Meta arrived at this week’s IAB NewFronts with a familiar pitch: its platforms are where culture happens, AI is making advertising smarter, and creators are the new prime time. But the presentation landed against a backdrop of turbulence that has complicated its upbeat messaging.

On Wednesday, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google liable in a landmark social media addiction case, ruling that Instagram and YouTube were negligently designed in ways that harmed a young user’s mental health. The bellwether verdict, which holds Meta responsible for 70% of $3 million in damages, could shape the outcome of roughly 2,000 similar pending lawsuits. 

The news came just one day after a separate New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million for willfully violating state consumer protection law by enabling child exploitation on its platforms. 

Meanwhile, the company confirmed Wednesday it had laid off several hundred employees across multiple divisions, including sales, recruiting, and its Reality Labs unit, as it redirects headcount toward AI and works to offset mounting infrastructure costs.

Of course, that wasn’t the focus of Meta’s NewFronts presentation on Thursday.

Instead, the company’s pitch centered on a suite of AI-powered tools designed to give advertisers more ways to scale video creative and attach their brands to cultural moments. 

The centerpiece was an expansion of Reels Trending Ads, an existing product that Meta is building out with new category lineups around tentpole events, including Fashion Week, F1 races, NFL games, and Black Friday. A new buying option, currently in a limited trial, lets advertisers lock in high-visibility placement during a window of up to 24 hours around marquee events.

Meta also unveiled a redesigned Partnership Ads Hub, which aggregates creator content and recommended posts for paid amplification in one place, and new audience-matching filters in Instagram’s Creator Marketplace, a tool Meta says now includes more than 1.5 million creators. 

The integrations are meant to reduce the friction of creator campaigns. The company cited data showing that adding partnership ads to standard campaigns reduces cost per acquisition by 19% on average.

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On the generative AI front, Meta announced that it is testing tools that allow advertisers to create UGC-style videos using avatars, along with AI voiceover translation now available to more advertisers and a new single-step translation flow in Ads Manager. 

Separately, the company is piloting tools that auto-generate product videos from catalog data, a capability aimed at ecommerce advertisers.

The creator-centric efforts arrive as Meta has been dangling cash directly at creators.

The company announced last week that it would pay up to $3,000 a month to established creators on competing platforms who agree to post Reels on Facebook. 

The initiative, aimed at luring talent from TikTok and YouTube, has drawn skepticism from some in the creator industry, who noted the payments would barely cover production costs for larger influencers. The program is also merely the latest in a long series of turf wars between the platforms, whose offers of short-term cash incentives have historically failed to produce meaningful change in creator behaviors.

For advertisers, the Meta message of scale and AI tooling still gives it a durable edge; ultimately, 3.5 billion users is a compelling premise. 

Still, whether that pitch continues to resonate may depend on how much patience the buy side has for a company simultaneously navigating billion-dollar courtroom scandals and a workforce in flux.

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Twenty years ago, as I prepared to graduate with a degree in English, everyone asked me the same question: “What are you going to do with that?” 

At the time, it was fair. Specializing in language wasn’t a direct path into business or tech. 

Today, that same skill has a new label: prompt engineering. 

The ability to write clear, explicit instructions that provide context and guide interpretation has become valuable again in the age of large language models, because AI systems are only as precise as the directions and context they’re given. 

Eventually though, the model “forgets” what you told it previously. Even with stored documents to “remind” the AI of past progress, at a certain point, the model can only process so much at a time. 

And that’s the key: to get the most out of your AI models at work, it’s less about having the smartest model, and more about the context you provide.

Without enterprise data, your AI models are commodities

That context often comes with access to enterprise data. Whether it’s structured or unstructured, that data—including historical performance data, customer behavior, or business constraints—can provide much more specific outputs around your needs.

Ask an AI coding assistant without access to your data to build you a bespoke analytics application, and it’ll give you something polished, possibly even technically sound, but it won’t reflect your reality. 

Give that same model governed access to marketing performance, customer cohorts, pricing dynamics, inventory signals and sentiment trends within a secure environment, and the output changes dramatically. 

This is the shift many organizations are underestimating. Foundation models like Claude, OpenAI, and Gemini—which are trained on vast datasets and are designed to generalize across use cases—are rapidly becoming commoditized. 

Your data is not. With marketing data and business data in the same enterprise environment, you can move beyond dashboards and into real machine learning workflows much faster than most teams expect. 

If this English major can do it, so can you

I’ve seen this firsthand. 

I was able to do work that would ordinarily require a month—coordinating across teams, standing up environments, tuning models—in one week of focused work, in between my day-to-day responsibilities.  

An AI coding assistant worked behind the scenes, configuring hyperparameter variations and writing lines of code, as I focused on defining the business question, evaluating the output, and iterating.

While this doesn’t make us all data scientists overnight, it absolutely changes the pace at which teams can explore, test, and operationalize predictive models. 

If you let AI operate directly within your governed enterprise data, it makes experimentation faster and you get results much more efficiently.

Your data is the memory of your business, and contains the patterns that define it.

AI helps you surface and act on that memory faster, but only if it can operate securely within that context. 

For your marketing and business goals to be successful, without exposing your competitive edge, you need to bring the model to your secure data and not the other way around. 

Models will evolve. Capabilities will expand. But context will remain king.

OpenAI pulled the plug on its viral video platform Sora earlier this week, less than a year after its splashy debut—by which point much of the creative industry had already moved on.

For many in the creative industry, the shift has been less about abandoning AI video and more about redefining where it actually adds value—away from pure generation and toward supporting the broader production process.

“The truth is we had already moved on to other tools that better fit the way our creative teams work,” Tim McCraken, SVP creative and AI, BarkleyOKRP told ADWEEK. According to McCraken, while Sora showed “huge promise” it didn’t really match up with the agency’s workflows. “We experimented with it and kept watching how it evolved, but consistently found ourselves gravitating toward tools that better matched the way ideas actually get developed, refined, and moved through the agency.”

OpenAI’s release of Sora in 2024 rattled the entertainment industry, where concerns quickly mounted that its ability to generate high-quality video from text could displace human creators. The company doubled down last year with an updated version that produced more realistic footage, added audio capabilities and improved physics—intensifying backlash across Hollywood.

Alongside the model, OpenAI launched a standalone iOS app that quickly gained traction, hitting 100,000 installs on day one, climbing to the No. 1 spot on the U.S. App Store and reaching 1 million downloads faster than ChatGPT, according to Appfigures. OpenAI also rolled out a developer version of Sora, which has also been discontinued.

Disney also pledged a $1 billion stake in OpenAI and had plans to license its characters to Sora, but the deal reportedly never materialized.

OpenAI’s pullback on Sora comes as the company sharpens its broader strategy—prioritizing products with clearer utility for both enterprises and everyday users, as well as more scalable revenue streams like advertising.

In recent weeks, the company has consolidated its core offerings, folding tools like its ChatGPT desktop app, coding assistant Codex and browser capabilities into a more unified product experience. The company is also building an ads manager, ADWEEK previously reported, signaling that it’s serious about growing its ad business.

Industrywide recalibration

Usage data from Higgsfield, a video generation platform for creators and agencies, shows Sora peaking around its October 2025 launch before steadily declining, according to Taz Patel, Higgsfield’s VP of platform partnerships. By contrast, models like Kling and Nano Banana have gained traction, doubling their share of generations on Higgsfield between November 2025 and January 2026 and continuing to grow.

“Our user base is predominantly professional creators and agencies, and they need consistent quality, controllability, and reliable output for commercial work. Sora found an audience in more casual content which is a valid use case, but not core to the needs of professional creators, studios and production teams,” Patel said. 

Ad agencies echo that sentiment.

At Havas, Sora was integrated into the agency’s creative and production toolkit but remained largely unused, Havas’ global chief data and technology officer, Dan Hangen told ADWEEK.

“We found other tools to be better in terms of output. Sora made a splash, but the other video models quickly surpassed them,” Hagen said. Hagen cited quality issues for the lack of uptake. All the tools included in the agency’s production toolkit, Vermeer, need to pass a usage threshold before the agency can indemnify clients’ use of finished assets. “I don’t believe Sora made it to that stage,” Hangen said.

At Code and Theory, the agency’s primary video generation tools are Runway, Google’s Veo suite, and Higgsfield. “People aren’t just looking for AI content. They are looking for compelling content,” Peter Steiner, head of the company’s creative labs told ADWEEK. While Sora showed early promise, Steiner said, rival platforms fit better into the agency’s workflow–Sora’s limited camera control and inability to extend existing shots pushed the team toward tools better suited to their needs including experimenting with Chinese models like Seedance and Qwen.

For Kathleen Barrett, former svp of Vimeo and current CEO of Backlight, that shift reflects a broader industry recalibration. 

“This deprioritization is a sign that studios and companies are moving toward operationalizing workflow AI to support human work, which leaves space for more original creative output,” Barrett said. 

This story was originally published in On Background with Mark Stenberg, a free, weekly newsletter that explores the key themes shaping the media industry. You can sign up for it here.

Amazon and Dax, the digital audio arm of the U.K. media firm Global Media Group, plan to unveil an audio advertising partnership in the U.K. next month, according to a deck obtained by ADWEEK.

The tie-up, shared earlier this month at a closed-door presentation for media buyers, would let brands layer Amazon’s first-party retail signals onto Global’s audio inventory, including its network of radio stations and streaming properties.

An Amazon Ads spokesperson declined to confirm the deal, saying the company has “nothing to share at this time.” Global did not respond to a request for comment.

The partnership, branded as a collaboration between DAX and Amazon Ads, would be billed as a first of its kind in the U.K. audio market. 

The deal, while exceptional in some aspects, is best understood as the latest in a series of such partnerships that Amazon has inked in order to grow the market share of its demand-side platform, ADSP.

In October, Spotify opened its streaming audio and video inventory to Amazon’s DSP across the U.S., U.K., Canada, and several other markets. 

SiriusXM followed shortly after, integrating with Amazon Ads to let brands pair its first-party signals with SiriusXM’s streaming and podcast inventory. In November, iHeart came aboard, with Amazon DSP gaining access to iHeart’s streaming audio portfolio, with broadcast radio inventory set to follow.

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The DAX deal is the latest chapter in that saga, although with one notable difference. While U.S. audio partnerships have so far dominated the headlines, the Global tie-up would be the most significant extension of this model into international markets. 

Global is one of the U.K.’s dominant audio players—it brought in roughly $1.1 billion in annual revenue in the year ending in March 2024—and DAX is its digital advertising platform, making this a meaningful step for Amazon in European audio.

The strategy, however, extends well beyond audio. 

Amazon has been pursuing a parallel set of partnerships across the connected TV space, striking deals with Roku, Disney’s ad exchange DRAX, and Netflix in the last year. Each partnership hinges on the same core premise, which is that the ability to layer Amazon’s retail data onto ad buys makes the inventory more appealing. 

As a result, the more data-enriched inventory Amazon can make available through its DSP, the more indispensable the ADSP becomes as a buying platform. 

For advertisers who care about linking exposure to purchase behavior, Amazon data is nearly impossible to replicate. As a result, the pitch to buyers is better targeting, better attribution, and a cleaner path from audio ad exposure to measurable purchase behavior that can be activated programmatically.

In a market where CTV and digital audio are both growing rapidly, controlling the demand-side infrastructure gives Amazon significant leverage, and the DAX deal fits neatly into that ambition. 

It also marks the moment Amazon’s data-enablement strategy officially crossed the Atlantic in audio, a quiet but consequential expansion of what is fast becoming one of the ad industry’s most valuable infrastructure plays.

Talking Heds

The Atlantic Sponsorship (EXCLUSIVE): Credit where credit is due: Few sales teams are more creative than the fine folks shilling The Atlantic. Earlier this week, the publisher penned a three-year partnership with the cruise liner Seabourn, an arrangement that entails sponsorship and advertising commitments, but is primarily a sui generis subscriptions play. The tie-up will see The Atlantic providing onboard programming and curating the library with Atlantic magazines and works from its bench of famous contributors, while ship-goers will receive complimentary access while aboard and a three-month trial subscription following disembarkation. The deal, although simply the latest in a long line of creative commercial ventures from the publisher, is certainly its richest in terms of available wordplay.

The Post Flight: While much has been rightfully made of the exodus of reporting talent to flee The Washington Post amid its tailspin, too little attention has been paid to a similar scattering of its commercial talent. To wit, The Guardian recently snapped up two former Post notables, Will Carrico and Anthony Lanotte, who are joining the publisher as director and associate director of advertising partnerships, respectively. If the D.C. outlet continues its convulsions, I imagine these departures will be merely the first of many. 

Apple Maps Adds Ads: If you, as I once did, endured the inferior quality of Apple Maps because you preferred an interface not yet larded with ads, let this be the official notice that you can finally give up the ghost. On Tuesday, Apple announced that after fourteen years, ads would be coming to Apple Maps this summer. The move is part of a broader initiative from the Cupertino outfit to bolster its growing advertising business, which is on track to generate around $8.5 billion in revenue this year. 

The Eater App Retools: Eater announced a dramatic redesign of its mobile app on Tuesday, debuting an entirely reimagined interface whose primary purpose is helping users find restaurants, according to Jill Denhert, its senior vice president and group publisher. The new product foregrounds map-based discovery, enables delivery through Grubhub, and will soon roll out robust community features and ads. When I covered the launch of the first Eater app, in October 2024, I contextualized the move as part of a broader trend from publishers toward serving their users as utilities. Since then, such moves have only become more commonplace, with media increasingly acting as a wrapper for businesses with better unit economics.

Social Media Week Returns: In just a few weeks, ADWEEK will once again be hosting Social Media Week, by far the coolest event in our portfolio and one whose insights can legitimately help make or break your brand. I will be on-site, moderating panels and trying not to look washed, and would love to see you there. So join ADWEEK, on April 14 – 16 in New York, to tap into the cutting-edge tactics powering social for the top brands, media outlets, agencies, and creators in the world. Click here to learn more.

Pulled Quotes

“Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.”
Upper Middle author Andrew Burmon, quoting François de La Rochefoucauld, explaining Ted
READ MORE

“And sometimes a story that’s too good to be true is just that.”
The Atlantic journalist McKay Coppins, on the cartel Olympics
READ MORE

“AI is not very popular in the US right now.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, speaking at a BlackRock conference
READ MORE

“Startups apparently need taste like A.I. needs data centers.”
New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka, on the rise of “taste” among the Silicon Valley set
READ MORE

Quote/Unquote

Neil Vogel is the chief executive of People Inc., the company formerly known as Dotdash Meredith, one of the biggest digital media companies in the world and the steward of iconic titles including Food & Wine, People, and Better Homes & Gardens, among others. 

Earlier this month, I interviewed Neil on-stage at the Marketecture Live event in New York, where we discussed how People Inc. has transformed its business in response to the paradigm shift posed by AI. The conversation below is adapted from that interview.

This interview has been edited.

Mark Stenberg: People Inc., formerly known as Dotdash Meredith, was once nearly synonymous with the open web. But now the open web is shrinking, and yet People Inc. has seen nine straight quarters of growth. How?

Neil Vogel: There are two truths in media: If you have great brands and you do great things, you can build durable audiences. Because we used to be so focused on Google, we were the first to see it changing. About three years ago, we realized we needed to change our business, so we invested heavily in TikTok, Instagram, email, apps, and direct relationships. Now, we’re good at 20 things instead of one. It’s harder, but it’s much more durable. We’re nearly $1.8 billion in revenue and over $300 million in EBITDA.

Mark: Has the growth in these new channels compensated for the loss in the old ones?

Neil: About 60% of our business is flat—this is the traditional web model: people come to sites, we sell ads. Google referrals are down about 50% over the last two years. The other 40% of our business is growing at nearly 40%. That includes events, social video, AI licensing, Apple News, and more. So our business now is a race: How fast can we grow the 40% before the 60% declines? So far, we’re winning.

Mark: The one constant in the media business seems to be its decline.

Neil: Decline in some capacity is a constant in every business. You have to deal with it, not complain. Move resources from what’s declining to what’s growing. Media companies think they have a divine right to exist because they had a brand people used to love. You don’t. You have the privilege of trying to exist.

Mark: Where is People Inc. in terms of participating in content marketplaces, i.e. systems where AI firms pay publishers for use of their content? 

Neil: There are really two types of AI deals. One is an “all-you-can-eat” licensing deal, which is what we’ve done with OpenAI and Meta. The other is a marketplace model, like with Microsoft Azure, where companies license content on a per-use basis. We don’t really care which one wins—we just want to be paid fairly and be in the room. AI needs three things—power, models, and information—and right now, it’s running out of information. That makes publishers valuable again, especially for fresh content. 

Mark: In the open internet era, having a massive portfolio was an advantage. Now, media companies like Condé Nast are openly whittling down their portfolios. How is People Inc. reassessing its house of brands in response to this new paradigm?

Neil: We have about 40 brands. Internally, we say about 10 really matter. The other 30 serve a purpose, but they’re more limited. The top brands have the most permission—they can expand into events, licensing, commerce, and more. For example, Better Homes & Gardens has a massive licensing business with Walmart, Food & Wine has a huge events business, and People is a full-scale media operation. But some categories—especially traditional service journalism—are shrinking. Take Parents: if your kid has a fever, you go to Google or ChatGPT, not a publisher site. Those brands require the hardest decisions.

Principal media buying has moved from a quiet industry practice to a very public flashpoint. 

While much of the current discussion focuses on digital and programmatic channels, principal media spans the full media ecosystem, from traditional linear channels to programmatic marketplaces.

The practice has long existed across traditional media—broadcast, cable, radio, and outdoor—where agencies could leverage scale to secure and resell inventory. What’s changed is not the existence of principal buying, but its scale, complexity, and the degree to which it now sits at the center of agency economics.

This is an extremely sensitive topic, but the recent surge in reporting, coupled with broader industry tension, makes it clear: this once-niche practice is reshaping the economics and the trust dynamics of our business.

The case for principal media

Those that support principal media largely point to cost efficiency. And that is, in many cases, true. Some marketers may see 10%–15% savings versus open-market buying.

But the advantage runs deeper than that.

When price becomes disproportionately weighted in an agency review, those agencies with scaled principal media practices have a structural edge. 

Not just because they can offer lower pricing, but because the profits generated through principal media can subsidize other services—sometimes significantly. It’s not uncommon to see teams provided at no charge for a period as part of a broader commercial arrangement.

In this environment, clients seeking cost extraction as a primary goal will naturally gravitate toward agencies with scaled principal offerings.

There’s also a second-order benefit. The profits generated through principal media can be reinvested into capabilities—whether through acquisitions or in-house development—that strengthen an agency’s competitive position. 

Consider the scale of investment some holding companies are now making in AI and data infrastructure. Those investments are not happening in a vacuum.

The case against principal media

The concerns around principal media are well-documented and deeply interconnected.

The most visible issue is lack of transparency, due to hidden fees, undisclosed margins, and opaque pricing structures.

While some agencies disclose their margins on principal media, many do not—unless explicitly required by contract. According to the ANA, only 57% of marketers have governance rules in place around this practice.

I saw this firsthand. During the onboarding of a major retail client, we discovered their media flowcharts showed only aggregate costs—no partner-level detail. When pressed, the incumbent agency declined to disclose rates, arguing they “belonged to the agency.”

The issue quickly becomes a conflict of interest. 

Agencies are no longer purely incentivized to act in the client’s best interest—they are also incentivized to maximize their own margin. That can mean prioritizing inventory they own or deals that carry higher spreads, rather than what may perform best.

And when pricing is opaque and incentives are unclear, trust erodes.

Agencies rarely lose clients over pricing. They lose them over trust.

It deepens tension in the agency-client relationship

These issues are symptoms of a larger structural shift.

For years, clients have pushed for lower costs—both in media and in agency fees. 

Procurement has taken a more prominent role in decision-making, often with a mandate to deliver savings. Consultants frequently reinforce this dynamic, leading with cost guarantees rather than growth.

Even though principal media can deliver both cost efficiency and performance, it fundamentally alters the agency-client relationship.

Agencies were traditionally positioned as trusted intermediaries—acting on behalf of their clients. Principal media shifts that role. Agencies become market participants, with financial exposure and competing incentives.

You can’t be both a fiduciary and a counterpart in the same transaction without introducing tension.

A former colleague of mine, now on the client side, ran a global media review. 

Three of the four consultants competing for the assignment focused heavily on savings. Only one focused on strategy and topline growth. That’s the one she hired—but the broader trend is clear.

In this environment, agencies have been forced to find new revenue models. And at the same time, clients increasingly expect outcomes, not process.

How to move forward when outcomes are paramount

Principal media is not going away. In fact, it is likely to accelerate. The economic pressures that drive it exist across all channels.

Even smaller, independent agencies are now establishing their own principal practices. But what’s interesting is that many of these independents are taking a different approach:

• Disclosing margins
• Requiring opt-in rather than opt-out
• Comparing buys with and without principal media

That may signal where the model evolves next—not away from principal media, but toward greater transparency and client control.

At the same time, the clients need to shift their thinking.

An emphasis on cost extraction is a race to the bottom. Agencies can always find cheaper media. The more important question is what that media actually delivers.

Does it command attention?

Does it place brands in environments that enhance perception?

Does it drive meaningful business outcomes?

Because better media builds better brands.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 won’t hit theaters until May 1, but it’s already spawning a brand ecosystem.

TRESemmé, L’Oréal Paris, and Grey Goose all aired campaigns during the Oscars. Diet Coke is rolling out limited-edition cans across Europe. Cinemark has six collectibles. 

TRESemmé is the most interesting one to me. It recently announced its status as the “signature hair brand” of the film. This word choice matters. It goes beyond being a sponsor, or a co-branding partner. 

“Signature” is pro sports league territory. It’s how Infosys talks about its premium relationship with Madison Square Garden—where it has naming rights on a theater—or how Gatorade is the “official sports drink” of the NFL, MLB, WNBA, and multiple others. It doesn’t just mean your logo is on something. It means you’re structural, and are part of the game itself. 

And that’s so important given the competitive landscape TRESemmé finds itself in, and the opportunity that Devil Wears Prada 2 provides.

TRESemmé has fallen behind in the race for purchase consideration

The Devil Wears Prada is a film about women’s ambition, choices, and power, against a backdrop of Chanel and Prada. Its protagonist is a woman trying to survive in that world, not own it. 

That’s the audience TRESemmé is reaching with its Devil Wears Prada 2 alignment: women who aspire to the fantasy, but shop at Target. 

And TRESemmé needs to solve a problem: it trails competitors like Suave and Pantene in purchase consideration across every female age group, according to data from Morning Consult. Over the past year, it has only a 28% consideration rate among women 18-29; 39% among women 30-44 as well as women 45-64; and a 30% consideration rate among women 65 and up. 

TRESemmé’s “signature” partnership—which feels more like Verizon’s deep relationship with the NFL than Dunkin’ making a limited edition Wicked-themed drink—is really a long-term growth strategy. It goes well beyond a themed bottle.

For a drugstore brand competing against Suave, Pantene, Garnier, and others for the same wallet, it signals that Miranda Priestly, the ultimate arbiter of taste, would reach for your product. No paid media buys that.

Devil Wears Prada fans are a crucial demographic

TRESemmé is also hitting this audience at a crucial time. The fans that made the original a phenomenon are now in their 40s and 50s, with real money and long memories. 

Nearly 45% of women have already changed their spending behavior by avoiding brands or spending less because advertising didn’t feel made for them, Zappi research found. That disconnect hits hardest in their 30s and 40s, right when purchasing power peaks and brand loyalties calcify.

Once lost, brands rarely win those women back.

TRESemmé likely knows this. And its play to be the “signature hair brand” of The Devil Wears Prada 2, unlike a classic product placement gimmick, is meant to help consumers feel that they’re part of the film’s world, not just watching it through a screen. 

Consumer attention has become exponentially harder to grab, and consumer packaged goods manufacturers need to elevate themselves beyond tried-and-true marketing tactics, because they are saturated with competitors and a constant stream of challenger brands.

The sponsorship playbook that TRESemmé is tapping was actually built by sports, and largely targeted men. Hollywood studios have also chased this model for properties whose fanbases typically skew male. The 2023 release of Barbie seems to have tipped the scales. 

And now, Devil Wears Prada 2 is fully embracing it, and TRESemmé has fully bought in with an integration designed to help audiences extend the cinematic moment and carry it out of the theater, and—quite literally for the shampoo brand—into their lives.

The social media platform TikTok made its return to the NewFronts on Tuesday, unveiling a suite of new advertising products as the company looks to rebuild advertiser confidence following one of the most consequential years in its history.

The presentation, delivered at the Ziegfeld Ballroom in Manhattan, marks TikTok’s first NewFronts appearance since it survived a potential ban in the United States and emerged under new ownership after a court-ordered sale in January. Complicating matters further, the Trump administration is set to receive a $10 billion fee for brokering the deal, a development that has drawn further scrutiny to the company as it works to reestablish its footing domestically.

Against that backdrop, TikTok arrived at the NewFronts with a pitch centered on cultural relevance and advertiser scale. 

“TikTok is where people go to see what everyone is talking about right now,” said Khartoon Weiss, its vice president and general manager of global business solutions, in a statement. “Brands are not interrupting people—they are joining the conversation.”

The centerpiece announcement is TikTok’s Logo Takeover, a new format that allows advertisers to co-brand with TikTok on the app’s launch screen when users open the platform. The company cited Warner Bros. as an early adopter of the format, using the product to promote the upcoming release of the film Supergirl and reporting double-digit improvements in brand awareness and purchase intent.

TikTok also introduced Prime Time, a format that delivers up to three ads from the same brand to the same user within a 15-minute window, designed to capitalize on tentpole moments and live events. The company framed it as a tool for narrative arcs rather than one-off impressions.

A third new format, TopReach, bundles two existing placements—TopView, the first ad users see when they open the app, and TopFeed, the first in-feed ad in the For You Feed—into a single purchase. The product aims to give advertisers the maximum reach possible in a single day during key cultural moments or product launches.

The company also unveiled new additions to TikTok Pulse, its contextual ad solution. Pulse Tastemakers lets brands align their ads with a curated group of creators, while Pulse Mentions places ads next to conversations already happening about a brand or its product category.

The product rollout reflects TikTok’s broader commercial priorities heading into the year. The company has leaned heavily into its Shops business as a key revenue driver, while also cultivating its creator ecosystem as a point of differentiation. 

That creator advantage, however, is frequently under siege. Just last week, Meta announced its Content Fast Track program, which offers creators with more than one million followers on TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram up to $3,000 a month to post 15 Reels on Facebook. 

For now, TikTok appears focused on making the case that, whatever questions surround its ownership structure, its advertising business remains consistent. 

With 200 million users and a platform synonymous with popular culture, it has the audience. Tuesday’s NewFront was an effort to remind the ad industry that it’s also open for business.

Is your media investment grounded in brand strategy? Enroll in the ADWEEK MiniMBA in Marketing and connect planning, messaging, and real market impact. Sign up here.

Like the champagne in the Bachelor mansion, Disney may be putting the latest season of The Bachelorette on ice. But as the Mouse House weighs the decision, millions in ad dollars hang in the balance.

Disney and ABC made a shocking call last week to remove The Bachelorette from the network’s lineup days before it was set to air. The decision comes amid allegations of domestic violence against this season’s star, Secret Lives of Mormon Wives personality Taylor Frankie Paul, as well as a leaked video of an incident between Frankie Paul and her ex, Dakota Mortensen, from 2023.

In a statement, Disney said it wasn’t moving forward with the show “at this time,” and a rerun of American Idol was put in place of The Bachelorette’s planned debut on Sunday, March 22. However, Disney hasn’t been public with its plan for the time slot moving forward.

With the fate of Taylor Frankie Paul’s Bachelorette season in the air, here’s a look at the ad dollars potentially on the line.

In the series’ most recent season (Jenn Tran’s stint as Bachelorette in 2024), brands spent an estimated $30.7 million in advertising during episodes, according to iSpot.

ABC typically charges about $100,000 for a 30-second ad in the show, according to The Hollywood Reporter, with an average of half an hour of ads per two-hour episode.

Though the company could receive lower rates if it relies on fill-in programming, it seems Disney won’t lose all of the ad spend from the current season if The Bachelorette remains off the air.

A source familiar with the matter, which noted that ABC is currently the No. 1 entertainment network and up year-over-year (season to date), said, “Most advertisers have re-expressed their media dollars back into other ABC programming.”

Can these promos steal you for a minute?

In addition to the potential loss of ad dollars, Disney is also losing money from the media time devoted to promoting the show.

Since Feb. 9, promos for The Bachelorette have aired 870 times on national linear TV, according to iSpot. That has a media value of $8.2 million. It was one of ABC’s top properties for promos in media value since Feb. 9, behind only R.J. Decker and Scrubs.

Among the most impactful placements, iSpot noted that The Bachelorette promos aired four times during the 98th Oscars, live and during re-air. Placements in live events, including the Oscars, are premium inventory, with media value in the millions.

For the 2026 ceremony, Disney achieved an Oscars ad sellout, with pricing up double-digit percent-wise over the 97th Oscars. In 2025, Disney brought in between $1.7 million and $2.3 million for a 30-second spot in the awards show.

Live events like the Oscars are also somewhat ratings resistant. Despite a ratings downturn this year, with the 98th Oscars dropping by about 2 million viewers, Disney is already talking to advertisers about its 2027 Oscars, ADWEEK recently learned.

Time will tell whether The Bachelorette remains benched. Still, with Taylor Frankie Paul being an influencer with a massive online following, this story will continue until the last rose petal falls.

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The Atlantic is giving new meaning to the word sponsorship.

The 168-year-old magazine announced a first-of-its-kind, three-year partnership with the luxury cruise line Seabourn on Monday, which will bring its writers, editorial programming, and subscription access aboard Seabourn voyages starting this fall. The company declined to offer further financial specifics of the deal.

The partnership spans advertising, sponsorship, and subscription enablement, according to Alice McKown, publisher and chief revenue officer of The Atlantic. It will culminate in fall 2028 with a full 12-day route takeover from Montreal to Boston, the city where The Atlantic was founded in 1857.

“We realized we could do more than just an advertising relationship,” McKown said. “We thought of it as a joint business opportunity for both of us. The passengers win because they get new experiences, a subscription, access to our writers. And it is new for our writers too—it allows them to bring their stories to life in a different way.”

The partnership is rooted in a thesis McKown has been developing since joining the company four years ago, which is that the affluence—not just influence—of its readers could open up budgets from luxury advertisers. 

The Seabourn deal adds an international and travel-focused dimension to that playbook, one that fits squarely into this evolving commercial identity. Travel and luxury have emerged as two of its strongest advertising categories heading into Q2, which is on pace to be the company’s best second quarter in at least four years, up 30% year over year, per McKown.

As part of the deal, passengers aboard routes that feature Atlantic programming will receive complimentary digital access while onboard, plus a three-month subscription after disembarking. The Atlantic is also curating the libraries aboard each ship, stocking them with recent issues and books by its writers, both current and historical.

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The events programming will be overseen by Evan Smith, the former founder and CEO of the Texas Tribune who built that outlet’s festival into a nationally recognized event. Smith now leads The Atlantic’s events operation. 

Programming this year will feature fireside chats. The slate will then expand in its second two years, with the flagship 2028 voyage timed to the 40th anniversary of Seabourn and marketed as 12 Days with The Atlantic. The scope of the programming will resemble that of The Atlantic Festival, spanning culture, literature, technology, and business, and will be informed, in part, by whatever is animating The Atlantic’s journalism at the time.

The partnership arrives as The Atlantic has been leaning hard into live events as a growth vehicle. 

Last year, events made up 25% of the company’s commercial revenue, anchored by The Atlantic Festival, which moved to New York last fall and generated 36% more revenue than the prior year, McKown said at the time. 

The company produces roughly 25 events annually, and in 2025 launched The Atlantic Across America, a 50-state tour that has so far drawn more than 7,500 attendees across five events, with two more scheduled for April.

“We want to go to [audiences],” McKown said. “In the age of AI and the internet, just having your brand show up in person is so valuable and builds affinity and strengthens that relationship.”

The partnership is also backstopped by a company that has been on a remarkable run. 

The Atlantic now counts 1.46 million total subscribers as of the second half of 2025, having added 300,000 net new subscriptions over the prior year. This 27% year-over-year gain has outpaced all but one of the 184 titles that filed audited figures with the Alliance for Audited Media, according to the publisher. The Atlantic also added more than 50 newsroom positions last year, bringing its editorial headcount above 200.

The company has been building its subscription base through a series of creative distribution moves, including a college subscription program that has enrolled more than 200 universities, and a program offering free digital access to every public high school in America. The Seabourn deal adds another channel, one where the potential subscriber base is self-selecting and well-matched.

“We did do math on subscription projections,” McKown said, “and we saw that there was considerable upside.”