Universal Ads must pass the pizza test if it’s to steal ad dollars from social

A more diverse customer set could give big media companies like Comcast the same resilience to market shocks as Meta and Google enjoy, but persuading enough performance-minded brands to try CTV — and they’ll need a lot of them — takes constant effort.

For Comcast, that effort means stacking up a slew of feature announcements and developing out its SMB-focused Universal Ads business even as its media execs attempt to court big-ticket advertisers during upfront negotiations. 

Last week, Universal Ads released an MCP (Model Context Protocol) extension, following a similar policy change from Meta in April. The move means that small teams of marketers can connect home brewed AI media agents built with Claude or Gemini directly with Universal Ads, allowing them to build tools for campaign optimization or data analysis.

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ACR data is invaluable, but only if it lives within DSPs

Oscar Rondon, vice president, data and measurement solutions, Nexxen

 Today’s TV advertising doesn’t have a data problem; it has an execution problem. 

The industry has never been richer in signals, ranging from contextual intelligence to identity graphs, outcome measurement to an overload of dashboards. Despite this sophistication, too many TV strategies still break down at the moments that matter most. Why? Because not all signals are created equal — many are constrained by small sample sizes, probabilistic assumptions or limited visibility, making them difficult to scale or trust. The one signal that consistently underpins campaigns that work, however, is automatic content recognition (ACR) data. 

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