Teads today released a new version of Teads Ad Manager, its buying platform for connected TV and digital campaigns, making cross-screen performance buying generally available to global enterprise clients while placing AI copilots, full-funnel measurement and connections to Claude, Gemini Enterprise and Microsoft Copilot into a closed beta.

In Short

Teads, a company that sells ad space on TV screens and news websites, updated the software agencies use to buy those ads. Big clients can now run sales-focused campaigns across TV and the web in one place, and a small test group can use AI helpers and connect Teads data to chatbots such as Claude, Gemini and Copilot. Most of the AI features are still in a closed test, so the change for most clients today is the combined buying, with the rest promised before the end of 2026.

Four capabilities, two speeds

The announcement came from New York on October 29, 2026. According to Teads, which trades on Nasdaq under the ticker TEAD, the "next generation" of Teads Ad Manager - shortened throughout the company's materials to TAM - is meant to help agencies and advertisers connect campaigns across connected TV and digital environments, understand campaign impact across the funnel, extend performance buying across what it calls quality media placements, and work more efficiently through AI-assisted workflows.

Four capabilities make up the release. Only one of them is generally available today.

"Marketing teams and agencies can no longer afford to manage brand and performance in isolated silos if they want to drive real business growth," said Remi Cackel, Chief Product Officer at Teads. "By connecting the omnichannel journey in one platform and enabling AI-powered workflows, we're giving our partners the control, efficiency, and intelligence needed to make every media investment deliver measurable impact."

Omnichannel strategies and full-funnel measurement

The first capability lets buyers activate campaigns against multiple KPIs across CTV and digital inside a single workflow. Measurement is meant to show how upper-funnel brand activity drives lower-funnel outcomes. Teads gives a single example: tracking site visits generated by branding campaigns. Teads' product page for the platform describes the measurement as linking exposure to downstream outcomes such as site visits, and to broader brand impact. Full-Funnel Measurement is in closed beta.

Unified Performance

The second capability is the one that ships today. Unified Performance extends performance campaigns across four placement types: CTV InStream, HomeScreen, inRead and Feed. According to Teads, buyers get access to "premium, transparent media supply with built-in quality controls" and flexible measurement integrations, including Conversion API (CAPI) and Google Analytics 4 (GA4). The product page labels those integrations pixelless options. The announcement does not define the quality controls.

HomeScreen refers to the smart TV launch screens Teads sells, a form of home screen advertising that has become central to its CTV business. InStream covers ads that run during streamed programmes and on pause screens. inRead is Teads' in-article video format, and Feed covers units placed inside publisher content feeds.

Unified Performance is generally available to global enterprise clients from today. Smaller self-serve accounts are not mentioned.

Agentic AI workflows

The third capability is what Teads calls agentic AI workflows. According to Teads, task-specific AI copilots automate campaign planning, setup, management and reporting. Two are named. Strategy Builder takes a buyer from brief to strategy. Control Hub flags delivery and pacing risks.

The headline number belongs to Control Hub. Teads says it cuts troubleshooting time "from 15 minutes to under 60 seconds." The source given for that figure is a single line: "Alpha Test Results (2026): In-platform AI assistant testing." No sample size, number of testers, campaign count, test period or measurement method is published. The product page cites the same alpha test for two further claims - up to two hours saved per week, and media plans produced in minutes instead of hours or days - again without method.

Teads uses the agentic label, yet the tools it describes are copilots that assist people. The product page says humans stay in control. Neither source says whether any copilot can launch, pause or re-budget a campaign without a person approving the step. Strategy Builder and Control Hub are both in closed beta.

MCP connections to agency AI systems

The fourth capability connects Teads data to AI assistants that agencies already use. According to Teads, audience insights, reach forecasting and inventory discovery can be piped "directly into agency AI systems, including Claude, Gemini Enterprise, and Microsoft Copilot, through open, secure MCP integrations." Model Context Protocol, or MCP, is the open standard Anthropic created to let AI models call external tools and data sources.

All three named functions sit on the planning side. One agency quoted in the announcement went further.

"MCP is really a game changer because it gives us exactly what we need from discovery through to campaign creation," said Nami Hamidi, Head of Precision at Havas Media Network Italy. "It combines different data sources with TAM's knowledge and data to help create the best strategy and media plan, with recommendations on audiences, websites, context and creatives, as well as estimates for CPMs and CTRs."

Hamidi's reference to campaign creation is not matched by the list of MCP functions Teads published. The product page speaks of "selected MCP capabilities" in closed beta, connecting approved Teads data and capabilities to agency-owned or preferred AI environments. Whether an agent connected through MCP can write to a campaign, or only read planning data, is not stated.

The list of AI systems is also worth reading closely. Claude, Gemini Enterprise and Microsoft Copilot are named. ChatGPT is not, although the word "including" leaves room for others.

What is live and what waits

Availability splits cleanly. Unified Performance is generally available to global enterprise clients. Full-Funnel Measurement, Strategy Builder, Control Hub and the MCP integrations are in closed beta for a group Teads calls TAMbassadors, with broader global access planned "through the end of 2026." That leaves a window of about nine weeks from today. The announcement does not define TAMbassadors, give their number or say which markets they operate in. The product page adds that availability varies by account and market.

Teads is also expanding its Teads Ad Manager Certified Agency Program, a global accreditation scheme. According to Teads, it provides agency teams with structured training in omnichannel media, performance advertising and strategic planning, and certified partners receive priority beta access and industry recognition. Teads did not say how many agencies hold certification, when the programme began or what the expansion adds. The priority beta access implies a link between certification and the TAMbassador group, though the announcement does not spell it out.

OMD's UK programmatic team is one of the agency voices in the release. "Agencies require technology that simplifies media execution without compromising supply quality or data flexibility," said Rheece Hemmings, Programmatic Manager at OMD, UK. "TAM's connected toolset and open AI architecture allow our teams to plan, activate, and optimize cross-screen campaigns in minutes, giving us full visibility into how branding and performance work together to drive client growth." No figures accompany the "in minutes" claim.

The numbers behind the pitch

Teads frames the update around two market statistics. It says daily media consumption has reached an all-time high of 13 hours and 26 minutes per day, and that streaming accounts for the majority of television viewership. It also says 53% of marketers struggle to unify measurement across channels for optimization. Neither figure carries a named source in the announcement.

Independent industry work points in a similar direction, with its own numbers. IAB Europe's CTV working group reported in March 2026 that CTV's share of media budgets doubled from 14% in 2023 to 28% in 2025, while measurement frustration reached 70% among more than 170 advertising professionals surveyed across 27 European markets. The same group listed the core problem: streaming ads are seen on shared household screens, while purchases happen on personal devices.

Conversion APIs are one of the fixes the industry has been pushing for that gap. In October 2025, IAB published a 26-page guide on Conversion API for CTV, finding that two-thirds of advertisers reported improved return on ad spend after implementing CAPI. The same survey found that 72% of publishers cite technical complexity as a major obstacle and only 21% consistently give advertisers access to logs or dashboards. The survey base was small: 28 sell-side and 17 buy-side companies.

How Teads Ad Manager got here

Today's release extends a sequence of product steps that began with the merger that created the current company. Outbrain completed its roughly $900 million acquisition of Teads on February 3, 2025, with a restructuring plan aimed at about 15% of the workforce. The combined business took the Teads name and the TEAD ticker in June 2025.

CTV outcome measurement came first. In October 2025, Teads launched CTV Performance in beta, a deterministic product linking TV exposure to site visits and sales through a household graph and a universal pixel. A Men's Wearhouse campaign was credited with more than 41,000 site visits.

Supply followed. Teads secured the Google TV home screen masthead in February 2026, renewed LG HomeScreen exclusivity in April across 17 European and nine APAC markets, and added Whale TV home screens in more than 100 countries in September.

The AI plan was flagged in May. When Teads reported first-quarter results on May 7, 2026, revenue fell 7% to $266.0 million while CTV grew more than 50%. The company said Outbrain's performance algorithms had been integrated into Teads Ad Manager, letting agencies run branding and direct response campaigns in one platform, and that it was working on letting AI agents set up and manage campaigns there. Today's announcement attaches product names to that work.

Agency plumbing came in June. On June 2, Teads connected its audience planning API to Havas Media Network's Converged.AI platform, so audiences built by Havas planners flow into Teads Ad Manager in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK and the US. Havas returns today through its Italian precision team, this time on the MCP side.

Two weeks later, on June 18, Teads launched CTV Ensemble, bundling HomeScreen and InStream inventory, dynamic creative and program-level targeting, and making CTV Performance generally available after nearly 40 beta campaigns in 14 countries. Teads said then that omnichannel campaigns made up 13% of its campaigns in the first quarter, up from 8%, with a target of 15% by the end of 2026. In September, Teads added Koddi-powered retail media inventory, including Gopuff UK, Hopper and Wolt Ads, to Teads Ad Manager through OpenRTB.

The business backdrop

The platform update arrives during a difficult year for the company. Teads suspended its full-year 2026 guidance on August 6 after second-quarter revenue fell 17% to $284.6 million. Ex-TAC gross profit from the direct response and SME business dropped 30% to $34 million, while the enterprise segment produced $89 million. Adjusted EBITDA fell 74% to $7.0 million. CTV revenue rose 67% and reached 13% of total revenue.

Read against those figures, Unified Performance connects the fastest-growing part of the business, CTV, with the part under the most pressure, performance buying. Omnichannel adoption was put at 16% in the second quarter, up from 9%, although the release and the earnings call used different denominators for that figure.

There is also litigation. On August 3, 2026, Teads sued Google in the Southern District of New York, alleging monopolization of publisher ad servers and ad exchanges. In a filing the same day, Teads warned that Google could retaliate, noting that a meaningful portion of its revenue involves Google's advertising technology. Gemini Enterprise, a Google product, is one of the three AI systems named in today's MCP list.

Today's announcement contains no financial figures. Its forward-looking statements name, as a specific risk, the possibility that the new capabilities, including the AI-powered workflows and MCP integrations, "may not perform as expected, launch on the anticipated timeline, or achieve expected market adoption." Teads will report third-quarter 2026 results before the market opens on November 5, 2026.

MCP becomes standard plumbing

Teads is not early to MCP. Large ad platforms have spent 2026 wiring their systems into AI assistants, with differing scope.

Amazon put its Ads MCP Server into open beta in February 2026, naming Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini as compatible, after a closed beta that began in November 2025. Meta opened its Ads AI Connectors on April 29, 2026 for Claude and ChatGPT, with the ability to create and edit campaigns from the first day. Pacvue's MCP server launched in May as a read-only reporting tool. Adform announced its MCP server on May 13, 2026, and published its first usage figures on October 28: campaign reporting accounts for almost a third of queries, and every agency example given was a reading task.

That split between reading and writing is the practical dividing line. Teads' published MCP functions - audience insights, reach forecasting, inventory discovery - sit with the readers. Its agency quote suggests more.

Cost is the other open question. In August, Draft Digital described hitting Claude usage limits while building a stack that made 12 separate MCP calls, and argued for routing work through a single buyer agent instead. Teads has not said whether MCP access or the copilots carry extra charges, or who pays for the model usage on the agency side.

What the announcement leaves open

Several details are missing. Teads has not published pricing for any of the new capabilities. It has not described the data governance around MCP: which Teads data reaches third-party models, whether advertiser data travels the other way, and how permissions are set. The size and make-up of the TAMbassador group, the markets covered by the closed beta, and the method behind the 15-minute claim are all unstated. Nor does the announcement say what the "built-in quality controls" on Unified Performance check for.

Will broader access arrive by the end of 2026 as planned? The company's own risk language allows that it may not.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Teads (Nasdaq: TEAD), the advertising platform formed from Outbrain's 2025 acquisition of Teads, with statements from Chief Product Officer Remi Cackel, Rheece Hemmings of OMD UK and Nami Hamidi of Havas Media Network Italy.

What: A new version of Teads Ad Manager with four capabilities: omnichannel strategies with full-funnel measurement, Unified Performance across CTV InStream, HomeScreen, inRead and Feed with CAPI and GA4 integrations, AI copilots called Strategy Builder and Control Hub, and MCP connections to Claude, Gemini Enterprise and Microsoft Copilot. Teads claims Control Hub cuts troubleshooting from 15 minutes to under 60 seconds, based on an alpha test with no published method. An expanded Certified Agency Program accompanies the release.

When: Announced today, October 29, 2026. Unified Performance is generally available to global enterprise clients now; the other features are in closed beta, with broader access planned through the end of 2026.

Where: Announced from New York, with global availability stated for Unified Performance. Beta markets are not listed.

Why: According to Teads, media planning, buying and reporting remain fragmented across tools while consumer journeys span screens. The release also comes after a second quarter in which Teads' revenue fell 17%, its direct response profit dropped 30% and it suspended full-year guidance, while CTV revenue grew 67%.