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| Thursday, November 12, 2026 |
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Good morning! Here’s the news from media’s first morning read:
- So, Was DC Studios’ “Lanterns” a Hit or Not?
- British Broadcasters Are Washing Their Hands of David Walliams
- Fox Announces Its Midseason Premiere Schedule
But first: This week, AdExchanger Editor-in-Chief Allison Schiff was on the ground at LUMA’s digital media summit, where she sat in on a session about the challenges facing connected TV (CTV) advertisers and platforms. According to the panel, marketers are still holding back on CTV ad spend due to a lack of trust in the medium’s ability to drive performance. So, what’s an ad sales team to do to prove its inventory is worth buying?
Plus: If you’re at the IAB’s “I Want My CTV” Event in New York City today, keep an eye out for Victoria, who’ll be in attendance during part of the day!
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| Partner content |
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CTV Has Trust Issues
Around four months ago, Serge Matta, president of global ad sales at LG Ad Solutions, had a meeting with a large QSR advertiser, and he offered the CMO a guarantee.
“We said, ‘You only pay us based on incremental visits to your store as defined and measured by your independent third-party measurement provider,’” Matta shared during a session at LUMA’s Digital Media Summit earlier this week, in what felt a little like group therapy for CTV ad tech platforms.
Sounds like a slam dunk, right?
Not so much. The QSR advertiser wasn’t convinced. “Well, how do I know I can trust them?” he asked.
“They’re your measurement partner!” Matta recalled thinking, still incredulous in his retelling.
“That’s when I gave up,” he said.
Legacy barriers
Matta’s tale highlights a frustration that plenty of CTV sellers share. They’ve spent years positioning connected TV as a vehicle for driving outcomes, not just reach and frequency – but getting advertisers to believe it is another matter.
“We’re not there yet,” Matta said. “The promise is there, we’re pitching it, we have it, but we need advertisers to come on board.”
So why the hesitation?
Ad industry vet – and self-described “recovering marketer” – Lou Paskalis piped up from the audience to venture a theory. It’s partially a perception thing.
Although there’s been an “inexorable pull down the funnel” toward performance, he said, marketers still tend to see TV as upper-funnel “hero media,” he said.
Advertisers also often don’t have the right creative for CTV, and making the creative is too expensive. “There are legacy barriers to taking full advantage,” Paskalis said, “and [CTV is] just not seen as being as performative as programmatic.”
Proof isn’t the problem
But whatever it is that’s holding buyers back, it’s not a lack of measurement options.
Philip Inghelbrecht, CEO and co-founder of CTV ad platform Tatari, said that around 10 years ago when he started the company, people would look at him cross-eyed when he tried to talk about incrementality.
But today, there are lots of different independent third-party measurement companies that offer incrementality through a variety of models. It’s a good thing, Inghelbrecht said.
Yet, be that as it may, even the offer of a guarantee backed by independent measurement couldn’t close the deal for Matta. And sometimes the skepticism is warranted. There’s no denying that attribution is kind of a mess.
Every channel, from display to social, tries to take credit for the same conversion, said Scott Young, co-founder and chief product officer of streaming ad insertion platform Transmit.Live.
To be fair, CTV is no different in that regard, although it does bring something to the table that other channels don’t.
“You’re getting a higher rate of attention,” Young said. “Yes, you might be paying more for it, but you need exposure and attention in order to actually convert.”
Not-so-fun-size frustration
But it’s also worth pointing out that this whole debate can sound rather academic to the people who control the budgets, Vinny Rinaldi, VP of client strategy and growth at The Trade Desk, reminded the room.
“Not many brands think about all the things that we talk about on a daily basis,” Rinaldi said, and he knows of what he speaks. Before joining TTD over the summer, Rinaldi spent most of his career on the brand and agency side, including multiple long stints at Hershey’s in media, marketing and strategy roles.
Marketers care about things like timing, seasonality and sales, not the ad tech plumbing underneath. And that, he argued, is why it makes sense for the DSP, not the publisher, to have the final say on when and where ads run across CTV and everywhere else.
At Hershey’s, for example, October was like its Super Bowl, but most candy sales wouldn’t happen until the last three or four days of the month in the countdown to Halloween. When he’d buy direct from publishers, however, most of the impressions would run in the first week of October, well before shoppers were thinking about Halloween candy, because the publishers were focused on monetizing their own inventory, not his business problems.
There would only be a trickle of impressions remaining by the end of the month.
If pressed, Rinaldi said, “[the publishers] would be like, ‘Well, we delivered in full, what do you mean?”
“But I wanted 95% of my spend to be the last week of October,” he said, “because it would have driven a lot more revenue for my company, not somebody else’s.”
Earning trust, it turns out, takes more than just a third-party measurement partner.
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WPP’s Angela Steele On AI, CTV And The ‘Trusted Growth Partner’ Pitch
AI is taking over the media and tech industries in the name of simplification, and marketers are pining for provable campaign outcomes, including from TV. These shifts are also causing significant change in Agency Holdco Land, according to Angela Steele, the first chief client officer for WPP Media US.
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Skydance’s Efforts to Merge Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery Have Only Just Begun
Paramount Skydance’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) closed five weeks ago on October 4, just after the third quarter ended on September 30. So, investors who wanted Skydance co-CEOs David Ellison and Ynon Kreiz to pull back the curtain on the combined entity’s finances on Monday will have to wait another quarter for the full picture.
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| In The News |
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Aaron Pierre and Kyle Chandler in “Lanterns”
Blackest night, indeed. The post-firing PR campaign against former DC Studios heads James Gunn and Peter Safran has begun, it would seem – and now “Lanterns” is caught in the crosshairs.
- “Lanterns” averaged 19.3 million viewers per episode globally and ranked among HBO’s top five series launches after its first-season finale. Despite this success, anonymous sources told Variety that the show “isn’t quite capturing the zeitgeist” and “didn’t get renewed for a second season.” Variety later had to tweak its wording to reflect that the show hasn’t been renewed yet, not that its fate has already been decided. (Put more simply by showrunner Chris Cantwell on Bluesky: “Nothing’s cancelled. Calm down.”)
- For what it’s worth, not long after it came out that former Marvel producer Jeremy Latcham would be taking over DC Studios, The Hollywood Reporter revealed that Skydance execs started courting Latcham in “early fall,” months before Gunn and Safran were officially told.
- In any case, Gunn and Safran’s next series, “The People v. Gorilla Grodd,” is still on track to premiere in 2027. Whether it will receive any marketing support from Skydance in the lead-up is another story altogether.
In other superhero TV news, the series finale of Marvel’s “VisionQuest” featured a second post-credits sequence (which, of course, we won’t spoil here!) that was not included in the advance screeners sent out to press. Offering alternative cuts to press is a relatively novel approach to avoiding leaks; other shows, such as “Game of Thrones,” have instead responded by cutting off screener access entirely.
With two major British celebrity misconduct scandals in the news, streaming services are divided on how best to handle the aftermath.
- Netflix, on the one hand, said it will not remove “Russell Brand: Re:Birth,” an original 2018 stand-up special by the star now convicted of sexual assault and rape. However, it will not feature the special in viewing recommendations or in searches for Brand’s name. (Other searches, like “British comedian,” still work.)
- On the other hand, several British companies have already started scrubbing David Walliams, who has been accused of grooming minors, from their streaming line-up. The BBC removed adaptations of Walliams’ children’s books, a 2011 episode of “Doctor Who” featuring the actor and “Little Britain,” among other things. Meanwhile, Channel 4 took down the 2021 special “Chitty Flies Again with David Walliams,” plus several other episodes he’s guest-starred in, and Sky told Deadline that it has “already removed content which features him from our platforms” as a result of the allegations.
- The Takeaway: This scenario highlights the biggest pros and cons of massive streaming libraries. Audiences – plus studios and advertisers, of course – have more access than ever before to decades’ worth of content, but those libraries are always at risk of becoming undesirable in a modern context.
Speaking of Britain, another one of its broadcasters is slashing its own budgets. This time it’s ITV, which is cutting $40 million in spending in preparation for its pending $2.1 billion sale to Sky. The cuts will also include $33 million in content spending, which will mostly affect smaller productions but not staff.
- According to ITV’s earnings report on Wednesday, third-quarter ad revenue dropped more than 8%, above the guidance of 5%. The company is now forecasting a similar 5% to 10% decline in fourth-quarter advertising revenue.
- There’s one silver lining, at least; streaming hours rose by almost a third (29%) over the last five months, thanks in no small part to ITV’s FIFA Men’s World Cup broadcasts.
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| STATISTICALLY SPEAKING |
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Speed it up, will you? Roughly 76% of Gen Z viewers in Britain say they watch content using increased playback speed, according to a recent report from Sky.
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| New & Returning Series |
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For sneak peeks, check out Cynopsis Trailer Park.
Netflix dropped the first trailer for the sixth and final season of “Emily in Paris,” which premieres on Dec. 24.
The 90 Day Fiancé franchise is getting a new (and presumably chaotic) installment in “90 Day Fiancé: Florida,” which premieres on TLC Dec. 14.
Discovery Channel’s new competition series “Men V. Food” premieres on Dec. 8.
“Dance Moms: A New Era” returns to Hulu with Season 3 on Dec. 3.
The cast of “Baywatch”
Fox announced its slate of midseason 2027 premieres, which includes:
- Two new series, “Best Medicine” and “Doc,” on Jan. 5
- New series “Baywatch” and the Season 15 premiere of “The Masked Singer” on Jan. 6
- Season 3 of “Extracted,” which premieres with a two-hour episode on Jan. 7
- Season 3 of “Murder in a Small Town” and Season 2 of “Memory of a Killer” on Feb. 1
- New series “The Interrogator” on Feb. 9
- Season 6 of “Next Level Chef” on Feb. 18
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| Today’s Premieres |
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Bravo: “Southern Charm” Season 12 at 9 p.m.
BritBox: “Blue Lights” Season 4
HBO Max: “The Killing of the Golden Rooster”
History: “Mysteries Unearthed with Danny Trejo” Season 3 at 8 p.m.
Hulu: “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives: Orange County”
Netflix: “Bros” Season 2; “Ethos” Season 2; “The Empress” Season 3; “Love Is Blind, Habibi” Season 2; “Miracles of the ER”
Paramount+: “The Jigsaw Puzzle Murder”
Peacock: “The Good Daughter”
TLC: “Crown of Deceit: Inside the Miss Universe Scandal” at 8 p.m.
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| IN OTHER NEWS |
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Not only is Netflix not planning to take down its Russell Brand content, but it’s actually preparing to offer more – namely, a 72 Films-produced documentary series about the comedian’s trial and conviction. As of Wednesday, the deal had not yet officially closed, but is expected to do so as early as today.
Jack Innanen and Amita Rao in “Adults”
After a massively successful second season, “Adults” has been renewed for a larger, 16-episode third season at FXX. As part of the renewal, creators Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw have also struck a new overall deal with FX Productions.
MGM+ has greenlit a TV adaptation of Daisy Goodwin’s novel “The American Heiress,” an eight-episode comedy of manners set in 1893. The series stars Julianna Margulies (“Paradise”) as a mother who brings her daughter to England to marry into nobility.
The BBC drama “Sherwood” will end after its third season, said series creator James Graham. That final season will likely premiere sometime in January or February next year.
Free ad-supported streaming service Tubi is launching an unscripted queer dating show featuring YouTuber Trisha Paytas. Titled “Don’t Date Alone,” the series will premiere on Feb. 4.
International streaming service MHz Choice has acquired the exclusive US rights to “The Man Who Died,” a dark Finnish comedy by Northern Irish writer Brendan Foley (“Sherlock & Daughter”). The show’s first season will premiere on Dec. 1.
Reelz has picked up a new true-crime series from Canada’s Black Watch Entertainment and the UK’s BossaNova. The 10-part series, “Into the Chase,” follows law enforcement officials as they pursue fugitives across the United States.
Peacock is making more updates to its mobile app to include more sports and a wider range of vertical video features, as well as a “jump back in” button that returns users to the shows they were previously watching.
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| Sports Report |
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Prime Video announced that its exclusive “Prime College Hoops Showcase” coverage of Duke men’s basketball will come with its own broadcast team: play-by-play announcer Ian Eagle, former NBA and NCAA Division I head coach Stan Van Gundy, five-time NBA All-Star John Wall and TSN anchor Kayla Grey. Amazon will air three Duke Blue Devils nonconference men’s basketball games this season, starting on Nov. 25.
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| Ratings |
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YouTuber Druski brought a two-year ratings high to his Nov. 7 episode of “Saturday Night Live.” (Plus, it didn’t hurt that the episode had a nice lead-in from the Notre Dame-Miami game earlier that night.) The show drew in 5.6 million viewers, the most since Nov. 2, 2024. NBC also said the show is the most watched-episode on Peacock, but didn’t disclose the exact number of viewers.
The Nov. 8 episode of “60 Minutes,” which featured Ross Douthat’s now-viral interview with President Donald Trump, achieved the show’s highest ratings following an NFL singleheader this season. According to CBS, the episode drew 7.8 million viewers and was the week’s No. 1. non-sports primetime program for adults 18+.
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TODAY’S TRIVIA QUESTION
Tom’s Restaurant in NYC, located on Broadway and 112th, is an iconic exterior location in which ‘90s sitcom?
Email answers to Trivia@Cynopsis.com and include your name, company and city/state (don’t forget!). Only the first four correct responses from each time zone will be included.
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YESTERDAY’S TRIVIA ANSWER
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Which civil rights leader was responsible for convincing Nichelle Nichols to stay on “Star Trek” after she considered resigning from her role as Lt. Uhura? Martin Luther King Jr.
Congrats to: Phyllis McQuillan-MSG Networks/NY; David Rubinsohn-American Public Television/Boston, MA; Greg Moloznik-Media Focus 121/Lakewood Ranch, FL; Gerry Bixenspan-TV Marketing Inc./NY; Wendy Holmes/Denver, CO; John Kukla-KDFW/Dallas-Fort Worth, TX; Andy Nelson-Full Throttle Customs/Richland, IA; Lorrie Shilling/El Segundo, CA Susan Nessanbaum-Goldberg-M and S Entertainment/LA; Tom Moore-Kalt Productions/LA; Michael Coscia/LA
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