Comcast’s FreeWheel introduced Video Content Report, a new reporting capability in Buyer Cloud (formerly Beeswax) that gives advertisers series-level reporting across participating premium CTV publishers.
Unlike traditional post-campaign reports that often require individual publisher requests, the new tool uses impression-level data captured by its ad server, Streaming Hub, to show where campaigns actually ran.
Read: FreeWheel Debuts First-to-Market Series-Level Reporting Powered by Direct Publisher Insights for Premium CTV Buyers (July 29) – FreeWheel
From tipsheet: As AI takes on more campaign planning and optimization, proprietary infrastructure becomes a competitive advantage. Because FreeWheel operates both the ad server and buying platform, it can surface insights that independent DSPs cannot easily replicate.
Related: FreeWheel’s home is still TBD (July 28) – tipsheet
FINANCIALS
Earnings reported yesterday
Public companies are reporting their latest quarterly financials and providing a look into how AI may be creating opportunity for the advertising and marketing ecosystem.
Meta
- Markets: Meta stock was down 7.4% in after-hours trading yesterday.
- Stat: “Revenue was $60.80 billion, an increase of 28% year-over-year; Average price per ad increased by 12% year-over-year; Ad impressions delivered across our Family of Apps increased by 14% year-over-year.”
- Company: Meta Reports Second Quarter 2026 Results (July 29) – Meta
- Read: “Meta Platforms earnings missed by $0.99, revenue topped estimates” (July 29) – Investing[dot]com
- Read: “Meta’s Reality Labs lost over $4.6 billion in second quarter” (July 29) – CNBC
Microsoft
- Markets: Microsoft stock was up 8.8% in after-hours trading yesterday.
- Stat: “Azure and other cloud services revenue increased 43%.”
- Company: Earnings Release FY26 Q4 (July 29) – Microsoft
- Read: “Microsoft Profits Jump 31% as Azure Cloud Sales Surpass $100 Billion” (July 29) – The Wall Street Journal (subscription)
- Read: “Bing Ads Revenue Up 10%” (July 29) – SE Roundtable
From tipsheet: Meta and Microsoft show two different models for AI monetization. Microsoft is converting infrastructure demand into Azure growth. Meta’s advertising business is still expanding, but its results show how much capital the AI race now requires.
Next: Apple, Amazon and Reddit are among publicly-traded companies that report later today.
COMMERCE MEDIA
The omnichannel infrastructure race
Adweek’s Lauren Johnson reports on what she sees as a race between Amazon and Walmart for omnichannel marketing supremacy.
Among her data points:
- “Amazon has spent years building premium content through Prime Video, and the company also has rights to major sporting events like the NFL’s Thursday Night Football. Walmart is earlier in this journey, using its late 2024 Vizio acquisition to leverage streaming TV infrastructure.”
- “Amazon’s $70 billion ad business is significantly bigger than Walmart’s $6.4 billion business. However, the two are the largest retail media sellers and will make up 89% of incremental spending this year, according to Emarketer.”
Read: Walmart and Amazon Are Battling for Streaming TV Budgets. Here’s How Their Offerings Break Down (July 29) – Adweek
From tipsheet: The competition is becoming more about proprietary infrastructure. In an AI-driven advertising market, companies that own proprietary customer data, identity and the systems that transform those assets into optimization signals may be best positioned to attract budgets.
DATA
Snowflake wants to govern enterprise AI
Snowflake introduced Cortex AI Gateway, a centralized AI gateway designed to govern how agents access enterprise data, models, tools and MCP servers. The platform extends Snowflake’s governance capabilities beyond data to AI agents by centralizing identity, authorization, auditing and cost controls across first-party and third-party AI tools.
Why should advertising and marketing technology companies care? Snowflake built its business serving ad tech, its first industry segment, and now sees AI as accelerating demand for data governance. In a 2025 interview with tipsheet, CMO Denise Persson described a future of AI-driven, self-optimizing marketing systems that automate media planning, buying, optimization and content creation. Cortex AI Gateway provides governance infrastructure that could support that vision by controlling how AI agents securely access enterprise data and tools.
Read: Snowflake Launches Cortex AI Gateway and Advanced AI Security at Black Hat 2026 (July 28) – Snowflake’s Inside The Data Cloud blog
From tipsheet: Snowflake wasn’t talking about advertising in the announcement. Even so, it illustrates a broader shift. Enterprise data platforms are evolving into AI governance platforms, creating governance capabilities that could underpin the next generation of AI-powered marketing systems.
AGENCIES
AI-generated creative adds new work for agencies
The challenges of AI-generated creative are leading agencies to adopt new oversight processes, according to Ad Age senior editor Garett Sloane.
Previewing his article on LinkedIn, Sloane writes:
“One, they have to pay close attention to AI settings, because new ones come online often and old settings don’t always stick. For instance, I was talking with broadhead., and they ran into an ad that included AI music as a soundtrack on Meta, which they never picked. Turns out there is an ‘AI Music’ button that needs watching…
It’s not just Meta. On Google, the platform will fill in gaps left out by marketers. For instance if you don’t give Google a video asset, it will create one…
While AI can create odd ad choices, it’s also a necessary component for marketers looking to feed the platforms that require creative experimentation and versions to enhance the results.”
Read more. (July 29)
Read: Meta and Google’s AI can create ads without asking—how to guard against rogue agents (July 29) – Ad Age (subscription)
From tipsheet: AI is moving advertising platforms from execution engines to creative agents. That promises more experimentation at lower cost, but it also means marketers and their agencies must manage platform-generated creative alongside campaign performance.
But: Will marketers pay separately for AI governance, including the review, approval and monitoring of AI-generated creative?
LLMs & CHATBOTS
Developments
- OpenAI’s ChatGPT Nears 1 Billion Weekly Active Users Seven Months After Target (July 28) – The Information (subscription)
- We’re launching Lyria 3.5 in Google Flow Music, with advances across musicality, lyrics, vocals, and creative control. (July 29) – Google
- Brookfield, NextEra to Develop $100 Billion Data Center Campus in Kentucky (July 29) – The Wall Street Journal (subscription)
PLATFORMS
TikTok turns MCP into an AI marketplace
In a sponsored content article published yesterday on Adweek, TikTok reminded advertisers of the social platform’s agentic AI strategy and what that could mean for advertisers.
From the piece:
“Throughout the history of advertising technology, the biggest innovations have come from collaboration. Search, programmatic advertising, measurement, commerce, and customer data all evolved because platforms and partners built solutions together.
Agentic AI will be no different. Making that future possible requires more than building AI into products. It requires enabling an ecosystem where technology partners can turn their expertise into intelligent advertising solutions.
That’s the thinking behind TikTok Agentic Hub, a marketplace of AI-powered advertising solutions enabled by TikTok for Business Model Context Protocol (MCP).
Rather than asking advertisers to adopt another standalone AI assistant, TikTok partners are now able to build and publish AI skills on TikTok’s Agentic Hub. Whether launching campaigns, generating creative, diagnosing performance, managing product catalogs, or analyzing results, these Skills help marketers accomplish more without switching between disconnected systems.”
Read: (Sponsored) How TikTok Is Building the Future of Agentic AI for Advertising (July 29) – Adweek
From tipsheet: AI is changing the unit of software from applications to intelligent capabilities. By combining MCP with an Agentic Hub marketplace, TikTok is betting the future of advertising platforms won’t be defined by the AI features they build themselves, but by the ecosystem of AI capabilities partners build on top of their platform.
MCP turns APIs into marketplaces: Traditional APIs let software connect to a platform. Combined with an agent marketplace, MCP lets companies package expertise into distributable AI capabilities. The opportunity shifts from building another application to packaging expertise into reusable AI capabilities.
MEASUREMENT
The enterprise measurement split
Chalice AI co-founder and CEO Adam Heimlich argues on his personal blog that measurement is undergoing the same architectural split reshaping media buying.
In the third installment of his “Two Architectures” series, he predicts enterprise advertisers will increasingly move away from platform attribution and toward privately-controlled, incrementality-based measurement, particularly when the next economic downturn forces tougher budget allocation decisions.
He also contends that Meta, Google and Amazon’s open-source marketing mix modeling (MMM) tools represent a concession to growing enterprise demand for measuring effectiveness on advertisers’ own terms rather than through platform reporting.
“The claim is not that attribution disappears. Most of the market will keep it. The claim is that the enterprise tier stops using it to decide, and that the next downturn is what converts that from a private position held by a few sophisticated marketers into action taken across the whole tier at once. The trend is already visible. The largest platforms have begun to concede it.”
Read: “The Two Architectures, Part Three: The Effectiveness Reckoning” (July 28) – Adam Loves Ad Tech blog
From tipsheet: The long-term divide may be between advertisers that rely on standardized measurement and those that increasingly own measurement as a competitive capability. AI lowers the cost of building proprietary measurement, but the larger shift may be organizational rather than technical.
Related: On this week’s Mobile Dev Memo podcast, Eric Seufert and Recast co-founder Michael Kaminsky argue that enterprises should own and validate measurement, but reject the idea that Google’s Meridian or Meta’s Robyn are inherently biased because their open-source code can be independently inspected. They also caution that MMM is not a replacement for attribution and may be the wrong tool for many advertisers.
Listen: “Podcast: Demystifying open source MMM (with Michael Kaminsky)” (July 28) – Eric Seufert on Mobile Dev Memo
PEOPLE MOVES
Now hiring
- “I’m excited to share that I’ve joined Higgsfield AI to lead Enterprise Marketing.” (July 29) – Mariam Asmar on LinkedIn
- “Excited to announce I’ve joined IAB Tech Lab as Head of Agentic Technologies!” – Matthew Jacobs on LinkedIn
MORE
- DoubleVerify study: Poor-Quality AI Content Puts Brand Trust at Risk (July 29) – press release
- Google Is Leaning on Travel to Sell Its AI Ad Story (July 28) – Skift
- World Federation of Advertisers and X Corp. settle Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) litigation (July 29) – MediaPost
- Podcast: “Episode 108 with Heather Macaulay of MadConnect[dot]ai” (July 29) – Open Market podcast