According to the Horizon Media study, a negative experience with an automated purchase puts consumers' brand loyalty at risk - what Horizon calls a "trust tax."
A recent analysis of companies that tracks digital media payments and invoices across the ad industry shows more than half made to publishers and platforms are now late - and the problem appears to be
getting worse.
Researchers have long known about a phenomenon called the hostile media effect — the perception by people that the media is prejudiced against them. But researchers are now studying what they
call the hostile misinformation effect — the impact of ideology on targeting, Nieman Lab reports. The researchers write, “we find clear support for a hostile misinformation
effect, as citizens believe their own political party was much more targeted than the political opponent.”
Black men who voted for President Trump in 2024 and Joe Biden in 2020 are unhappy with Trump and also with mainstream news media, a focus group has determined, Huffington
Post reports. They now largely get news from nontraditional outlets and independent creators on YouTube and
other platforms. They are frustrated with the economy and gas prices.
The Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) is being used to send phishing emails that can bypass standard security filters and render reputation-based blocks
ineffective, Bleeping Computer reports. Kaspersky researchers say in a report that there has been “an uptick in phishing
attacks leveraging Amazon SES” to deliver links that redirect to a malicious site.The spike in this abuse may be due to a large number of AWS Identity and Access
Management access keys exposed in public assets.
Time has released a list of the 10 most influential companies in media and communications in 2026. They include: Nielsen, T-Mobile, AST Mobile, Publicis Groupe, Patreon, Discord,
Letterboxd, TikTok, iHeartMedia and Telegram. In its coverage, Time explains the reasoning in each case.
Almost a third of U.S. adults — some 31% — often avoid stories about President Trump, according to a new poll by the Media Insight Project survey, Associated Press reports. Of
those surveyed, 38% of Democrats and 38% of independents avoid Trump stories, compared to 17% of Republicans. Among all groups, many sometimes avoid such coverage.
Albertsons Media Collective has brought first-party shopper data to YouTube and third-party inventory in Display & Video 360 with Keurig Dr. Pepper as launch partner.
Revenue, research and insights teams at Trusted Media Brands (TMB) are using AI tools to provide advertisers with a coherent narrative, AdExchanger reports. This
isn’t easy, given that inventory spans print, web, social, streaming and newsletters. “The magazine subscriber doesn’t look anything like the TikTok viewer, at least on paper,”
says Michael Boccacino, vice president of marketing at TMB. “But advertisers still expect you to tell one clear story about who you reach and why it matters.”
New research from Magid shows a decline in the association of the word “trustworthy” with news
organizations, TVNewsCheck reports. Of 44 emotional attributes surveyed, “trustworthy” ranks 39th. The study will be presented
at TVNewsCheck’s Programming Everywhere conference on April 19 at the NAB Show.
By 2028, around 20%-40% of spending among Paramount Skydance, NBCU and Walt Disney will be on sports programming, according to one market analysis from MoffettNathanson Research.
Americans who spend at least five hours a day on social media are more likely to feel their views are heard, according to a study of 20,000 Americans by Gallup and the Charles
F. Kettering Foundation, The Washington Post reports. But they are also more open to political violence and less supportive of democracy.
Artificial intelligence, while widely covered in the media, ranks at the bottom of the new sources used by Americans, a new Pew Research poll found, according to Mediaite. Of the individuals surveyed,
35% look to their preferred news organization for breaking news, 28% use search engines like Google or Bing. Only 1% turn to AI chatbots.
The only thing worse than AIs hallucinating false facts about human behaviors is humans hallucinating false facts about AI behaviors. Today's post is about a prime example of that: a new global
research study from Snowflake purporting to measure the ROI of companies overall - and in specific industrial sectors - from adopting AI.
Almost a year in the making, the report provides an "intelligence framework" that establishes five key capability categories that will shape which players become primary sources of intelligence for
business and consumers by 2030.
Networks and platforms anchored by live sports are benefiting from stable viewership and pricing power, while general entertainment channels continue to face sharper audience and revenue erosion.
The service - DASH (Universe Study of Device and Account Sharing) - is the first syndicated ARF study accredited by the MRC, but follows a series of entrepreneurial research studies by the
federation.
That's according to a report from research firm Forrester, which found that over 80% of marketers surveyed are planning to increase their principal media spending this year.
AI search summaries and chatbots mean the “end of the traffic era,” publishers fear, according to a new study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Media bosses
foresee that web referrals will plunge and that journalists should emulate content creators, The Guardian reports.
It may have started with vision and sizzle, but the year evolved into a sophisticated, methodological framework for rearchitecting advertising and media on the road to 2030.
The question: What share of your ad budget will be spent targeting bots, not humans, in 2030? The responses ranged from 0% to 100%, but as the year progressed, the higher number seems more likely.
Dentsu finds companies are rushing into the agentic AI space without a viable game plan and "risk not only building inefficient solutions but [also] eroding consumer trust in their brand."
Republicans are less trusting than Democrats, and older people are more trusting than young Americans.
The future of media and marketing research will be an increasingly synthetic one, combining AI and human experiences in ways that are better than either could be on their own.
More than two years after launching Madison and Wall, long-time ad industry forecaster Brian Wieser has recruited Magna's Luke Stillman to the team. Both are former Wall Street analysts.
Horizon Media just dropped new research redefining what it means to be "live" in the modern time-shiftable media universe. The agency has reorganized the meaning of "live" media experiences under a
rubric consisting of three concentric layers: real-time, social reverb and cultural afterglow.
Total "normalized" ad revenue - which excludes seasonal/one-time events - for Fox, Comcast/NBCU, Disney, Paramount Skydance and WBD was down 1% in Q4 2024 and 2% lower in Q1 2025.
Forty-three percent of U.S. adults say TV ads are most likely to "influence" them to try a new product/service, vs. 55% of Baby Boomers and 51% of Gen X, a survey finds.
It's not just political leadership either. A majority of Americans lack faith in leadership across business, healthcare, education and government according to a new Harris Poll survey.
"Welcome to the new age of decision dominance" reads a tag used by Aaru, the researcher partnering with IPG to create an agents-based studio simulating human responses to ads, media and other campaign
variables.