One simplifies tagging, the other unlocks full flexibility and control.

ChatGPT Ads are live. Here’s how measurement, pixels and CAPI work.

The ad tech industry is rebuilding itself for an increasingly agentic future.

Google’s latest migration reveals how advertiser control is steadily giving way to automation.

Regional consumers are becoming one of advertising’s most valuable growth opportunities.

Google is embedding AI deeper into Search behaviour and discovery experiences online.

As IPv6 expands, advertisers face growing challenges around identity, measurement and signal visibility.

The UK’s proposed social media ban for under-16s could trigger one of the biggest shifts in youth advertising in years, forcing brands to rethink how they reach younger audiences across digital, streaming and traditional media environments.

As privacy concerns continue reshaping the digital ecosystem, Apple is increasingly positioning user protection and data transparency as key points of differentiation against advertising-funded competitors.

The Trade Desk is positioning its Ventura TV operating system as a neutral alternative to platforms such as Roku, Amazon and Google. Beyond the product itself, the move highlights a broader industry shift as ad tech companies compete for greater control over CTV infrastructure, audience signals and advertising monetisation at the operating system level.

From agentic media buying and AI-powered optimisation to OpenAI’s advertising ambitions and growing focus on supply-path measurement, this year’s Cannes conversations highlight an industry rapidly restructuring around automation, interoperability and data-driven decision-making. The common theme: AI is moving from experimentation into core advertising workflows.

As startups search for experienced operators and growth expertise, a growing pool of adtech and technology leaders may represent one of the most underutiised talent opportunities in the Australian market.

Google will begin using IP addresses for advertising measurement and personalisation across Europe from August, shifting new consent obligations onto publishers and advertisers. The move has reignited debate around privacy, device fingerprinting and whether current consent frameworks provide meaningful transparency for users.

New sales data suggests AI assistants could be changing how people consume advice and educational content. As users increasingly turn to chatbots for personalised answers, creators, publishers and media businesses are questioning whether traditional formats such as self-help books, courses and how-to content can continue to compete with AI-powered information delivery.

Australia is introducing a mandatory SMS Sender ID register from July 1 to help combat text message scams. Businesses will need to verify branded sender names or risk having messages labelled as “unverified”, making it easier for consumers to identify potential scam texts and reducing opportunities for impersonation.

Courts are beginning to examine who is responsible when AI-generated search summaries get facts wrong. Emerging legal arguments suggest AI Overviews may be treated as platform-generated content rather than neutral search results, with potential implications for Google and the future of AI-powered search.

Warner Bros. Discovery is rebuilding its advertising technology stack with AWS, using agentic AI to automate media planning, forecasting, optimisation and measurement across linear and digital channels. The move signals how major media owners are increasingly using AI to unify buying, improve efficiency and create more intelligent advertising workflows.

DV360 is replacing legacy Audience expansion with Lookalike audiences for YouTube Video reach and Video view campaigns. From 15 June 2026, you must manually apply lookalike audiences to your campaigns, as existing settings will not migrate automatically.

Setting creative rotation settings for display and video line items will be deprecated. On 12 August 12 2026, any display and video line items with creative selection settings will be migrated to aligned rotation.

Starting in July 2026, Google Analytics will automatically begin receiving events, such as purchases directly from Shopify’s servers. This deeper integration makes measurement more resilient by recovering lost conversion signals through a direct server-to-server communication.

To streamline performance analysis, Google Analytics has launched a new Source Group dimension that automatically consolidates fragmented third-party data (e.g., standardising disparate variations of “Facebook” or “Instagram” into clean, single categories). The update is applied retroactively to historical data and includes built-in classifications for generative AI traffic.

Google Analytics now supports direct integration with Google Business Profiles (GBP), bridging the reporting gap between off-site local search intent and website/app metrics.

You can collect, view, and analyse multimodal prompts and responses from your agentic applications that use the LangGraph or Agent Development Kit (ADK) frameworks. This feature is generally available (GA).

Support for configuring daily token quotas for BigQuery generative AI functions has been temporarily disabled. Google is working to restore this feature as soon as possible.

BigQuery’s real-time continuous queries just got an upgrade. Data teams can now use ARRAY_AGG and STRING_AGG functions (currently in Preview) to group and consolidate incoming data streams into arrays or text strings on the fly. This makes it much easier to process and group real-time event streams without waiting for batch processing.

Meta introduced its global rollout of native AI assistants to handle automated, round-the-clock customer support and sales journeys across WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger.

Meta announced it will use data shared by external businesses (such as off-site pixel events) to personalise regular user Feeds and Meta AI chatbot responses, while simultaneously streamlining user privacy controls into a single dashboard.

Google removes consent ambiguity, increasing pressure on privacy infrastructure and measurement.