In advance of next week’s Cannes Lions Ad Festival, Meta announced affiliate program expansions, payment capabilities and a wider release of Live Video Ads.
Perhaps more importantly, Meta said product data would become a foundational input across its commerce ecosystem.
A blog post explained:
“Today, [marketers] have to fragment campaigns where performance-driving product data like product title, price, availability, and description are only used in certain ad types.
This summer, we are changing that: product data is becoming a foundational input across all Sales campaigns, so Meta’s AI can automatically match the right products to the right people in the most effective format anytime an advertiser chooses a Sales campaign. Instead of manually choosing between different ad types, advertisers will provide both their product data and creative assets, and our ads system will assemble the best-performing ad for each viewer in real time.”
Read:
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- “Cannes 2026: New Ways to Turn Discovery Into Purchase on Meta” – Meta
From tipsheet: A week ago, Meta announced that activity generated through advertising on its platforms would help improve personalization across content and ads. The Cannes announcements extend that learning system deeper into commerce. Discovery, recommendation, checkout and purchase are becoming part of Meta’s commerce feedback loop whose output aims to improve the next interaction.
LLMs & CHATBOTS
Developments
- Predicting model behavior before release by simulating deployment (June 16) – OpenAI
- World leaders want American AI. They just don’t want America to be able to turn it off. (June 17) – TechCrunch
- Zhipu surges 33% as Wall Street raises bets on China AI after Anthropic curbs (June 17) – CNBC
PLATFORMS
Fox-Roku on offense: Agentic ad platform
In advance of next week’s big Cannes Lions Ad Festival — and on the heels of Fox’s announced acquisition of Roku — Fox Advertising previewed its new ad platform with Adweek and said the platform creates a “secure agentic system to work across audience planning, media transactions, and activation.”
Adweek’s Bill Bradley reports:
“The offering, powered by the company’s data and technology platform, Fox AdStudio, uses a connected system of AI agents and industry partnerships to enable safe and scaled workflows. In simpler terms, buy-side agents and sell-side agents can now act autonomously for tasks such as accessing audiences or creating media buys across Fox’s portfolio.
Read:
- Fox Announces TV Industry’s ‘First End-to-End Agentic Ad Platform (June 17) – Adweek
- Fox Advertising To Launch Industry’s First End-to-End Agentic Advertising Platform, Powered by Fox AdStudio (June 17) – Fox
More: Fox Advertising Launches FOX AdStudio, Unifying Audience Intelligence Across Its Premium Portfolio (April 23) – Fox
From tipsheet: Fox is wasting little time articulating the strategic rationale behind Roku. The combination isn’t just about adding streaming scale. It’s about expanding Fox’s role from media owner to advertising platform.
PLATFORMS
Fox-Roku on offense: Smartly partnership
Smartly and Roku announced a new partnership that allows advertisers to run Roku Ads Manager campaigns through Smartly’s platform via API.
The integration lets marketers extend social campaigns to connected TV using existing workflows, creative assets and measurement systems.
The move follows Roku’s recent partnerships with Amazon DSP and Yahoo DSP. Those integrations expanded distribution through major buying platforms and identity systems.
For Roku, the Smartly partnership extends distribution into the social advertising workflows where Smartly already operates.
Read: Smartly and Roku Bring Social Performance Playbook to the Biggest Screen at Home (June 17) – Smartly
Related: Fox finds its programmatic identity in Roku (June 17) – Digiday (subscription)
From tipsheet: CTV spent years trying to become digital. Now it is trying to become social. Roku’s partnerships with Amazon DSP, Yahoo DSP and Smartly show the company embedding itself into the systems advertisers already use. Partnerships like this help explain what Fox saw in Roku.
PLATFORMS
Pinterest builds for recommendation era
Ahead of Cannes Lions, Pinterest announced Business Assistant, a new MCP integration layer, expanded Performance+ creative capabilities and Ask Pinterest, an experimental AI shopping app.
Pinterest said the tools are designed for a world where consumers move beyond “search-and-click” toward conversational and generative discovery experiences.
Read: Pinterest’s new AI tools for the discovery era: from ads to personalized shopping (June 17) – Pinterest
Business Assistant builds on Pinterest Assistant announced last year.
Related: Grow your business faster: How Pinterest Performance+ automates success for SMBs (June 15) – Pinterest
From tipsheet: Pinterest’s announcement is less about AI creative and more about positioning for a recommendation-driven web. The company is exposing Pinterest to agentic workflows through MCP while simultaneously experimenting with AI-native shopping experiences built on its Taste Graph. As discovery shifts from keywords to recommendations, platforms are competing to become the system that influences decisions.
SELL-SIDE
Disney’s AI-generated TV ads
Read:
- “Disney is launching AI-generated TV ads in July. A new tool generates scripts, music, and video to streamline ad creation” – Business Insider on LinkedIn
- “Get ready for Disney’s big AI ads push” (June 17) – Business Insider (subscription)
From tipsheet: Disney’s AI ad generator tool lowers the cost of producing TV and CTV ads while moving creative generation closer to the advertising platform itself.
Creative generation, optimization and delivery are converging into the same decisioning system.
MOBILE
Composability and the great unbundling
CloudX is trying to unbundle mobile UA (user acquisition) from the black-box network model, according to an article in AdExchanger.
Today, app publishers often buy users through the same networks that monetize them, creating a bundled relationship where the network controls the auction, pricing, optimization, and reporting.
CloudX is proposing a different architecture: publishers define goals and budgets while agents handle execution across a marketplace.
AdExchanger’s Allison Schiff reports:
“A single SDK can handle mediation, monetization and performance. But they also make it harder for publishers to know what they’re actually paying for — and harder to walk away. The more a studio leans on network-run UA, the more its growth and monetization are effectively locked into the same opaque relationship.
CloudX is trying to chip away at that dependence rather than replace it outright. It charges a flat fee on campaigns that transact through its platform, and the agent’s work — things like generating creative and running models — is priced on a token basis, rather than folded into a take rate on media.”
Read: CloudX Takes A Swing At Black-Box Mobile UA With Agentic Buying Tools (June 17) – AdExchanger
From tipsheet: Mobile user acquisition has historically been dominated by black-box networks that bundle buying, optimization and monetization into a single platform. CloudX is betting agents can unbundle that model by giving publishers their own decisioning layer.
The trend extends well beyond mobile — and much of it is happening this year.
OpenX’s OpenXBuild, Chalice, Index Exchange’s Index Cloud, Hightouch Agentic CDP, Databricks CustomerLake and now CloudX all reflect a broader shift toward composability. As AI reduces the cost of decisioning, capabilities once embedded inside platforms are becoming portable infrastructure that customers can own and control.
Also: CloudX prices agent work on a token basis rather than bundling it into media spend — another sign that AI is changing not just how advertising systems operate, but how they are priced.
MEASUREMENT
DoubleVerify aims for intelligence layer
DoubleVerify is positioning itself beyond its roots as a brand safety vendor with DV Neura, which it describes as “the cognitive engine powering artificial intelligence across DV MAP, the DV Media AdVantage Platform.”
In a press release yesterday, the company described four DV Neura components: Media Intelligence, Adaptive Performance, Agentic Execution and Open Connectivity.
On the agentic front:
- A natural language interaction agent called DV Neura Insight Agent uses Model Context Protocol (MCP) to surface DV campaign insights within a client’s Claude instance (with additional chatbot integrations planned).
- Additionally, “DV is also introducing the DV Neura Activation Agent, which will autonomously execute approved campaign changes within advertiser-defined guardrails and become available in Q3.”
Read: “DoubleVerify Introduces DV Neura, the Dynamic AI Engine Powering the Future of Media Quality and Effectiveness” (June 16) – DoubleVerify
Related: How A New MCP Is Helping Advertisers Bet Bigger On YouTube (June 17) – AdExchanger
From tipsheet: While AI has powered adtech systems for years, LLMs and agents are changing how campaign intelligence is consumed. DoubleVerify’s MCP support and agent integrations suggest the company is preparing for a world where media quality, measurement and optimization data flow directly into AI systems rather than dashboards alone.
MOBILE
Bringing brand dollars to games via standards
Game engine and AI ad platform Unity announced the expansion of Unity Core Standards, an initiative designed to improve transparency and trust in gaming advertising.
Christopher Feo, who joined Unity as SVP of Sales and Partnerships last year, wrote:
“The last ten months has certainly broadened my perspective, and one consistent theme I heard over and over was gaming is a channel we want to invest in but its not ready for brand dollars at scale — reasons spanned everything from audience, to creative, to quality.
Summarized best by Brent Koning from Dentsu:
‘The gap between time spent in games and ad dollars flowing into games is not an audience problem, it’s a trust and infrastructure problem. dentsu is proud to help shape the standards that close that gap, because when gaming advertising works better, it works better for game makers, for players, and for our clients.’”
Read more on LinkedIn. (June 17)
Partners include DoubleVerify, Magnite, The Trade Desk, Index Exchange, Nexxen and others.
In the comments to Feo’s post, Unity Senior Partner Manager Michael Collington noted, “The hard part of any standard is getting a room full of competitors to actually enforce it on themselves. Seeing this many buy and sell-side names sign on to the same bar is the real story here.”
Read: Unity is bringing transparency to mobile gaming for brand advertisers, extending Unity Core Standards to advertising (June 17) – Unity blog
From tipsheet: Unity wants more brand dollars flowing into gaming, but gaming has long suffered from the same problem that early connected TV faced. The audience is there, but brand budgets require standards, verification, measurement and transparency. Unity appears to be betting that gaming’s next phase of advertising growth won’t come from attracting more players. It will come from making gaming easier for major advertisers to buy.
PEOPLE MOVES
Now hiring
- “After more than two decades in adtech, media, and data-driven businesses, I’ve learned that the most exciting opportunities emerge at industry inflection points. That’s what makes me especially excited to begin my next chapter as Chief Commercial Officer at SponsorUnited.” – Tim Braz on LinkedIn
- “Thrilled to share that I’ve joined Omnicom Media as SVP, Strategic Partnerships.” (June 17) – Yigit Donuk on LinkedIn
MORE
- Introducing Adobe Brand Visibility: A Unified Solution for the AI Search Era (June 17) – Adobe
- Introducing External MCP Connectors in Profound (June 17) – Profound
- AI search adoption rises as consumer trust declines: Study (June 17) – Search Engine Land
- SWYM Delivers AI-Powered Supply Shaping at Scale Through Cross-SSP Containerization (June 17) – press release
- X Streamlines Campaign Setup and Tracking to Help Businesses of All Sizes Drive Stronger Ad Results (June 16) – X on X