Requests by companies including Alphabet and Meta for the EU to delay the AI Act, which calls for the regulation of general purpose AI model in August, were dismissed in no uncertain terms by the European Commission on Friday. “Let me be as clear as possible, there is no stop the clock. There is no grace period. There is no pause,” Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier told reporters. “We have legal deadlines established in a legal text.”

A shift towards ad-based services is occurring as consumers re-evaluate the cost of ad-free streaming, according to new VAB report “Staying Current on Streaming: The Latest on Connected TV Behaviors.” The report notes that 26% percent of consumers have added a free streaming service in the past 12 months, while 24% plan to add a free streaming service over the next 12 months. Additional findings include:
· Consumers of all income levels and age brackets are gravitating towards ad-supported streaming. Two-thirds of adults prefer ad-supported streaming services and tiers over ad-free subscription services.
· FAST continues to grow – it is now used by one-third of the US population.
· Adoption of bundled streaming services is growing, with nearly half of households subscribing, or planning to subscribe, soon.
· Consumers spend an average of an additional 71 seconds engaging with interactive CTV ads vs. standard pre-roll.

“As audiences re-evaluate the cost of ad-free subscription streaming, consumers of all income levels and age brackets are finding value in ad-supported tiers and services,” said Jason Wiese, EVP, Strategic Insights & Measurement, VAB. “Viewers are balancing their spending in streaming by shifting towards advertising-based streaming services, watching more content through FAST channels and unlocking greater cost efficiencies through streaming bundles.”

WPP and Vercel have expanded their strategic partnership to bring Vercel’s AI technologies, v0 and AK SDK, to WPP teams and their clients. According to WPP’s internal pilots and a network-wide Vercel v0 hackathon held earlier this year, the use of Vercel technologies in experience design processes has the potential to increase the development efficiency of the production of apps and websites by up to 25%. The expanded partnership will also give WPP priority access to new Vercel product releases, an advisory role in Vercel’s future roadmap, and provide targeted joint investment into new product development, integrations and innovation within WPP Open, WPP’s AI-enabled marketing services platform. “At WPP, we’re committed to providing our talent with the best tools and technologies available to unleash their creativity. The adoption of Vercel’s AI-powered tools will dissolve the traditional boundaries between functions, enabling our teams to move from prompt to prototype at speed,” said Stephan Pretorius, Chief Technology Officer of WPP. “This autonomy empowers our people to ideate, build, test and deploy groundbreaking digital experiences that champion creative craft and connect with consumers online, ultimately delivering superior results for our clients.”

While 92% of marketing leaders plan to increase their AI investments this year, just 2% fully trust AI-driven marketing decisions, according to a study from AdRoll and WBR Insights that surveyed marketers from mid- to large-sized brands and agencies across industries. Key insights include:
· 93% of marketers are already using generative AI, but most say it’s limited to “quick win” tasks like content and reporting.
· Trust gaps persist: 66% cite data privacy and 62% cite inconsistent output as major concerns.
· Strategic focus is shifting: Marketers’ top goals include improving operational efficiency (60%), customer loyalty (51%), and campaign ROI (45%).

DoubleVerify released the discovery of ShadowBot, a fraudulent bot scheme that generated over 35 million spoofed mobile devices in 1Q25. The DV Fraud Lab identified ShadowBot targeting mobile and CTV environments using rudimentary automation techniques, including mobile emulators and spoofed app IDs. DV Fraud Labs identified five key red flags that uncovered ShadowBot:
· Basic Automation Methods: ShadowBot used emulators that defaulted to screen resolutions (e.g., 800×600). This resolution is not typical for mobile devices.
· Overly Aggressive Traffic Generation: The operation produced abnormally high impression volumes that didn’t align with seasonal trends.
· Suspicious IP Activity: Fraudsters relied on anonymizing IP proxies, provided by long tail entities. The digital footprint of these proxy providers was riddled with fake testimonials, broken URLs, and known abuse reports.
· Lack of Behavioral Diversity: Devices showed identical impression counts, lacking the variability expected from real users.
· Improbable Engagement Patterns: Devices appeared to open 10 spoofed apps in just 9 minutes – behavior impossible for actual users.

“ShadowBot shows that fraud doesn’t need to be sophisticated to be costly,” said Gilit Saporta, VP Product, Fraud & Quality at DoubleVerify. “It’s alarming to see $2.5M lost to bots using resolutions of an old CRT screen we all used back in the 1990s. The fraud scheme operator didn’t even bother to match its fake device signals to a proper mobile device.”

Technology platform MNTN announced a new partnership with ZoomInfo aimed at helping B2B marketers reach the right business decision-makers through streaming TV ads. MNTN advertisers can tap into ZoomInfo’s 100M+ decision-makers in the GTM Intelligence Platform. By targeting streaming ads to specific companies and job titles, industries, and more, B2B brands can get in front of high-value prospects.