Jan 8, 2026 3 min read Daily Rundown

🎯 The CTV Black Box

Plus: DoorDash Rewrites Retail, The Cost of Rotation

Hi, Marketers!

What looks like progress on the surface is often a trade-off underneath. The question is no longer which channel performs best, but which systems still allow brands to understand what they are actually buying and what they are slowly giving up.

ADS

Streaming TV Just Lost Its Excuses

👀 What’s happening: At CES 2026, DoubleVerify launched DV Authentic Streaming TV, collapsing media quality, brand suitability, and optimization into a single AI-driven CTV workflow. The real shift is program-level visibility. Streaming TV is no longer judged by where ads ran, but what content they actually appeared next to.

📈 Growth impact: This stresses a lot of comfortable assumptions. When buyers can see genre, maturity, attention signals, and delivery quality pre-bid, sloppy reach narratives break fast. DV’s data already points to billions leaking outside premium environments. Expect tougher CPM negotiations, more scrutiny on managed service buys, and founders facing harder questions about where performance actually comes from.

🎯 Key takeaway: Streaming TV is moving from brand theater to accountable performance media. If this pattern holds, marketers should prepare for tighter budget control, fewer black boxes, and rising pressure to prove that CTV spend earns its place in the growth mix.

RETAIL

DoorDash Turns Retail Media Into a Decision Engine

👀 What’s happening: At CES 2026, DoorDash introduced a commerce media stack built around real orders, not inferred intent. Restaurant-level interest targeting, retailer-specific sponsored products, and in-platform category share insights shift ads closer to the moment people choose what to buy. Media is becoming part of the transaction flow itself.

📈 Growth impact: This challenges how performance marketing has been justified for years. When platforms can link spend to incremental sales and category movement, surface metrics lose credibility. Early Smart Campaign tests showed double-digit sales lift and meaningful new customer gains, pushing budgets toward closed-loop systems and pressuring channels built on probabilistic attribution and delayed feedback.

🎯 Key takeaway: Marketing is being redefined as demand capture, not exposure. As intent signals harden into infrastructure, advantage moves to platforms that own behavior, measurement, and optimization at the point of purchase.

OOH

Static OOH Lost Its Asset Logic in the Shift to Rotation

👀 What’s happening: Static out of home was historically treated as a long term brand asset. One location, one message, sustained presence. Digital billboards reframed that logic. Rotation increased sell through for owners and normalized short exposure windows. What changed is how value is defined, from ownership and memory to utilization and throughput.

📈 Growth impact: For advertisers, this breaks the asset model. Rotating screens fragment share of voice and weaken mental availability. Feedback loops stay shallow because exposure is brief and blended with others. Measurement leans on delivery metrics instead of brand lift. Efficiency improves upstream while effectiveness erodes downstream.

🎯 Key takeaway: Static worked because it compounded. Digital rotation sells inventory, not memory. The opportunity is reclaiming formats that behave like assets. The risk is mistaking sell side efficiency for brand growth and losing long term demand creation.

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