The Stack: UK Festive Season Ad Spend to Break New Record; Video Giants Face Hurdles

This week on The Stack: UK Festive Season Ad Spend to Break New Record; Video Giants Face Hurdles; Google Introduces Curation Capability; Today’s MadTech Daily 

Following the release of AA/WARC’s latest Expenditure Report last week which revealed that ad spend had hit a colossal £10bn in the UK during Q2, this week they went on to reveal that UK festival season ad spend is expected to reach £10.5bn. The figure would mark an increase of almost 8% from last year’s total ad spend for the period. Out of all categories, online display is expected to see the biggest boost. 

Elsewhere, certain video giants are encountering obstacles. Paramount is facing a class action lawsuit – filed in California – over allegedly tracking their subscribers’ viewing history and sharing with Meta and TikTok in order to serve targeted ads. Meanwhile, Sky Media is facing a bill worth hundreds of millions of pounds following a blunder which led it to accidentally underpaying its advertising partners. 

Lasty, a summary of the week’s news would be incomplete without a mention of Google: the tech titan unveiled new curation capabilities across its Ad Manager in order to streamline media buying for advertisers. Its new curation service allows advertisers to curate ad placements from various auctions/sellers, veering away from the traditional approach which sees targeting occur exclusively through programmatic bidders.