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For much of the past year, publishers have been playing defense against AI scraping and copyright uncertainty. But heading into 2026, some see reasons to believe the ground is finally starting to move a little more in their favor.
The Financial Times was the first U.K.-based publisher to strike a licensing deal with OpenAI in 2024. It has yet to agree to terms with another consumer LLM, but...
New year, same problems. Even with Google’s U-turn to keep third-party cookies in Chrome, the race for first-party data hasn’t slowed. If anything, generative AI has accelerated this long-term trend by promising to lower the barrier to entry, allowing internal teams to process, ingest, and normalize more data faster.
Brands and their agency partners are still pushing to own their first-party...
This year, TechRadar publisher Future wants to win the AI visibility game.
Future — which also owns U.S. titles including Tom’s Guide, Who What Wear, Marie Claire, and Ideal Home in the U.K. — rolled out a proprietary AI visibility tool called Future Optic. So far, the tool, launched in beta in November, has increased the volume of mentions and citations in AI search engines like Google’s AI...
Walmart is going all in on artificial intelligence and agentic technologies for its ad platform. What was a retail media arms race has morphed into an agentic AI race so far this year, and Walmart seems to be taking aim at Amazon’s ad business.
On Tuesday, Walmart execs said they would put ads in Sparky, its AI shopping agent, as well as provide generative AI-powered performance insights and...
2026 will be the year authenticity gets repriced in the creator economy.
The importance, reach, and financial power of the creator economy is well-established — now everyone is fighting for a piece of the pie. As such, it will become increasingly important that these pies feel freshly baked by hand rather than stale and mass-produced.
With AI-generated content flooding social media...
CES functioned less as a turning point than a temperature check for the ad industry.
Behind the stage demos and glossy AI announcements, the advertising industry arrived in Las Vegas with a quieter set of questions than previous years. Q4 held up better than feared but not well enough to justify old certainties. Budgets remained cautious. Flexibility continued to beat commitments. Linear...
You may not know it or have felt it, but 2025 was actually a pretty good year for the U.S. ad economy. At least the way Brian Wieser tells it. But he warns that 2026 will be only about half as good, and will get worse as the year rolls on.
The media industry analyst and principal of the Madison...
Amazon is becoming the easiest place to make TV spend defensible inside organizations and is emerging as the proof layer for television — not necessarily the default buying layer.
Amazon’s pitch to advertisers goes beyond just inventory, positioning itself as the “first-stop shop” for planning, buying, optimizing and measuring TV, while marketing authenticated, logged-in household reach as the...
This story was first published by Digiday sibling Modern Retail.
Tariffs completely upended the retail industry in 2025 — and no company was left unscathed.
Last year, tariffs kicked in at their highest rate since the Great Depression, with the United States’ effective tariff rate hitting above 17% in August. The beginning of the year started with chaos, as, seemingly every week, there was...
This week’s Media Briefing looks at the main business areas publishing executives have their sights set on as they head into 2026, recalibrating around AI advertising revenue opportunities, brand marketing, and video and creator opportunties, after a humbling 2025.
Publishing execs have their eye forward and sleeves rolled up for the new year
What OpenAI’s new Academy for News...