Yahoo is building out a range of new AI-powered tools within its demand-side platform, or DSP, for mid-market, performance-focused advertisers. These include automated options for activating and managing media designed to make the DSP more accessible and easy to use for all kinds of advertisers.

The development signals an expansion beyond Yahoo DSP’s core business, which has historically serviced enterprise advertisers facilitating ad buys for brands like Kroger, Arby’s, and Planet Fitness. The new tools could help the platform extend its market penetration, attracting a wider variety of advertisers, such as ecomm platforms and direct-to-consumer brands. 

“AI is enabling us to better support existing customers while making our technology accessible to a broader range of advertisers, and we will share more when ready,” a Yahoo spokesperson said in a statement.

Yahoo is hiring a dedicated team to build out these offerings, according to a source familiar with the matter. 

A job posting for a head of growth accounts for the new project appeared on LinkedIn earlier this month. The range for the role is $217,905 to $473,710 annually, with a core mandate to “drive net-new advertiser acquisition across mid-market brands, with a strong focus on CTV and full-funnel programmatic solutions.”

The company is also seeking out talent to fill strategy and product development roles associated with the new features, the source said. 

Yahoo is in the early stages of building out these new features and is eyeing a launch date for later this year, according to the source. 

Yahoo’s core enterprise DSP business has grown substantially over the last year. The company strengthened its privacy-safe targeting, began testing AI agents within its DSP, and inked a handful of deals likely to bring more offsite retail media dollars onto the platform. Plus, Yahoo became a key beneficiary of advertisers’ disgruntlement with The Trade Desk, which lost millions of dollars last year to rival DSPs. Yahoo’s lower fees have proved particularly appealing to The Trade Desk defectors. 

Now, by folding in more performance-minded features, Yahoo could bolster its competitive edge with advertisers for whom automation, cost efficiency, and accessibility outweigh the sophisticated customization options offered by some other DSPs on the market. 

Spotify is rolling out interactive carousel ads, the company announced on Tuesday. The company is looking to attract more dollars across the marketing funnel from brand awareness down to generating sales—while also accommodating changing users preferences towards a more visual platform.

The new swipeable ads allow brands to spotlight up to six different products. Each slide in the lineup includes its own image, link, description, and optional pricing or promotional information. The ads will pop up in the app’s Now Playing view appearing on screen while users actively consume content.

Though the carousel ad format was pioneered by Meta in the mid-2010s, Spotify is only now rolling out the offering as users spend more time watching—and not just listening—to Spotify. This is thanks to the platform’s foray into music videos and its push for podcasts to be published with full video.

“The user experience is becoming a much more interactive, audio and visual experience,” Brian Berner, Spotify’s global head of advertising revenue and partnerships, told ADWEEK. “It’s just time for us to make sure that our ad strategy reflects the trends we’re seeing and the user engagement we’re seeing from our consumers.”

Priceline and GNC are among the brands piloting Spotify’s carousel ads.

The platform is also introducing a branded takeover of select Spotify playlists including some of its flagship selections like Rap Caviar, Today’s Top Hits, and New Music Friday.

Advertisers can pay to be the only featured brand on a given playlist where their name appears prominently on the playlist’s main page and their ads run exclusively during play. To improve the user experience, listeners hear fewer ad breaks throughout the duration of a sponsored playlist.

Both carousel ads and sponsored playlists are served to users of Spotify’s free tier. 

Meanwhile, the company has enhanced its performance tooling. It added A/B testing capabilities and automated bidding—which uses machine learning to optimize ad delivery and budgets—directly into its Ads Manager. Although, these features are considered table stakes for major advertising platforms. 

With the updates it’s clear that Spotify is positioning itself as a more full-stack ad platform—one capable of delivering upper funnel and mid to lower tier funnel offerings, in addition to performance tools that help marketers get more out of their media buys. 

“What we’re trying to build from an ad strategy is to challenge that preconceived notion of audio just being an upper funnel reach play and build a full-funnel suite,” Berner said. “Do I think overnight we’re going to go from upper funnel to suddenly driving bazillions of app installs? Not overnight. But when I think about the next five years…we are absolutely trying to challenge the status quo and show Spotify to be a full-funnel offering.”

To support that vision, the company is bulking up its ads infrastructure and increasingly investing in AI. Last spring, it launched a global ad exchange and began letting advertisers produce custom audio ads using generative AI tools at no additional cost. This year, it plans to roll out additional AI updates, Berner said.

Asked why a marketer would choose to shift more spend toward Spotify particularly in a crowded market with behemoths like Meta, TikTok, and Google vying for dollars, Berner said simply: “User engagement, user attention, time spent.” He might be on to something. On average, consumers spend about two hours a day on Spotify and 90% use Spotify as part of their daily routine, according to recent survey data the company collected from over 5,000 consumers. For marketers, he said, it’s that user attention and engagement that should prove appealing. “That’s advertising 101: Fish where the fish are.”

Over the last few week, X eliminated over 20 nontechnical roles, and has laid off Angela Zepeda, the ad industry veteran who joined the social platform in 2024 as its head of global marketing, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

Zepeda’s LinkedIn profile indicates she lost her job last month.

The company is trimming talent as its billionaire owner Elon Musk prepares to take his rocket company SpaceX public in an IPO targeting a valuation of around $1 trillion. SpaceX could reportedly file as soon as this week. X was folded into Musk’s AI company xAI in a $45 billion merger last year; then, early this year, SpaceX also joined xAI.

Zepeda was the first true marketing leader appointed at X in the Musk era, filling a role that had been vacant since 2022. 

Her priority at the platform was to distill X’s image and ethos to users and to advertisers, the latter who have historically generated more than 90% of the platform’s revenue. X has lost reams of advertisers, and, as a result, about half of its ad revenue since Musk’s takeover in 2022 (tallying $1.25 billion in 2025 compared to $2.43 billion in 2021)—largely over brand safety concerns sparked by Musk’s lax approach to content moderation.

Last spring, Zepeda told ADWEEK’s editor-in-chief Ryan Joe that X planned to roll out a major brand campaign later that year that would position X as the enduring digital town square. That brand campaign never materialized.

Now, X is hyper-focused on ramping up revenue, offering fresh financial incentives to lapsed advertisers, and bringing on a new chief revenue officer, longtime private-equity executive Jon Shulkin.

Neither X nor Zepeda could be reached by press time. 

Google is turning its demand-side platform for advertisers, Display & Video 360 (DV360), into an AI-powered media buyer backed by Gemini, the tech company’s flagship family of AI models. 

While Gemini tools have been baked into DV360 since at least last spring, they were primarily used to aid marketers in audience discovery, surface reporting insights, and offer tweaks to help optimize campaigns here and there. Now, Gemini will become the true operating layer of the DSP, moving upstream and taking on a larger role in media planning, the company explained at its NewFronts presentation in Manhattan on Monday.  

“Marketers can upload their media plan and automatically translate it into a comprehensive campaign setup,” said Bill Reardon, general manager of the enterprise platform at Google Ads, on a call with the press. 

In its presentation on Monday, the company also hyped up additional AI-powered updates for ad buyers: AI will be deployed within DV360 to help manage real-time fluctuations in live sports inventory across connected TV; and soon, marketers will be able to use Ads Advisor, an agent embedded in the Google Ads Console, to build custom reporting dashboards.

Beyond supercharging the buyer experience with automation, Google also indicated that it is investing more deeply in cross-channel measurement—specifically in connected TV attribution. The company is debuting Confidential Publisher Match, a new identity model that can link marketers’ first-party data with signals from streamers like Roku in a privacy-safe trusted execution environment.

“This shift empowers you with a cross-device conversion memory, connecting a CTV impression directly to a purchase,” Reardon said. 

The push could help Google level up its measurement capabilities on non-owned inventory environments in CTV, specifically, an area where it’s historically been weaker than rivals like The Trade Desk.

To further buoy its CTV measurement push, Google is turning to retail media data. 

The company is working with Kroger to integrate the retail giant’s first-party shopper data into YouTube and Google’s other partner inventory. The company will also roll out SKU-level reporting in DV360, “so brands can see the precise impact of their YouTube and display ads on Kroger sales,” Reardon explained.

“This really changes how brands think about YouTube and its direct impact on sales,” Christine Foster, Kroger’s group vp of commercial strategy and operations, said in a statement. “Now, advertisers can reach Kroger shoppers on the most-watched video platform in the world—and measure how their spend drives sales at the SKU level. The reach is massive, the ability to unify once-siloed efforts is profound, and the opportunity to connect with shoppers across the full customer journey has never been better.”

In fact, YouTube is the cornerstone of Google’s NewFronts pitch this year. It’s the company’s crown jewel, expected to bag nearly 12% of all CTV ad revenues this year, per Emarketer estimates.

While YouTube isn’t getting any new ad formats, Google is aggressively pushing for wider adoption of a select number of the platform’s ad offerings. Now, the company said Monday, YouTube’s pause ads and creator takeovers—which allow a brand to buy out all of a specific creator’s ad inventory for a select period—can be bought through DV360. 

Increasingly, the DSP is being designed to act as a buying environment that reinforces Google’s walled garden, encouraging buyers to transact on YouTube in particular. 

Reardon only underscored the notion that Google is more tightly binding its buy-side tool with its owned inventory and measurement capabilities. “Gemini, with [DV360] and YouTube, will be core to the success of the future of advertising,” he said.

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