Brand safety is a growing concern as world news gets more miserable.  Google has given advertisers more tools to control where their ads appear by making it easier to select themes to exclude and showing the impact on YouTube and Google Ads audience size of those choices.  Other ad platforms are also bulking up brand safety options, although some work harder than others.

In case you still haven’t read the memo, streaming digital services are really anxious to show you ads.  The latest to drive home the message is YouTube, which has stepped up its war against ad blockers.  They apparently issued a statement seen only by The Verge, to the effect that their previous anti-ad blocker tests have now gone global and ad-averse users can buy a paid subscription if they want.

CDP Simon Data has announced the launch of Goals-Based Marketing, initially featuring an AI-powered segmentation workflow. The ultimate goal of this approach is to create revenue-generating customer experiences at scale. The new offering is driven by three AI agentic teams (Strategy Agents, Data Execution Agents, and Revenue Impact Agents) and features Smart Fields and Smart Segments, aimed at uncovering customer behavior patterns.