Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) is publicly considering a sale after receiving acquisition interest from several buyers, the company announced Tuesday. WBD’s change in attitude could have significant implications for marketers by increasing audience reach and unlocking diversified ad inventory across popular IPs.
The New York Times is adding a Watch tab to its app Wednesday in an effort to boost engagement and usher in more advertising business. The tab will feature a mix of short-form, swipeable, vertical video content, per Adweek. In early 2026, the publisher plans to open video ad placements within the tab to brands through a beta program, per Axios. As publishers introduce vertical video ad inventory, marketers should rethink their media mix to include premium placements that mirror the engagement of social video—while considering how those ads may appear alongside hard news or opinion content.
Netflix reported a strong Q3 on Tuesday, increasing revenues 17.2% YoY, in line with the forecast issued in Q2. The company stated that it is on track to double its ad revenues in 2025, claiming Q3 was its strongest quarter yet for ad sales—proving that momentum is largely being driven by Netflix’s maturing ad offerings. Marketers can capitalize on audience appetite for ad-supported tiers, but should focus their investment in platforms with proven results as less dominant connected TV (CTV) providers are likely to struggle in Q3 and beyond.
Amazon plans to replace over 500,000 human jobs with robots as part of a major automation drive aimed at speeding up deliveries and cutting costs, according to The New York Times. After years of workforce expansion, the company is now focused on streamlining operations, with new robotic warehouses like its Shreveport, Louisiana facility already reducing staffing needs by 25%. Amazon expects to replicate this model nationwide by 2027, maintaining headcount while doubling sales by 2033. The shift toward automation is designed to boost efficiency, cut per-package costs, and reinforce Amazon’s dominance in US ecommerce through faster, cheaper fulfillment.
OpenAI launched an AI-powered browser—ChatGPT Atlas—and jumped headfirst into a new kind of rivalry with Google and Perplexity. ChatGPT Atlas is built around OpenAI’s flagship chatbot and features agentic capabilities. The browser is available globally on macOS, and access for Windows, iOS, and Android users is coming soon, per OpenAI. Companies should start optimizing for conversational search by ensuring websites are structured so AI agents can easily find and surface them in user queries. Brands should test both Atlas and Comet to see how their content surfaces and understand how AI browsers engage with users.
A minor technical failure took down Amazon Web Services (AWS) for several hours. Disrupted financial apps reportedly included Chime, Coinbase, and Venmo. Some financial institutions (FIs) were also reportedly affected.A mistake in a digital transformation project or a poor choice of vendor can have far-reaching consequences for a bank’s customer relationships and compliance with recordkeeping regulations. The solution for banks that can afford it has been redundancy through hybrid deployments to the cloud and on-premise.
Airbnb opted against launching a third-party app integration with ChatGPT because it “didn’t think [the technology] was quite ready,” CEO Brian Chesky told Bloomberg. While the company hasn’t ruled out joining the platform, its measured approach contrasts sharply with the enthusiasm of competitors like Expedia and Booking.com. Airbnb is prudent to have reservations about OpenAI’s commerce capabilities. While chatbots could reshape travel discovery and booking, early reports indicate ChatGPT’s utility for now is hampered by a clunky, finicky interface that is more frustrating than helpful. Rather than forge commerce partnerships with AI companies, Airbnb is focused on making its service an indispensable travel resource to keep its platform sticky.
Most (63%) of global social media users prefer short videos from creators, according to a March impact.com and EMARKETER survey.
Now that consumers can make direct purchases within ChatGPT, marketers and retailers must reimagine the customer journey once again.
TransUnion has introduced new pricing for credit scoring for mortgage borrowers, undercutting the pricing of FICO’s new mortgage credit scoring model: FICO charges resellers $10 per score, while TransUnion charges $4. The market for consumer credit data and how it’s packaged is hotly contested, and the government has helped facilitate competition. In addition, the fintech Plaid, a newcomer to credit reporting, just introduced a cash flow–based scoring model. This competition is good for consumers, because it creates more ways for them to access credit. And it should also be good for data buyers, including banks, because it will mitigate prices and encourage the development of more sophisticated scoring models and data products.
Walmart has expanded its Scintilla Digital Landscapes platform with new capabilities that give suppliers a clearer, data-rich view of how customers move from discovery to purchase.
AdsGency, which bills itself as the first agentic operating system for advertisers, is working to unify the entire advertising process in a single ecosystem. Its large language models (LLMs) target the ideal audience, create the ads, and automate the ad-buying process. AdsGency is breaking down siloes and democratizing advertising for smaller teams that don’t have the talent budget of larger companies. But at the same time, it’s taking over for humans and can easily miss the nuance that people can provide. Brands could adopt systems like AdsGency for targeting, placements, and analytics but leave the content to human creatives.
Marketing measurement is entering a new phase of speed and precision. InMarket’s Michael Della Penna told EMARKETER that marketers are moving beyond static reports toward real-time insights—fusing marketing mix modeling (MMM) and multi-touch attribution (MTA) to understand what drives incremental sales as campaigns run. AI-powered models now forecast lift, optimize spend, and connect awareness to conversion through unified platforms. With 56% of marketers prioritizing sales lift and nearly half investing in MMM, the focus is clear: decision speed over dashboards. InMarket’s end-to-end system exemplifies this shift, reframing measurement as a continuous feedback loop rather than a quarterly report.
This sponsored article by PartnerCentric will explore AI’s impact on affiliate marketing.
Meta withdrew from Media Rating Council (MRC) brand safety audits last week, just months after its accreditation was officially issued, per Adweek. Despite its other brand safety moves, Meta’s step away from the MRC indicates that advertisers are now navigating a digital ad landscape that necessitates investment in platforms without stringent brand safety protocols—requiring marketers to strengthen their own brand safety monitoring and verification processes.
Google has officially eliminated its Privacy Sandbox and removed the remaining 10 Sandbox technologies that were still available, marking an end to its yearslong plan to pivot away from third-party cookies on Chrome. Even as giants like Google step away from first-party initiatives, advertisers should prepare for continued change as many are pushing forward with post-cookie ambitions. Cookies may linger for some time to come, but that doesn’t negate broader consumer sentiments that favor data transparency.
Consumers have grown more accepting of sponsored ads—according to a recent survey by Bain and ROI Rocket. Roughly 3 in 5 US consumers (61%) say they don’t mind seeing sponsored ads for relevant brands and products, up 14 percentage points from last year. But just 42% agree that the sponsored ads they see are usually pertinent to them, showing that advertisers—and the retailers they’re buying inventory from—have a lot more work to do to deliver maximum outcomes from their ads, and consequently ROI.
Citi and American Airlines debuted the Citi AAdvantage Globe Mastercard, a mid-tier travel credit card with a $350 annual fee, per a press release. With airlines revising their year-end forecasts optimistically, issuers have a chance to get in on lucrative travel volume. While front-of-cabin sales have benefited from wealth-effect spending, mid-tier travel cards could help boost main cabin sales with slightly pared down reward structures.
B2B buyers are leaning on AI tools for vendor selection, raising the stakes for surfacing in AI results. Eight in 10 global B2B buyers in the tech industry use genAI as much as traditional search when researching vendors, per Responsive’s Inside the Buyer’s Mind report. Four in 10 use genAI and traditional search equally. B2B marketers can insert themselves early in buyers’ discovery, vetting, and selection process by focusing generative engine optimization (GEO) efforts on controllable platforms. Ensure website information is structured and easy to parse by publishing clear FAQ pages with information on pricing, use cases, and product offerings.