AdTech News Round-up

Marketers are closer to seeing across the entire video landscape as TV converges

Canada’s longest-running drama, Heartland, recently began its 18th season on CBC and its streaming platform, CBC Gem.

Seventeen years after the show first premiered, fans are now accustomed to watching on-demand, a prime example of the before and after split with traditional TV and streaming. TV executives have shifted their distribution strategies and with that have keyed in on the fragmentation that can come from all the ways people watch their favorite shows.

OpenAI plans to release its next big AI model by December

OpenAI plans to launch Orion, its next frontier model, by December, The Verge has learned.

Unlike the release of OpenAI’s last two models, GPT-4o and o1, Orion won’t initially be released widely through ChatGPT. Instead, OpenAI is planning to grant access first to companies it works closely with in order for them to build their own products and features, according to a source familiar with the plan.

Another source tells The Verge that engineers inside Microsoft — OpenAI’s main partner for deploying AI models — are preparing to host Orion on Azure as early as November. While Orion is seen inside OpenAI as the successor to GPT-4, it’s unclear if the company will call it GPT-5 externally. As always, the release plan is subject to change and could slip. OpenAI and Microsoft declined to comment for this story.

Spotify tunes up its ad tech as it looks to attract even more ad dollars

Earlier this week, Spotify confirmed it is piloting its own ad exchange or supply-side platform to enhance its revenue margins further as it turns a profit for the first time.

Spotify is piloting an SSP, Spotify Ad Exchange (SAX), focused on video ads to scale its automated advertising solutions, according to an Oct. 22 Axios report.

PAAPI Could Be As Effective For Retargeting As Third-Parties Cookies, Study Finds

There’s been plenty of mudslinging in and around the Chrome Privacy Sandbox. But the Protected Audiences API (PAAPI) maybe ain’t so bad.

PAAPI – a proposal for retargeting on Chrome without third-party cookies – could be nearly as effective as retargeting with third-party cookies, according to a new paper by researchers at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business.

Netflix pushes ad business growth as streaming profits rise

When Netflix launched its advertising business in November 2022, it repeated over and over that it would employ a “crawl, walk, run” strategy. Two years in, it isn’t running but it’s moving more quickly toward its goal.

“We’re on track to reach what we believe to be critical ad subscriber scale for advertisers in all of our ads countries in 2025, creating a strong base from which we can further increase our ad membership in 2026 and beyond,” it declared in its Q3 shareholder letter.

Why retailers like Kroger & Walmart are adding streaming services to their membership programs

While Amazon has been offering free movies and shows to Prime members since 2011, more retailers and delivery platforms have added streaming to boost their subscription services over the last few years.

The In-Game Ad Market is Expanding, One SDK At A Time

Finding more in-game ad inventory is like hard mode compared to other digital channels.

Signing up publishers in the in-game ad space is complicated. Placing digital billboards that can run display and video ads in game environments requires sophisticated software integrations with game and app developers.

Until recently, most in-game ad integrations focused on developers that use Unity as their game engine, since it’s among the most commonly used software for creating games, especially in the mobile market. But big-budget console or PC games, dubbed AAA games, are more likely to use custom game engines that don’t allow them to easily plug in to an ad platform.