it can be overlaid to deliver deeper insights into audience ad exposure, performance and TV viewing behaviours.
“As the leading Smart TV manufacturer, Samsung has a unique vantage point on how viewing behaviours are evolving across both linear and streaming,” said Alex Hole, SVP and General Manager, Samsung Europe and MENA.
Mercurius Media Capital makes its first investment in fire safety tech
Mercurius Media Capital (MMC), the first U.S.-based media-for-equity venture fund, today announced a $1.5 million investment in a UK-headquartered fire safety technology company, LifeSafe Technologies. The deal represents MMC’s entry into the fire safety tech sector, a category the fund has identified as one of the largest consumer markets in the U.S. with no established brand leader.
MMC invests media capital in exchange for equity, focusing on consumer categories where strong underlying demand exists, but no brand has established dominance. Fire safety is a clear example: a category present in virtually every American household, yet one where no single brand drives purchasing decisions. With over a million units already sold internationally, LifeSafe has validated consumer demand in the UK and U.S. for a modern alternative. MMC’s investment is designed to convert that demand into U.S. market leadership.
Advertiser adoption of subtitling has doubled in two years
Adoption of subtitling in UK advertising has doubled in just two years, rising from 27 percent in 2024 to 54 percent so far in 2026, according to new data from XR Extreme Reach. The findings point to a meaningful shift in how the industry approaches accessibility, with every ad category increasing caption usage year-over-year, suggesting this is a structural change rather than a short-term trend.
The XR data highlights both progress and gaps. Government advertising saw the steepest rise of any sector, up 51 percentage points, while Beauty and Personal Care leads all categories with 81 percent of ads subtitled. Automotive, however, lags behind at just 28 percent, the lowest of any industry tracked, pointing to a persistent accessibility blind spot that the sector has yet to address.
“More viewers are choosing to watch TV series and social content with subtitles on, often by default, and advertisers are clearly taking note,” said June Johnson, Director of Accessibility Services, XR.
XR Extreme Reach’s analysis is based on hundreds of thousands of ad deliveries across 2025 and 2026 year-to-date via its global ad delivery platform in the UK, covering 20 industry verticals. As part of the delivery process, XR tracks whether accessibility features such as subtitles are present on each ad, allowing subtitle adoption rates to be calculated as the share of total deliveries that included subtitles across each vertical and time period.
Amagi launches AI platform Newspulse
Amagi today launched Newspulse, an Agentic AI platform that watches live news broadcasts and scans VOD libraries, automatically identifying individual stories and packaging them as social-ready clips, vertical videos, and news bulletins.
Today, 93% of young adults (ages 18–29) get their news via digital devices, and 76% rely directly on social media for news (Pew Research Center), creating a challenge for traditional news broadcasters: reach those audiences on digital platforms or lose them entirely.
Newspulse aims to provide a single, unified platform that handles the full pipeline, from broadcast ingest to social publishing. It scans live feeds in real time, identifies individual story segments, and converts each one into publish-ready content for digital channels.
“The newsroom’s historical hesitation around AI has centered entirely on the fear of losing editorial control and brand integrity,” said Srividhya Srinivasan, Co-founder and CTO at Amagi. “With Newspulse, we are changing that equation. Our policy engine ensures the AI acts strictly within the newsroom’s defined guardrails, autonomously handling the heavy lifting of multi-platform formatting.”
Amagi Newspulse is currently in limited availability testing with select newsroom partners, with general availability expected in June 2026.
British ads shedding pounds
The number of UK adverts showing diverse body types plummeted in 2025 amid wider debate about cultural shifts in beauty ideals and the seeming decline of body positivity, new data from Kantar shows.
Just 15% of TV and digital ads showed different female bodies in 2025 versus 28% in 2024. The decline was similarly stark for campaigns showing diverse male body types which fell a whopping 12 percentage points year on year to just 18% of ads. The change brings the UK closer in line with the USA and global averages, despite it previously being far ahead.
The drop in the UK’s performance risks denting advertisers’ commercial effectiveness, warns Lynne Deason, head of creative excellence at Kantar: “Body diversity seems to have fallen off adland’s radar. The change is right across the board, impacting men as well as women.
“This pull back from diversity should set alarm bells ringing because we know that inclusiveness sells, and in fact it’s getting more important to consumers not less so. In 2025 nearly two thirds of people (65%) told us they valued companies who promote diversity and inclusion, up from 59% in 2021[1].”
Research has previously found that positive people portrayals in advertising drive a 3.5% to 5% uplift for short-term sales and boost long-term sales by 16% compared with less inclusive ads.
