The week that closed upfront season in New York opened up a far bigger argument about where television money is going to sit for the next five years. While the networks were running through casting reels and renewal lists at Radio City and the Javits Center, OpenAI was bolting custom audiences onto a three-month-old ad platform, Google was quietly rewiring how Analytics speaks to Ads, Microsoft was promoting a measurement tool aimed at the moment before a user even visits a website, and Magnite was reporting that connected television now produces more than half of its revenue. The numbers from the first quarter of 2026 - Meta up 33%, Google Search up 19%, Amazon advertising up 24%, and roughly $150 billion in combined Q1 ad revenue across Meta, Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft - sat in the background like a tide that no one in the upfront tents could ignore.

This edition of the PPC Land weekly briefing groups the week's coverage into four broad strands: the upfront and the streaming inventory map; OpenAI's accelerating ad infrastructure and its drag on the wider stack; the rewiring of measurement, consent and AI-visibility tooling at Google and Microsoft; and the supply side of the market, where DOOH, retail media and CTV fraud all moved in the same week.

Upfronts 2026: outcomes language, sports inventory, and Amazon's authenticated graph

Amazon's third upfront presentation on May 11 at the Beacon Theatre framed the entire week. The 90-minute event was packed with celebrity appearances ranging from Oprah Winfrey and Michael B. Jordan to Kacey Musgraves, but the more useful disclosure for marketing teams came in the hours around it. According to a conversation Adweek published with Amazon vice president of global ad sales Alan Moss ahead of the event, the company is using its DSP partnerships with Netflix, Disney, Roku and Spotify, alongside a new LinkedIn CTV Ads integration that brings first-party signals from over one billion LinkedIn members into Amazon DSP, to claim it can reach roughly 90% of US households through what it calls its authenticated graph.

The same day the upfront ran, Amazon Ads launched Dynamic TV Creative, a product detailed by PPC Land on May 12 that uses Amazon's shopping, browsing and streaming signals to personalize Interactive Video Ads on Prime Video films and series at impression time, without requiring brands to upload separate creatives for different audience segments. Expansion to more advertisers and to live sports and Prime Video Channels is scheduled for Q3 2026. The day before the upfront, Moss also sat down with the Next in Media podcast, where he described live sports, streaming, retail media and AI-driven campaign tools as a single offering rather than separate lines of business, pointing to Amazon's 11-year NFL deal, the Thursday Night Football average of more than 15 million viewers per week in the 2025 season, and the record 31.6 million who streamed the Packers-Bears wild card game on January 10, 2026.

That sales pitch landed in a week when other streamers were making the same argument with different inventory. Netflix is on pace to double its ad revenue for the second consecutive year, to roughly $3 billion in 2026, with its ad plan now representing more than 60% of sign-ups in countries where it is offered and programmatic spend rising to nearly half of total ad revenue. Speaking to Adweek ahead of Netflix's May 13 upfront, ads leader Amy Reinhard said the company's new ad-tech stack means it can now "compete with anyone", pointing to expanded DSP partnerships, including Yahoo and Amazon, and a growing live slate. Disney's annual presentation at the Javits Center on May 12 drew an expected attendance of 3,700 across the show and reception, with global ads president Rita Ferro previewing plans built around Super Bowl 2027 and a "huddle" technology activation in the venue. NBCU returned to Radio City on May 12 against the backdrop of the company's 100th anniversary, while Fox shifted to the New York City Center on May 11.

The buzzword running across the week was "outcomes". As Amazon brand and cross-channel measurement director Lily Tong told AdExchanger, TV "is historically largely reach-based, and most upfront spending still reflects that", but Amazon is now seeing a shift toward audiences and outcomes. The company is opening Prime Video Insights to more datasets, introducing a long-term sales value metric based on its first-party data, and extending measurement lookback windows in cloud analytics. AdExchanger's coverage of upfront day one captured the contrasting positioning across NBCU, Fox and Amazon, while a separate AdExchanger feature noted that PubMatic has now run more than 30 fully autonomous, end-to-end agentic campaigns through its AgenticOS platform, alongside more than 1,000 direct publisher deals.

The agency response was more measured. Speaking on the Digiday Future of TV Briefing, executives flagged that the 2026 upfront glossary includes terms such as "agentic AI" and "fluidity" - the latter referring chiefly to cancellation flexibility - and reported that YouTube ad revenue of $9.88 billion in the first quarter alone gave the platform unusual leverage in negotiations. Across earlier reporting, Digiday quoted one holding-company investor as saying that auto and spirits budgets were down slightly, while tech and pharma were marginally up.

CTV's supply side: Magnite over half from streaming, fraud up 140%, JCDecaux's programmatic acceleration

The economics behind the upfront were visible in the supply-side disclosures filed during the same week. Magnite's Q1 2026 results, released May 6, showed CTV contribution ex-TAC at $82.3 million, up 30% year-over-year from $63.2 million, with CTV's share of the company's total net revenue metric crossing 51% for the first time, up from 43% in Q1 2025. Total contribution ex-TAC reached $160.9 million, at the upper end of the company's $157 million to $161 million guidance range. According to CEO Michael Barrett, "Magnite once again exceeded total top and bottom line expectations, with growth paced by CTV at 30%", citing Buyer Marketplaces, ClearLine, live sports and SMB strength as the underlying drivers. The earnings release also pointed to AI as "becoming foundational in almost every area of our business", from agentic buying to inventory curation, with the company having launched its first seller agent inside SpringServe in December 2025.

European DOOH players told a similar story with different numbers. Ströer SE & Co. KGaA reported Q1 2026 group revenue of 495.6 million euros on May 12, up 4% on a reported basis and 1.1% organically, with digital out-of-home up 12.0% and programmatic DOOH up 12.1% - against a German advertising market that grew just 0.8% on a gross rate-card basis according to Nielsen data cited in the company's investor presentation. Television in Germany fell 1.5%, radio fell 3.2%, print rose 0.6%, and desktop and mobile combined came in at 10.7%. JCDecaux's Q1 2026 numbers, published May 5, ran in parallel: group revenue of 880.6 million euros, up 2.6% reported and 5.7% organic, with programmatic DOOH growth of 27.2% bringing pDOOH to 10.5% of total digital revenue. Total DOOH grew 13.1% organically and reached 41.7% of group revenue. Guidance for the second quarter sits at around 3% organic growth, or 5% excluding the Middle East, with the company expecting positive contribution from the 2026 FIFA World Cup distributed across Q2 and Q3.

Inside the United States, in-store retail media expanded with In-Store Marketplace and Stater Bros. Markets announcing on May 5 a programmatic audio network across 165 Southern California stores, with digital screens planned later in the year. Inventory will be monetized through Vibenomics, the audio monetization arm of Mood Media. US retail media spending is projected to reach $71.09 billion in 2026.

But it is on the demand side that the more uncomfortable number landed. DoubleVerify's 2026 Global Insights report, "Must-CTV", published May 7, recorded a 140% rise in CTV fraud schemes and variants between Q1 2025 and Q1 2026, more than 50 distinct bot attacks identified in 2025 alone, and a tenfold increase in the number of fraudulent CTV apps detected last year compared with 2024. According to the report, AI tools are being used by attackers to scale fraud operations and produce more complex, harder-to-detect schemes, while the survey arm - conducted by Sapio Research across 2,020 marketers and 22,000 consumers - found that fewer than one in five advertisers currently use invalid traffic or fraud rates as a CTV key performance indicator. DoubleVerify estimated unprotected impressions cost approximately $1.8 million per billion impressions in fraud-driven media waste.

OpenAI's three-month ad build-out lands custom audiences, an ads-manager rollout, and a wrongful-death lawsuit

OpenAI's advertising business is now slightly more than three months old. In the past seven days alone, the company added a custom-audience upload feature to its ChatGPT Ads platform, spotted in a gated rollout on May 14 by entrepreneur Juozas Kaziukenas, who shared screenshots showing CSV or TXT uploads of up to 512MB containing raw or SHA-256 hashed emails and phone numbers. The feature mirrors infrastructure that has been standard at Meta and Google for years, and arrives nine days after OpenAI opened its self-serve Ads Manager to all US businesses on May 5, introduced cost-per-click bidding with recommended starting bids between $3 and $5, dropped the minimum spend threshold entirely (down from $250,000 at pilot launch and $50,000 in April), and formally launched a Conversions API and a measurement pixel known internally as oaiq.

Digiday confirmed the rollout in a press briefing on the same day with OpenAI ads and monetization lead Asad Awan, who said third-party measurement and cost-per-action bidding are also in development, though without partners or a timeline. The pace has been brisk: Digiday separately reported the launch of a product-feed campaign type modelled on Google Shopping, allowing retailers to connect their product catalogues and generate ads automatically. At least one retailer has tested the system through Criteo, OpenAI's first ad-tech partner. Geographic expansion is moving in parallel, with ad tests rolling out across the United Kingdom, Brazil, Japan, South Korea and Mexico over the coming weeks. PPC Land's coverage of the StackAdapt joining the ChatGPT ad pilot on May 5 noted that the Toronto-based platform now sits alongside Criteo, Kargo, Adobe and Pacvue as official OpenAI technology partners, with Criteo reporting over 1,000 brands running active campaigns through its API connection by May 5 and Kargo announcing its partnership the same day.

The technical scaffolding has also developed around the platform. Utku Gulden, a marketing analytics specialist, published a Google Tag Manager community template for the OpenAI Ads Measurement Pixel on May 7, released under the Apache 2.0 licence with a v1.0.0 initial release, addressing the absence of a native GTM tag for the new pixel. Most digital marketing teams at mid-market and enterprise level rely on GTM for tag deployment; the community template, hosted on GitHub as gtm-openai-ads-pixel, removed the need for custom HTML and the version-control risk that comes with it.

The cost of the buildout is also surfacing in places that fall outside the ad-platform announcements. The Trade Desk's Q1 revenue beat - $689 million, with Q2 guidance "at least $750 million" - was blunted by the confirmation that chief strategy officer Samantha Jacobson is leaving for OpenAI, a move The Trade Desk disclosed to Adweek hours before its May 7 earnings release. CEO Jeff Green pointed analysts to a winback from Amazon by his pharma sales team that he said will increase that advertiser's spend on The Trade Desk's platform by 114% year-over-year in 2026. PubMatic, also reporting in the same window, posted revenue of $62.6 million for the quarter.

The harder edge of OpenAI's expansion arrived on May 12 in a different form. The parents of a 19-year-old Californian college student filed a wrongful-death lawsuit in San Francisco County Superior Court against OpenAI Foundation, OpenAI OpCo LLC, OpenAI Holdings LLC, OpenAI Group PBC and CEO Samuel Altman, alleging that ChatGPT-4o provided their son personalized drug combinations that killed him and that the company deliberately removed safety measures to maximize engagement. The complaint cites nine causes of action, including strict product liability and wrongful death, references that more than 40 million people consult ChatGPT daily for health guidance, and references a structured stress test using 60 clinician-authored vignettes that found OpenAI's systems missed high-risk emergencies in more than 50% of acute cases. The case lands at exactly the moment OpenAI is most exposed: a self-serve ad platform open to all US businesses, with custom audiences and conversion tracking shipped within days of the lawsuit.

Google's measurement rewrite: Analytics gets an AI Assistant channel, ad data control consolidates, UCP checkout leaves AI Mode

The largest plumbing change inside Google's stack in this seven-day window was the addition of a native AI Assistant channel to Google Analytics. According to the Help Center update published May 13 and recapped the same day by Search Engine Roundtable, Google Analytics now automatically assigns the medium value "ai-assistant", the channel-group label "AI Assistant", and the campaign name "(ai-assistant)" to sessions where the referrer matches a recognized AI assistant such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude. No manual configuration is required. The change updates the Default Channel Group across all Google Analytics properties globally and arrives in a quarter when, according to PPC Land's prior coverage, ChatGPT click-through rates measured by Similarweb hovered around 0.68%, with the best-performing brands hitting 1.57%.

Microsoft moved its parallel measurement tool into general availability the same day. Microsoft Clarity Citations, announced on May 13 by product manager Ihab Rizk on the Clarity blog, reports page citations in AI-generated answers, share of authority relative to competing domains, AI referral traffic, grounding queries, and cited pages. The dashboard sits under Dashboards > AI Visibility > Citations and requires domain ownership verification via Bing Webmaster Tools or Google Search Console. Microsoft Learn documentation for the dashboard was last updated May 12. Citations builds on the Bot Activity feature added in January 2026 and is intended to cover the stage before a visit happens: the moment when AI systems retrieve, evaluate and select sources during grounding.

On the consent side, Google has published a sequence of changes that consolidate ad-data authority in Ads rather than Analytics. As PPC Land's analysis of the June 15, 2026 transition details, the Google Signals setting in Google Analytics will lose its dual-control role over the collection of Google Ads cookies and identifiers, leaving Consent Mode (within Google Ads) as the single governing parameter for organizations that have linked an Analytics property to an Ads account. Search Engine Roundtable's daily recap also flagged Google Ads' decision to automatically link YouTube channels to advertiser accounts starting June 10, 2026, giving Google Ads more YouTube-side data, and the release of Google Ads API v24.1 on May 14, a minor update covering features such as a mobile device platform segment, classic images in Demand Gen, passkey support, and support for the new data retention policy that limits hourly, daily and weekly Google Ads reporting data to 37 months from June 1, 2026.

The compliance complaints flowing in the opposite direction are also worth recording. On May 11, Google Shopping Specialist Emmanuel Flossie publicly alleged on LinkedIn that Google Ads representatives have been sending unsolicited commercial emails to advertisers without a CAN-SPAM-compliant opt-out, citing FTC per-email penalties of up to $53,088. Flossie addressed the post to Google's Ads Product Liaison Ginny Marvin and tied it to documented operational consequences for advertisers, including restructured campaigns and degraded account performance. The CAN-SPAM Act has been in force since 2003.

Search itself is becoming a payment surface. Google's Universal Commerce Protocol checkout left AI Mode and appeared in the main Search results on May 5, first spotted by SERP researcher Brodie Clark and independently replicated by Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable on a "sofa bed couch" query that surfaced a Wayfair listing with a working Buy button next to it. The shopper's billing and shipping details load from Google Wallet, payment processes through Google Pay, and the transaction completes without the user leaving Google. UCP launched on January 11, 2026 with Target and Walmart inside Gemini and AI Mode, and the UCP Tech Council expanded on April 24, 2026 to include Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce and Stripe. AI Mode itself reached over 75 million daily active users by early 2026.

PPC Land's broader analytical piece on the week (May 10) connected the UCP move to a parallel set of structural data points: four demand-side platforms now controlling roughly 85% of global programmatic spend, according to Guideline data; a 100 million euro GDPR fine issued April 1 by the Dutch Data Protection Authority against MLU B.V., the parent of ride-hailing app Yango; the Mozilla patch on April 21 of an IndexedDB flaw in Firefox 150 and ESR 140.10 that had allowed tracking across private browsing and Tor New Identity resets; and researchers identifying more than 5,000 unsecured AI-built applications that have leaked advertising strategy documents and customer chatbot logs onto the open web.

LinkedIn, Google Discover, Pinterest: the platforms talk to founders, publishers, and shoppers

LinkedIn used May 12 to address founders directly. The platform launched four products: Advice Sessions, which allows members to offer paid one-on-one video consultations directly from their profiles, with booking, payment, and the video call all hosted inside LinkedIn; Competitor Analytics, expanded to company pages; Hiring Pro, a natural-language interface inside the hiring workflow; and mobile post boosting. The launch cites internal LinkedIn data showing US founder growth of approximately 70% year-over-year. Advice Sessions rolls out first to Premium Business subscribers in the United States during May 2026, with extension to more advanced plans to follow. The product is structurally novel because it consolidates booking, payment and delivery into the profile itself, removing the need to route prospective clients off-platform to Calendly or Stripe.

LinkedIn's positioning matters in the context of B2B advertising spend. According to Dreamdata data, LinkedIn Ads delivered 113% return on ad spend in B2B campaigns based on 2024 figures, with more recent Dreamdata coverage on PPC Land in the context of the LinkedIn Ads Agency Certification launch in May 2026 placing the platform's ROAS at 121% - the highest among major ad networks. LinkedIn's Member Post API, launched in July 2025, expanded creator-analytics access for third-party tools.

Google Discover was the subject of a separate research finding. According to a systematic analysis published May 12 by Sylvain Deaure and Damien Andell, co-founders of Google Discover analytics service 1492.vision, 54 US publishers have quietly received control over their Google Discover profile pages - custom banner images, link shelves, pinned posts - while more than 46,900 other publishers tracked by the same monitoring system have nothing. Of the 54, 41 had uploaded a banner image, with the remaining 13 in possession of the capability but not yet using it. The pilot has been running since March 2026 with no application process, no announcement, and no Search Console toggle. The 1492.vision report identifies five visual archetypes among uploaded banners, including the Wall Street Journal, Barron's and Pew Research deploying brand-pattern banners and Delish and The Dodo using editorial content imagery.

Pinterest's Q1 2026 results, reported on May 4 and analyzed by PPC Land, placed the platform's quarterly revenue above $1 billion for the first time, at $1,008 million, up 18% year-over-year. Global monthly active users reached an all-time high of 631 million, up 11%, and Pinterest completed the previously announced $2 billion of near-term share repurchases. Q2 2026 revenue guidance ran between $1,133 million and $1,153 million (14% to 16% growth), with adjusted EBITDA expected in the $256 million to $276 million range. Performance+, the platform's lower-funnel automation product, now accounts for 30% of lower-funnel revenue, with adopters growing spend at twice the rate of non-adopters. PinRec, Pinterest's generative retrieval system, was extended site-wide in Q1 2026, contributing approximately 180 basis points of search-fulfilment improvement and a roughly 180-basis-point reduction in CPA and CPC.

The longer reading list: zero-click marketing as a book, Ask.com shutting, GPC mapped against GDPR

Surrounding all of this, three pieces of analytical work appeared this week worth holding in mind. Rand Fishkin and Amanda Natividad of SparkToro opened pre-orders for "Zero Click Marketing: How to Build Brands and Earn Customers on a Traffic-Starved Web", with website traffic for the open web down 46% over three years according to data Fishkin cites. The Datos and SparkToro Q1 2026 State of Search report, published in late April, recorded zero-click searches at 22.4% in the United States, down slightly from 24.5% in December 2025, and 19.6% in the EU and UK. The book is scheduled for fall 2026 release through Damn Gravity, with pre-order buyers receiving access to a Zero-Click Summer School workshop series.

The ageing infrastructure of the open web continues to recede. Ask.com officially shut down on May 1, 2026 after nearly 30 years, with IAC publishing a brief statement on the Ask.com homepage and ending the search business that once reached 100 million global monthly users. Ask Jeeves originally launched on June 1, 1997, more than a year before Google's public launch. According to IAC's statement, "as IAC continues to sharpen its focus, we have made the decision to discontinue our search business, which includes Ask.com."

On the privacy side, a peer-reviewed study published May 5 in Computer Law & Security Review by Sebastian Zimmeck of Wesleyan, Harshvardhan Pandit of Trinity College Dublin, Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius of Radboud University, Cristiana Teixeira Santos of Utrecht, Konrad Kollnig of Maastricht and Robin Berjon of the IPFS Foundation, concluded that Global Privacy Control can partly reduce EU cookie consent banners but only if regulators clarify how the signal maps onto existing GDPR and ePrivacy Directive rules. The study notes GPC already has binding legal effect in California, Colorado, Connecticut, New Jersey and Oregon, and flags the asymmetric effect GPC could have between first parties and third parties as a competition-law concern.

Across the week, the throughline is not that any single platform is winning. It is that the underlying infrastructure - measurement, identity, payment, attention - is being rebuilt simultaneously by every major participant, often in ways that do not yet talk to one another. The May 20 Google Marketing Live livestream, ahead of which Google has pre-announced Data Manager Map View, Meridian GeoX, and Meridian Studio, is the next set-piece event scheduled to add to the picture. By then, OpenAI's CPC bidding will have a fortnight of running history, the UCP checkout may sit on additional retailers' listings, and the upfront negotiations that opened in New York will be moving into their long second phase.

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