TikTok has reversed course on a plan to phase out seller-fulfilled shipping in the U.S. for TikTok Shop, pausing previously announced deadlines, according to an email sent to merchants and reviewed by ADWEEK.

In the email, sent Tuesday, the company said, “At this time, Seller Shipping remains unchanged, and previously shared deadlines are not going into effect. In the meantime, please continue operating as usual”

TikTok corroborated the content of the email. “Sellers have a choice of fulfillment options, including Seller Shipping, Upgraded TikTok Shipping, Collections by TikTok (CBT) or Fulfilled by TikTik (FBT), ” a company spokesperson told ADWEEK.

TikTok had previously moved to centralize fulfillment across its U.S. marketplace, telling merchants they would be required to use the platform’s logistics services in place of handling their own shipping, as ADWEEK first reported.

“[The] logistics turned out to be far more complex than TikTok initially anticipated, which is why we’re seeing them course-correct. The model might work for smaller merchants, but for brands operating at real scale, it simply doesn’t make sense. This feels like an idea that sounded good in the boardroom, but once it met operational reality, the strategy had to change,” said Ian Blair, chief executive officer of the premium laundry brand Laundry Sauce.

Under that plan, which was set to begin rolling out Feb. 25, the company said it would phase out its “Seller Shipping” option and require merchants to route orders through its Fulfilled by TikTok (FBT) network or its upgraded shipping program, where TikTok controls labels and carrier selection.

The original plan had raised concerns among sellers, who said shifting fulfillment to TikTok could increase costs and reduce control over the customer experience, ADWEEK previously reported. 

The pause comes as TikTok’s U.S. business is now overseen by Oracle, Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi-based MGX, signaling that the platform is recalibrating its strategy under new leadership while it scales its marketplace.

Taboola, the native advertising giant known for placing sponsored content modules beneath news stories on sites like USA Today and NBC News, has named Krishan Bhatia its first chief business officer.

At Taboola, Bhatia will be charged with driving revenue through global sales and partnerships across Taboola’s full product portfolio.

Most recently, Bhatia served as vice president at Amazon, where he scaled Prime Video’s advertising business to new markets across the world, built out a brand partnerships team, and expanded the company’s live sports offering.

Prior to his time at Amazon, Bhatia spent over a decade at NBCUniversal, where in his role as president and chief business officer of global advertising and partnerships he grew the Peacock business.

“I’ve worked at the intersection of media and technology for the past 30 years, and I believe this company is very uniquely positioned to be able to take advantage of some of the key tailwinds and technology developments in the industry,” Bhatia told ADWEEK. 

He pointed to Taboola’s relationships with approximately 15,000 marketers and 9,000 publishers globally, which he said will serve it well at a moment when brand and performance marketing are converging. “[This] puts Taboola in a really unique position to be able to drive greater efficacy for marketers small and large, and also serve its publisher partners with incremental yield and, increasingly, technology solutions that will help grow their businesses.”

He arrives at a pivotal moment for the adtech company, which has spent the last year pushing aggressively beyond native advertising. It launched DeeperDive, a publisher-embedded generative AI tool for surfacing content from across the given publisher’s site, and rolled out Realize, a performance advertising platform for ad placements across a broader range of formats and media inventory. Then, in November, it debuted a connected TV product with Paramount meant to attract small- and medium-sized advertisers.

Shares of Taboola are down 15% over the last year. The company will report its Q4 and full-year 2025 financial results on Feb. 25.

In the months ahead, the new CBO will focus on driving adoption of Realize and DeeperDive among publishers, driving investment from mid-market and enterprise advertisers, and establishing new partnerships—with holdcos and indie agencies, marketers, technology providers, and a wider set of advertisers.

CEO Adam Singolda called Bhatia “the right person for the job” due to his experience building digital ad businesses and working on the intersection of video and performance advertising at both Amazon Prime and Peacock. 

Asked why Taboola decided to bring on its first-ever CBO at this moment, Singolda said that Taboola has been “laying all the pieces together” on both the publisher and advertiser sides of the business for a decade—and now, it’s time to hit the gas pedal. 

“If you look at two-sided marketplace companies, outside of Google, Facebook, and Amazon, I am unaware of anyone else that is [doing what we are] to build both sides,” he said. “We’re ready to take the next step and supercharge this rocket ship called Taboola to [make it] everything it can be. The world needs a non-walled garden friend, and I hope we can do it together.”

Bhatia declined to specify any revenue targets.

The numbers

$1.32 billion — Q4 revenue, up 14% year-over-year (YoY), slightly under LSEG analysts’ projections of $1.33 billion. Full-year revenue for 2025 came in at $4.22 billion, up 14% over the same period.

$541.5  million — Adjusted EBITDA for the period, coming in short of Wall Street’s expected $550 million.

619 million — Global monthly active users, a spike of 12% YoY in Q4. User growth accelerated in the second half of 2025, and Gen Z now accounts for over half of all Pinterest users.

The watercooler talk

Pinterest shares fell around 20% in after-hours trading after the company reported a fourth-quarter earnings miss and weaker-than-expected first-quarter revenue guidance.

On a call with investors Thursday evening, CEO Bill Ready said the company is disappointed in the poor revenue performance.

He cited Trump-era tariffs for a cooling effect on ad spend, noting, “Many of the largest retailers have been disproportionately impacted by tariffs and have been pulling back on advertising spend across the industry as they seek to protect their margins.”

Pinterest’s large share of major retailers has resulted in it feeling a greater impact, he said. 

Despite the drawback, the company’s advertising business has matured in the last year. It expanded its measurement capabilities and added more automation with its AI-powered campaign management platform Pinterest Performance+. Pinterest also announced in December that it will acquire tvScientific, indicating that it plans to get into the CTV game in a more serious way. 

The platform’s AI investments have also improved its commerce capabilities as it tries to become a more full-funnel platform. Pinterest Assistant, for instance, is an AI-backed shopping companion that lets users search and buy products using text or voice prompts. AI-powered visual search continues to be a core focus, Ready said. 

Pinterest hopes that investing in more advanced AI capabilities for merchants and advertisers will help it make up lost ground on revenue. It will also look to woo mid-sized enterprises and small-to-medium businesses for more ad dollars.

“These advertisers who, on our platform, range from roughly 30 billion down to tens of millions in annual GMV [gross merchandise value], continue to represent a significant opportunity for us to scale advertiser demand,” Ready said.

Pinterest’s fourth-quarter earnings arrive as the company is undergoing major organizational upheaval, laying off some 15% of its staff this winter as part of a strategic pivot toward AI.

The key quote

Ready said he is not satisfied with Pinterest’s Q4 performance: “We need to further broaden our revenue mix and accelerate the next phase of our sales and go to market transformation. These efforts will be led by Lee Brown, who joined in late January as our first Chief Business Officer.”

In this episode of Brave Commerce, Rachel Tipograph and Sarah Hofstetter sit down with Kate Hamill, VP of North America enterprise sales at Pinterest, to unpack how the platform is evolving from an inspiration engine into a more measurable driver of commerce outcomes. 

Kate shares how Pinterest is compressing the funnel between discovery and conversion, and how brands can think differently about visual-first experiences across the shopping journey.

The conversation also dives into why social search is capturing more search budgets, how Pinterest’s AI powers proactive discovery, and why modern measurement approaches—including MMM, MTA, and incrementality—matter more than last-click attribution as consumers shop across weeks and devices. 

From CPG to emerging non-endemic categories, Kate explains how brands can reach consumers earlier in the journey and better understand their impact on growth.

Key Takeaways:

• Social search plays a critical role in demand creation, not just demand capture
• Visual search helps brands engage consumers before preferences are fully formed
• Incrementality and triangulated measurement are essential to understanding impact
• AI-powered discovery experiences support both inspiration and performance

In a year when brands are shelling out $10 million for 30-second Super Bowl ads, the real key to winning the night isn’t just about being in the Big Game. It’s about surrounding it.

With over 40 billion hours of sports content consumed annually on YouTube globally, the platform, which regularly leads Nielsen’s Media Distributor Gauge with around 13% of the market, is increasingly becoming a key play for brands around live sports tentpoles, including Super Bowl Sunday.

By utilizing the platform, advertisers are building value beyond in-game ad units, according to Sean Downey, president, Americas and global partners, Google.

“For the Super Bowl, in particular, we’ve been really focused on having YouTube and creators surround the NFL and take advantage of that really huge cultural moment,” Downey told ADWEEK.

YouTube has made live sports a priority in its upfront conversations, with advertisers looking to align themselves with cultural moments and take advantage of the platform’s premier sponsorship offerings. According to Downey, some of those sponsorships are coming to fruition now around the Super Bowl.

For advertisers with a Big Game spot, Downey noted that YouTube’s AdBlitz program, which includes a hub for Super Bowl advertisements, can significantly extend a brand’s reach. The exec points to a Comscore AdBlitz Meta Analysis from the day of the Super Bowl, which shows that 45% of total unique viewers of AdBlitz participant campaigns saw an ad on YouTube only. And viewers are also increasingly watching those ads on the big screen.

“The viewership shifted on YouTube dramatically. There are over a billion hours watched annually in the living room, so they’re not just getting the reach of the game in the moment,” Downey said.

According to Downey, the platform’s strength lies in expanding reach and embedding brands with creators.

For instance, after its 2025 creator flag football game drew 6 million viewers, YouTube is back hosting another pre-Super Bowl flag football game on Feb. 7, with key creators and stars such as Druski, J Balvin, and Cam Newton set to participate. Meanwhile, P&G’s Old Spice is the premier sponsor, showcasing a new campaign with custom integrations, graphics, ads, and live activations.

Though not the premier sponsor, other NFL advertisers are also included in packages around the creator game, according to Downey, which include mastheads that “basically give you the reach of a Super Bowl ad every day.”

Of course, the real play around YouTube is getting in with the creators, who can bring brands organically into the conversation with their subscribers. And for this year’s Big Game, YouTube has more creators than ever in town, with the company tapping into their programming niches and connecting them with advertisers.

“If we want to put someone around Druski or Jason Kelce, we know the packaging and the advertisers that are looking for those folks in particular,” Downey said. “And we really move that around how we think about matching creators to brands over time.”

And if you’re looking for Jason Kelce, you can also find him starring alongside his wife, Kylie Kelce, in YouTube TV’s pre-game ad, as the platform surrounds the Super Bowl itself. Meanwhile, though YouTube doesn’t technically have an ad in the game, its creators starring in ads for other brands will inevitably drive more traffic to the platform.

Moving forward into the upfront season, Downey noted that YouTube is looking to take its current strategies to new, more granular levels. For instance, YouTube is looking to leverage its sponsorships with more custom integrations and get advertisers closer to the content in more robust packages with creators who align with their brands. Meanwhile, the platform is also utilizing AI-powered campaigns to help brands find new customers and take a full-funnel approach.

Ultimately, it’s about bringing brands closer to content and having creators promote brand partnerships that align with their values, rather than just aligning with their checkbook.

“Sports matter to a lot of people. So if you’re embedded into it, and you’re part of the conversation, you’re part of that niche, you do better, and I think that’s what brands see,” Downey said. “They’re always going to do the reach, because you’ve got to have a certain amount of it, but deep community, authentic communication, and resonance with fans is what really matters.”

Scope3, the adtech emissions quantifier-turned agentic media startup helmed by programmatic pioneer Brian O’Kelley is axing more of its staff, just five months after its last round of layoffs.

Scope3 declined to confirm the exact number of laid off staffers. But the company confirmed in a statement that it made “further adjustments” to its “commercial and engineering teams to align with market demand.”

One impacted employee said they learned they were losing their job on a brief call with their manager last week. They said the news came as a surprise. 

As of late 2024, the adtech company employed over 100 staffers globally, according to a blog post by O’Kelley, but that number was published prior to layoffs last year.

Two former Scope3 employees, speaking on condition of anonymity, told ADWEEK that a handful of their former colleagues left the company recently of their own accord as well.

Scope3’s spokesperson said, “We remain focused on building the agent-to-agent media infrastructure that brands need as the industry transforms.”

The company, which launched four years ago with the aim of quantifying carbon emissions across adtech supply chains, made a major pivot in 2025, with O’Kelley endorsing a new vision focused on aiding the industry’s shift to agent-to-agent media transactions. 

Last spring, Scope3 launched agentic products designed for automating brand safety and suitability. O’Kelley has also helmed a nascent effort to standardize agentic media buying and selling with Ad Context Protocol, or AdCP, which has gained support from industry players including Yahoo, PubMatic, and Magnite—though adoption is not yet widespread.

Google is kicking off its biggest marketing push for Gemini, its generative AI assistant, in a feel-good Super Bowl ad meant to humanize the tech. 

In the 60-second spot, set to air during the third quarter of the Feb. 8 game, a mother helps prepare her young son, Ben, for a big move to a new home with help from Gemini. She asks Gemini to pull up photos of the new house, then drops in a picture of Ben’s current room to show him how his bed, his toys, and even the dog’s bed can fit into his new room. Then, they take a look at the new backyard, and although Mom still won’t let Ben have a trampoline, together they imagine all the possibilities of their new life together with Gemini’s image-generation tools.

The campaign represents Google’s fifth consecutive—and 10th overall—Super Bowl appearance. From the company’s first foray in 2010 with “Parisian Love,”—a love story told through Google searches—the brand has consistently taken an emotional tack to its Super Bowl messaging. 

“Google is a product company, but really, we believe in products that help people,” said Marvin Chow, vp of consumer and AI marketing at Google. “We believe in that storytelling of connecting the benefit of a product to a value in someone’s life.”

The core idea of this year’s ad, “New Home,” is that Google is becoming more helpful than ever. “The platform that we’re developing is this idea of a new kind of help from Google,” Chow said. “We’ve always been the helpful company, but with new advances in technology and AI, the kind of help we can bring people is going to be new and improved. This really starts to set that tone [that] it’s not just another chatbot, but it’s a new kind of help…that we’re going to bring to you.”

This year’s ad, “New Home,” was created by the in-house Google Creative Lab team. Although Google maintains various agency relationships, it made sense to create this ad internally, Chow said, because the Creative Lab has direct insight to product development and research at Google, enabling a more informed depiction of Gemini’s capabilities. 

“New Home” is the keystone of an integrated campaign that spans TV, online video, social, out-of-home, and influencer partnerships. Much of the content will appear in the days leading up to the Big Game. Bay Area residents, for example, can expect to see ads for Gemini splashed across billboards and public transportation. Plus, through a partnership with Lyft, Google will offer a $20 ride credit through Feb. 8 for Bay Wheels bikes across the Bay Area. Gemini will also sponsor EA Sports’ Madden Bowl, starring Luke Combs and Teddy Swims, on Feb. 6. On social platforms, the brand will roll out a slate of play-by-play, sports commentary-style videos with announcers showcasing various use cases for Gemini, from trying a new hairstyle to identifying a car’s fuse box.

“We’re definitely going big,” Chow said. The forthcoming showdown between the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots will take place in Santa Clara, on Google’s “home turf,” Chow noted (Google’s global headquarters is just down the road in Mountain View). “You’ll start to see Gemini all over. It’ll be unmissable.”

In the months leading up to Super Bowl LX, the game’s broadcast host, NBC Sports, sold 30-second spots for upward of $10 million. Though Chow declined to specify Google’s total investment, he said it was “on par” with the brand’s previous Super Bowl buys.  

Google sees this moment as the start of a bigger promotional push, with Gemini occupying the pole position of CEO Sundar Pichai’s decade-long ambition to make Google an “AI-first” company (something he first spoke about in April 2016).

“At Google, we talk about [the idea that] a product has to be ready for marketing,” Chow said. “We have a lot of products, and some of them are early-stage, and they’re not quite ready for marketing. Nothing’s perfect, but we’re at that moment where the Super Bowl is the starting point” for a bigger Gemini push. 

Gemini is gaining steam on AI leader OpenAI. It now has around 650 million monthly active users, compared with ChatGPT’s 800 million, according to research from European bank BNP Paribas. Gemini’s share of website visits rose to 22.5% in December, up from 17.7% the previous month. The figures far outpace the tool’s 2024 usage numbers.

In the weeks following the Super Bowl, Chow’s team will look to link the “New Home” ad and the surrounding campaign to an uptick in Gemini adoption. Google will also do lift studies and assess changes in consideration, awareness, search trends, and more. 

“It is this pivotal moment, and we’re kind of kicking off this Gemini story,” Chow said. “When I look back, I would hope that this is the beginning of that moment where regular people are starting to learn about Gemini and be like, ‘Oh, that’s the helpful AI. That’s the thing that can do this for me.’ That’s where I think that cultural adoption and mindshare of Gemini starts to take off—in this starting moment.”

TBPN, the hourslong daily tech podcast hosted by the young, brash entrepreneur-investors Jordi Hays and John Coogan, spun up significant cultural cachet—and big sponsorship dollars—in the year-and-change since its debut. Now, the show has bought a regional Super Bowl ad, set to air on broadcast across the Bay Area and Silicon Valley. 

The 15-second spot, produced in-house, showcases previous TBPN guests, opening with interview clips of Palantir co-founder and CEO Alex Karp, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg, investors Mark Cuban and Marc Andreessen, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and others—before panning out to show a colorful collage of business logos that come together to form an all-caps ‘TBPN’ logo. Each small icon in the image represents an organization that has appeared on the show. 

The investment is a bold and unusual bet for a podcast business. “It’s completely unnecessary for a media company to buy advertising,” Hays told ADWEEK. “The nature of media is that you’re constantly putting out things that are promoting the business naturally, just through the content.”

So why do it? 

Well, for one, the show’s president, Dylan Abruscato, a former entrepreneur and marketer, secured a kind of sweetheart deal on the spot through his connections at NBCUniversal, where he worked for three years in the mid-2010s. While national Super Bowl LX spots have sold for up to $10 million, regional spots can sell for anywhere between $50,000 and $1 million-plus. Abruscato told ADWEEK he paid less than $50,000, thanks in part to his ties to NBC Sports, the game’s official broadcaster this year. 

“I started my career in the ad sales team at NBC, so I knew the right questions to ask, and the right spots in the game to request,” he said.

Even so, the investment was mostly for the hell of it. TBPN doesn’t need a Super Bowl ad to generate awareness, grow its audience, or drive downloads, Hays and Abruscato suggested. 

“We believe in doing things purely for fun,” Hays said. 

Most of all, TBPN wants to deliver a show of thanks to its many guests in an unexpected way. Hays called the push “Operation Surprise and Delight.”

“We wanted to give back in a small way to and create a fun moment for everybody that’s been a part of creating the show,” Hays said. “It’s really just this big collection of people that have made the show possible and are what make it great. So surprising everyone with this fun moment just made a lot of sense.”

Hays and Abruscato said that the podcast stands to benefit from the project’s ripple effects. In particular, they expect the ad to travel far beyond the broadcast, spreading across the social platforms that TBPN knows intimately—and has long relied on for growth. “This ad is optimized for shareability,” Hays said. “I would expect it to get millions of views across X and other platforms.”

The concept came together quickly, prompting TBPN to produce the spot in-house rather than enlist an agency. It gave its three-person production team—out of just 10 full-time employees—the chance to show what they could do.

The spot represents TBPN’s second big marketing push, following an out-of-home buy last summer that brought Hays’ and Coogan’s face to a billboard in New York. 

The TBPN billboard in NYC is the newest high-profile destination for tourists and city residents alike https://t.co/ZvxbnrUToW

— Tyler Gold (@tylergold) July 2, 2025

“There’s a running joke on the show about our love for advertising,” Hays said, nodding to early episodes in which Hays and Coogan inserted ad reads into their scripts even though they had no advertisers. While some podcasts view advertising as a “necessary evil,’” he added, TBPN has “really leaned into it.” The podcast’s sponsors now tally over 25, and include big names like Google Gemini, Figma, Plaid, Ramp, and Shopify.

“Through advertising and being an ad-supported media company, all the content that we’ve ever put out has been free for the entire world. We’ve never paywalled anything. We don’t have plans to paywall anything.” 

The appearance is also a sign that TBPN’s ambitions are only growing. “We constantly are pushing ourselves to go bigger—that’s the challenge,” Hays said. In 2025, some of the show’s biggest moments included covering Figma’s IPO in July and interviewing Mark Zuckerberg at Meta Connect, the tech titan’s annual developer conference. Now, the show’s Super Bowl ad is the next escalation. 

“Then the bar gets set,” said Hays, “and then we have to figure out how to do it again.”