Digital Roundup

 DIGITAL ROUNDUP

December 2025

Welcome to this month’s edition of the roundup to some core updates in the digital advertising industry.

NB: the following represents my own opinion

Amazon launches new AI ad solutions at Unboxed

Amazon Ads logo

Amazon’s annual advertising showcase debuted some more agentic capabilities.

(https://advertising.amazon.com/en-gb/events/unboxed)

DEEPDIVE

Amazon took to the stage in Nashville to demonstrate their latest ads solutions, focusing on agentic updates across both campaign & creative use cases. As per the official recap, the core theme was around efficiency for advertisers using their ad products and enabling the ability to use Amazon’s core inventory / data at scale. The big updates includes:

There is a lot of positives here, building on the last 12 months of Amazon improving the ads UI for DSP alongside a multitude of partnership announcements with the likes of Netflix & Spotify. The rise of agentic use cases is also impressive to see, with the creative side in particular being a good rival for Google’s approach with Nano Banana / Gemini in their ads solutions. How viable it is will be for non-endemic brands will be the main talking point on Amazon’s end however. As to whether an Ads Agent will lead to the efficiencies that advertisers / agencies expect, will be something to watch. Less publicly, Amazon have also released their MCP, which will open up the door to 3rd parties / agencies building their own agentic solutions with this.

EU Commission

EU Digital Omnibus & its implications

DEEPDIVE

Digital Omnibus is the latest adventure into the world of EU regulation but marks the start of an attempt to soften how strict components of how data regulation is enforced from a digital perspective. The core reasoning for this is due to the rise of AI and how this requires regulation but also ensuring that the use cases more broader than advertising can still exist in a heavy regulated space.

There are also other key components that will impact the digital marketing space in particular:

  • The definition of personal data is to become more soft, where consideration is only viable if the entity is using it to identify an individual.

  • The definition of legitimate interest in regards to leveraging personal data for use of certain use cases with the appropriate safeguards in place.

  • The attempt to move consent requirements away from individual cookie banners and more to a browser / operating system approach.

  • The attempt to make certain forms of cookies immune from consent requirements, specifically around audience aggregated measurement & security.

As a whole, you can argue that there are lots of positives for the different martech / adtech providers to take advantage from these rules becoming a little less strict, whilst also using the “AI” scapegoat to try argue that certain things are very much required. You can also see that bad actors will be very much intrigued to see how far they can push this, where concepts like fingerprinting may start to become even more of a challenge again. And for getting rid of the annoying cookie banner approach, this isn’t super new in the adtech space with approaches like DoNotTrack and to some degree the GPP framework similar. But moving to a higher level could also mean that there is no longer a choice on an individual publisher / advertiser level, which Apple most famously have seen trouble with via ATT.

Ultimately the aim for the EU Commission is to allow AI to exist in the EU in order for digital maturity to keep up with other parts of the world. But whether this comes at the consequence of more bad actors appearing or doing non-ethical things with personal data, will remain to be seen and is already on the crosshairs of Noyb.

EU Commission looks to reshape how data regulation operates with implication to how GDPR works today.

(https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_2718)

OTHER KEY CALLOUTS

SOCIAL / SEARCH HIGHLIGHTS 📱

  • Meta have released more AI capabilities for Leads goals (Meta)

  • Meta have released more capabilities for in-app value optimisation, following the equivalent on web (Meta)

  • Google have made a few announcements on how to use their Commerce offerings (Google)

  • Google have updated PMAX campaigns with new reporting & targeting capabilities (Google)

  • Meta have released a new blog post on how to calibrate attribution with incrementality (Meta)

  • Reddit have released a new automated targeting capability for campaigns (Reddit)

  • Reddit have released a new Interactive ad format (Reddit)

  • Google have released new incrementality testing features on Google Ads (Google)

  • Google have added a few more Demand Gen capabilities in November (Google)

  • Pinterest have put out some new research on visual search trends (Pinterest)

  • Amazon have released new benchmarking tools via API for ads / DSP (Amazon)

  • Adobe have made a powerplay to acquire SEMRush to drive LLM search (Adobe)

  • Google have added new branded queries filters to Search Console (Google)

  • Google AI capabilities continue to move forward with agentic calling in the US (Google)

PROGRAMMATIC HIGHLIGHTS 🌐

  • Uber have teamed up with Adelaide & Kantar to release attention metrics on their ad platform (AdExchanger)

  • Roku have released an ads API solution (Roku)

  • DoubleVerify have released a new AI Verification product that focused on websites built on AI in a fraudulent manner (DoubleVerify)

  • Skai have announced a strategic partnership with Kevel for commerce media (Skai)

  • Lift360 have announced they will acquire Nativo as a programmatic native ad platform (Nativo)

  • Magnite have released a new in-app SDK capability to break into in-app adserving more broadly (Magnite)

  • Innovid have released their agentic tools called Orchestrator as an AI Agent (Innovid)

  • ITV have launched Live Addressable + as a new ads solution (ITV)

  • Equativ have teamed up with Mozilla to launch their ads solution on Firefox (Equativ)

  • TripleLift have released a new paused ads capabilities into CTV (TripleLift)

  • Broadsign have made an acquisition of Place Exchange to solidify its DOOH solution (Businesswire)

  • Adform have integrated the Spotify Ad Exchange into their DSP (PMW)

IDENTITY HIGHLIGHTS 🆔

  • Amplitude have released their version of AI Search tracking (Amplitude)

  • Amazon will now charge 3rd parties for accessing the Seller Partner API on behalf of Endemic brands (Amazon)

  • ID5 have made their first acquisition in buying TrueData for their ID graph expansion, primarily in the US (AdExchanger)

  • IAB Tech Lab have released a new proposal to handle device attestation to reduce fraud (IAB)

  • Google have released updates to their user provided data solution on Google Analytics for stronger capabilities (Google)

  • Meta have been called out on making large revenue from fraudulent ads / brands (Reuters)

  • Meta have released some engineering collateral on how GEM works as part of their AI ads recommendation engine (Meta)

  • InfoSum have launched Beacons as a new cross-data cloud collaboration software (Businesswire)

  • Hightouch have introduced AI agents as part of their agentic offering (Businesswire)

  • Mozilla have expanded fingerprinting protection in Firefox 145 release (Mozilla)

  • AdCP gets its first major updates for v2.50 (AdCP)

  • Spotify have put out some nice analysis on how AB tests operate for them in challenging circumstances (Spotify)

  • PayPal have enabled instant buy for US users on Perplexity (PayPal)

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