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Coffee-Mate, Nestlé’s coffee creamer brand, strategically embraced the rise of microdrama in the Philippines, integrating Viu’s newly launched premium microdrama environment into its broader streaming strategy.

Working with WPP Media, Magnite and Viu, the brand extended “Lambing Serye” – a workplace romantic short film – across CTV, OTT and Viu’s newly launched premium microdrama environment using programmatic technology, precision targeting and purpose-built vertical creative to make the advertising feel native to the viewing experience.

Discover how an integrated CTV/OTT and microdrama strategy delivered premium attention, stronger brand impact and measurable business growth.

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Industry-first agentic integration via Magnite Orchestration automates local linear buying, transforming a multi-week process into a matter of hours

NEW YORK – September 10, 2026 – Magnite (NASDAQ: MGNI), the largest independent sell-side advertising company, and ITN, the ad-tech company focused on modernizing local TV activation, have expanded their partnership to bring agentic capabilities to local linear advertising. After successfully making local linear TV available programmatically, transforming a multi-week buying process into a matter of hours, the companies are taking the next leap forward. By integrating ITN’s newly launched seller agent into Magnite’s Orchestration layer, the partnership provides buyers with real-time activation and optimization of high-value local linear inventory and advanced audiences. 

Magnite and ITN are working with key partners to pioneer this advancement following the full integration in Q4 2026. By combining ITN’s proprietary NXTv infrastructure with Magnite’s ClearLine execution platform, the partnership will expand demand for local linear TV by increasing efficiency for traditional buyers while broadening access for digital-first buyers. 

This agentic workflow enables buyers to move seamlessly from planning to execution in a fraction of the time. Agents generate impression-based forecasts and media plans, enabling teams to instantly review, approve, and activate campaigns. Once approved, execution flows through Magnite’s ClearLine infrastructure, significantly accelerating time-to-launch.

When leveraging Magnite’s buyer agent, advertisers gain access to Magnite’s comprehensive supply ecosystem, unlocking unique advantages for omnichannel buys. Magnite’s buyer agent enables buyers to submit a single RFP and budget across both local linear and CTV, forecast omnichannel reach and book campaigns, and receive streamlined reporting. By removing friction between linear and CTV buying, Magnite empowers advertisers to holistically plan, allocate, and optimize their total TV spend in one place.

“At DMG, we’re always looking for new ways to give our clients access to premium inventory while maintaining the efficiency of digital buying,” said Dano Ehler, Chief Revenue Officer and Co-Founder at Digital Marketing Group (DMG). “The ability to bring linear television inventory into a more streamlined programmatic workflow is an exciting evolution and creates additional opportunities for the advertisers we serve.”

“What ITN and Magnite are building represents an important evolution for local linear television,” said Joe Cerone, Founder of Cerone Advisory Group. “The addition of agentic capabilities builds on the programmatic foundation already in place and brings the industry another step closer to aligning local linear with the technology, workflows and expectations that define modern media buying.”

“Local linear TV remains a powerful medium for reaching audiences but the operational friction of buying local linear TV inventory has historically limited its growth,” said Matt McLeggon, SVP, Advanced Solutions at Magnite. “By bringing ITN’s seller agent into Magnite Orchestration, we’re providing a streamlined agentic process that bridges traditional IO-based workflows with programmatic execution. This further unlocks previously untapped local linear inventory for advertisers and builds on our efforts to help local linear broadcasters more effectively monetize.”

“ITN has long been focused on modernizing how local linear TV is bought and activated. By connecting our proprietary technology infrastructure directly into Magnite’s Orchestration layer, we are eliminating weeks of back-and-forth operational drag,” said Craig Sulema, Chief Investment Officer at ITN. “This agentic integration transforms our vision for programmatic local linear TV into a frictionless reality, enabling both TV and digital buyers to execute local linear campaigns with unprecedented speed, efficiency and scale.”

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About Magnite 
We’re Magnite (NASDAQ: MGNI), the world’s largest independent sell-side advertising company. Publishers use our technology to monetize their content across all screens and formats including CTV, online video, display, and audio. The world’s leading agencies and brands trust our platform to access brand-safe, high-quality ad inventory and execute billions of advertising transactions each month. Anchored in bustling New York City, sunny Los Angeles, mile high Denver, historic London, colorful Singapore, and down under in Sydney, Magnite has offices across North America, EMEA, LATAM, and APAC.

Media Contact: 
Charlstie Veith
[email protected]

Investor Contact: 
Nick Kormeluk
[email protected]

About ITN
ITN is an ad tech company focused on modernizing how local TV inventory is bought and activated. Its proprietary technology infrastructure powers managed and self-service solutions that simplify and automate how local TV is transacted across broadcast, cable and streaming at the national, regional and local levels. ITN helps agencies operate more efficiently and deliver greater value for their clients while creating new demand opportunities for media suppliers. By bringing local TV into the programmatic era, ITN enables advertisers to realize the reach and impact of local TV with more digital-like execution. For more information, visit itn.tv

Media Contact:
Craig Sulema 
[email protected]

Audience strategy has become more sophisticated as we are better at understanding how different audience signals can contribute to better outcomes, but activating audience data against premium media often remains unnecessarily complicated. Buyers may have to coordinate across multiple vendors, submit manual requests, or establish custom integrations before a campaign can launch. These disconnected workflows slow execution and make audience strategies more difficult to scale.

Magnite is simplifying that process through enhanced self-serve audience capabilities in ClearLine Activate (CLA). Buyers can now more easily access a broader selection of third-party audience segments—including more exclusive publisher and commerce data—and apply them directly to campaigns through line items and demand tags, providing the speed and precision that they require.

A more self-serve approach inside ClearLine

CLA now taps into Magnite’s extensive data ecosystem, giving buyers access to third-party data, advertiser first-party data, and permissioned publisher first-party data directly within the platform. Instead of managing separate workstreams or relying on manual support, audiences can be applied more directly and flexibly at the campaign level through line items and demand tags.

This means teams can layer multiple datasets together, create more precise audience segments, and activate those strategies without the same level of operational overhead that audience curation has often required in the past. It also gives buyers access to permissioned publisher first-party data through Magnite’s ecosystem, a differentiated capability not available through other platforms.

At a high level, CLA now enables buyers to:

A key advantage of CLA is its seamless audience activation workflow, now powered by an expanded ecosystem of data partners. By bringing these partners directly into the platform, Magnite gives buyers access to a broader range of audience data, examples including:

This expansion reflects a broader goal: making ClearLine more useful not only as a platform to transact, but as a more complete activation environment for premium media and data targeting.

Why this matters for buyers

The value here is not just new functionality. It is the decreasing of friction.

Audience activation has often been treated as a separate, technical layer of campaign execution. But for buyers, it should feel native to the buying process itself. By centralizing audience access and activation within ClearLine, Magnite reduces the number of touchpoints required to launch campaigns. Instead of requesting new Deal IDs tied to specific audiences, buyers can access and activate approved audiences directly within their CLA seat. That has several practical advantages:

Mike Laband, group SVP, US revenue at Magnite, put it plainly: “Advertisers do not need more pipes. They need a faster, cleaner way to turn audience strategy into live campaigns against premium supply. That is where the market is going. The winners will be the platforms that cut out friction, collapse steps, and make activation as simple as selecting an audience.” 

That simplification is especially important for agency teams navigating growing omnichannel complexity. As Jean Fitzpatrick, EVP, commercial strategy at Omnicom Media, said, “The future of media execution belongs to platforms that unify intelligence, access, and control in one environment. Buyers do not want more steps between insight and activation. They want a direct path to premium supply. With ClearLine’s seamless workflow, our teams can move faster, execute with more conviction, and scale smarter strategies across channels.” 

Building for what comes next

These enhancements are part of Magnite’s broader effort to expand ClearLine’s value in an evolving omnichannel market. By creating a more centralized and flexible foundation for audience activation, buyers can streamline campaign workflows today while remaining well positioned for future enhancements.

Buyers do not simply need more data. They need a scalable way to turn that data into media outcomes. ClearLine is helping bridge that gap by bringing audience intelligence, activation and premium supply together in one environment.

Results highlight the real-world impact of agentic buying for premium CTV campaigns

PARIS, FRANCE – September 8, 2026 – Magnite (NASDAQ:MGNI), the largest independent sell-side advertising company, today announced the launch of its first agentic campaign in EMEA in collaboration with the trading desk, Amnet France. The results offer a real-world look at the benefits agentic buying can have on improving the outcomes of premium CTV campaigns.

Using natural language prompts, Amnet leveraged Magnite’s buyer agent to build and activate a video campaign through ClearLine on behalf of a leading automotive manufacturer. Through Magnite Orchestration, the Magnite buyer agent communicated with the Magnite seller agent to identify and activate relevant premium CTV supply aligned with the campaign objectives, streamlining the path from buyer intent to execution. Rather than manually configuring campaign settings, identifying publishers and creating deal structures, the Amnet team was able to spend more time focused on strategy. 

The results included an approximate 70% reduction in campaign setup time and a strong video view-through rate (VTR) of 95. The agent also surfaced relevant inventory and optimisation opportunities that may not have been identified through traditional manual workflows, helping teams make more informed campaign decisions.

Barbara Thuillier-Romeri, Ad-Tech Manager, Amnet France said: “As AI continues to mature, we wanted to understand how agentic technology could deliver practical value and complement the way we operate today. Working with Magnite gave us the opportunity to evaluate how their buyer agent could enhance the way our teams execute campaigns and drive stronger outcomes. We look forward to leveraging more of the product’s capabilities going forward, and are excited by the potential for this to evolve how we approach campaigns.”

“AI is only as valuable as the inventory and data it can access,” added Edouard Schmidt, Commercial Director, France at Magnite. “Because Magnite’s buyer agent is embedded directly into the buying workflow, it can surface optimisation opportunities as they emerge and allows buyers to act on them faster to improve both operational efficiency and campaign performance. The results achieved with Amnet reinforce the value of connecting intelligence directly to execution, and we’re excited to build on that momentum with more clients across EMEA.”

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About Magnite 
We’re Magnite (NASDAQ: MGNI), the world’s largest independent sell-side advertising company. Publishers use our technology to monetize their content across all screens and formats including CTV, online video, display, and audio. The world’s leading agencies and brands trust our platform to access brand-safe, high-quality ad inventory and execute billions of advertising transactions each month. Anchored in bustling New York City, sunny Los Angeles, mile high Denver, historic London, colorful Singapore, and down under in Sydney, Magnite has offices across North America, EMEA, LATAM, and APAC.

About Amnet 
Founded in 2012, Amnet France is a leading programmatic trading desk helping more than 200 advertisers in France and internationally, helping brands address a wide range of digital marketing challenges, from brand building and performance marketing to drive-to-store strategies, audience creation and data-driven targeting. Amnet delivers programmatic campaigns across all major digital channels, including Display, Video, Social, Audio, Connected TV (CTV), and Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH).

Media Contact: 
Eric Van Damme: [email protected] 

With football season and high-profile live events approaching, Magnite’s Live Marketplace makes live content easy to buy programmatically and agentically 

NEW YORK – September 3, 2026 – Magnite (NASDAQ:MGNI), the largest independent sell-side advertising company, today announced major milestones across its live streaming business, cementing its position as the premier partner for live streaming advertising. As media owners prepare for a massive fall lineup, anchored by the return of NFL and college football, Magnite is scaling a global marketplace for live, built on a foundation of verified, event-level transparency for the industry’s biggest live moments. 

Historically buyers have struggled to differentiate between truly real-time live content and shoulder content. Magnite’s Live Scheduler allows media owners to signal upcoming live events well in advance, giving buyers the foresight needed to plan and execute campaigns with verified live inventory, so they can reach engaged audiences precisely when key moments happen.

Since launching Live Scheduler last November, 37 media owners globally have utilized the technology to seamlessly schedule and monetize over 4,000 live events, including high-stakes broadcasts like the FIFA World Cup, NFL Monday Night Football, the NHL Playoffs, as well as major cultural moments including the Academy Awards. 

“Live programming combines highly valuable content and highly attentive audiences, creating powerful opportunities for advertisers,” said Jamie Power, SVP, Addressable Sales at Disney Advertising. “Supporting those moments requires scalable, reliable technology that can keep pace with audience demand. Magnite helps us enable and manage the unique demands of live streaming while simultaneously creating more opportunities for the marketplace.”

By streamlining access and overcoming the technical complexity of live CTV execution, Magnite is opening up incremental growth for publishers. From January to July, Magnite has seen a 56% year over year increase in global live sports ad spend with over 5,800 advertisers spending on live sports inventory that did not spend in the year prior. 

“Live events bring people together around the moments and conversations they care about most, creating meaningful opportunities for brands to connect with audiences,” said Holly Dunn, Managing Partner, Head of Investment & Activation, Havas Media Network North America. “As audiences and media continue to fragment, marketers are increasingly looking to sports and live programming as a core part of the media mix, not simply a one-off activation. These environments offer something increasingly valuable by creating shared experiences at scale and connecting brands to culture in real time. Magnite helps make these opportunities more accessible, giving brands the flexibility to reach the right audiences and engage with the moments that matter”.

Magnite’s live strength is underpinned by several key capabilities designed to drive seamless monetization:

“Live streaming offers advertisers an unprecedented opportunity to capture massive, highly engaged audiences in real time,” said Mike Laband, Group SVP of Revenue at Magnite. “We are democratizing access to this live inventory in a way that works seamlessly for both sides of the market. By continuously innovating across our supply infrastructure, we are unlocking net-new monetization opportunities for media owners while providing buyers with an effortless, transparent doorway into verified live media.”

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About Magnite 
We’re Magnite (NASDAQ: MGNI), the world’s largest independent sell-side advertising company. Publishers use our technology to monetize their content across all screens and formats including CTV, online video, display, and audio. The world’s leading agencies and brands trust our platform to access brand-safe, high-quality ad inventory and execute billions of advertising transactions each month. Anchored in bustling New York City, sunny Los Angeles, mile high Denver, historic London, colorful Singapore, and down under in Sydney, Magnite has offices across North America, EMEA, LATAM, and APAC.

Media Contact: 
Charlstie Veith 
[email protected]

Investor Contact: 
Nick Kormeluk 
[email protected]

Japanese consumers have already embraced the open internet. From connected TV and premium news to mobile apps and digital audio, audiences move naturally across channels throughout the day. Yet while consumers spend around 66% of their digital time across the open internet, only 34% of advertising investment follows them ( SeenThis Japan, Harris Poll ). So what’s holding advertisers back?

That question was at the heart of a recent panel discussion hosted by Magnite Japan, where leaders from Dentsu Japan International Brands, SmartNews, SMN Corporation and Magnite explored what it will take for the open internet to become a larger part of advertisers’ omnichannel strategies.

The Open Web’s Biggest Challenge Isn’t Scale – It’s Confidence

The open internet has changed dramatically over the past decade.

Magnite

Premium connected TV inventory, trusted digital publishers, curated mobile applications and high-quality audio environments now form an increasingly important part of the programmatic ecosystem in Japan. Yet historical perceptions continue to shape investment decisions.

Stephen Leung, Associate Director, Dentsu Japan International Brands, believes the industry’s biggest barrier is no longer inventory quality.

“The biggest challenge isn’t the inventory itself. It’s trust—and making the value of the open internet easy to explain. The open internet has evolved significantly, but many advertisers and planners are still evaluating it based on perceptions from the past.”

If trust is one barrier, complexity is another.

Yusuke Kouga, Head of Ads Product GTM, SmartNews compared today’s media landscape to ordering at a restaurant.

“Walled gardens are like a set menu. You choose A, B or C and you know exactly what you’re getting. Programmatic is more like ordering à la carte—you can build exactly the combination that fits your objectives.”

The flexibility to combine premium streaming, digital news, mobile apps, audio and first-party data is one of the open web’s greatest strengths. At the same time, that flexibility can make programmatic feel more complicated than buying within closed platforms.

“The value of programmatic is still understood and fully utilised by only a limited number of advertisers and agencies today,” said Kouga.

As omnichannel media planning becomes more sophisticated, the industry’s challenge is no longer building better technology. It’s making sophisticated technology easier to use.

Measurement Must Evolve Alongside Consumer Behaviour

The panel also agreed that advertisers need a more complete understanding of campaign effectiveness. Today, many marketers still evaluate channels independently, even though consumers experience them together.

Magnite’s “Decoding the Connected Consumer” Japan Research showed 89% of Japanese consumers regularly engage with ad-supported open internet environments, while 46% use a second device while streaming, often searching for products or shopping online during viewing sessions. Rather than competing, these channels increasingly complement one another across the consumer journey.

Dentsu Japan International Brands’ Stephen believes this requires a fundamental shift in how the industry approaches measurement.

“Advertisers don’t simply want to know how one platform performed. They want to understand how every customer touchpoint contributes to overall business outcomes.”

Turning that vision into reality, however, requires overcoming several structural challenges.

As Lena Sakaguchi, Manager, SMN Corporation,  explained:

“Measurement fragmentation and optimisation speed remain two of our biggest challenges. Walled gardens operate within connected ecosystems, while the open internet depends on multiple partners working together.”

Privacy changes, evolving identity solutions and fragmented measurement have made collaboration more important than ever. Unlike closed platforms, the open web depends on multiple partners working together to measure performance across the customer journey, rather than within individual channels.

Beyond CPM: Defining Value Through Attention

If measurement is evolving, so too are the metrics that define advertising effectiveness.

For years, digital advertising rewarded efficiency through lower CPMs, cheaper reach and short-term performance. Increasingly, however, advertisers are asking a different question: not simply whether an ad was served, but whether it was actually noticed—and whether that attention ultimately influenced business outcomes.

The Attention Economy research by dentsu reflects this broader shift, arguing that as media consumption fragments, success will depend less on measuring impressions and more on understanding whether advertising captured attention and drove business outcomes.

Stephen believes Attention and Brand Lift should be viewed as part of a broader measurement framework rather than standalone KPIs.

“Attention and Brand Lift shouldn’t be the final destination. What’s important is demonstrating how those metrics connect to business outcomes and sales. When advertisers have that evidence, they’re much more willing to invest in new channels.”

That thinking is increasingly reflected across the industry. SmartNews’s Koga highlighted that users engage with the platform more frequently, spend longer with content and are less likely to multitask—characteristics that contribute to stronger Brand Lift outcomes. For DSPs, this also changes how campaigns are optimised.

“Performance optimisation has matured. The next challenge is how we incorporate quality into optimisation,” said SMN’s Sakaguchi. 

Rather than relying solely on clicks and conversions, DSPs are increasingly incorporating contextual signals, engagement metrics and Brand Lift Studies into optimisation models – moving the conversation beyond media cost towards media quality.

The Next Chapter Will Be Built Together

Throughout the discussion, one message remained remarkably consistent: no single organisation can solve omnichannel complexity alone.

Publishers create trusted environments. Agencies shape strategy. DSPs optimise campaign delivery. SSPs improve transparency and access to premium inventory. Realising the full potential of the open web will depend on how effectively those parts of the ecosystem work together.

As Sakaguchi concluded: “We need to create a new yardstick together.”

Looking ahead, Kouga believes emerging technologies such as Agentic AI could help remove one of programmatic’s biggest barriers – complexity. “If Agentic AI makes programmatic much easier for everyone to use, it can unlock the full value that programmatic has always had.”

Ultimately, the discussion pointed towards a broader ambition for the industry. As Stephen reflected: “I hope we can move the conversation beyond competition between walled gardens and the open internet, and instead focus on growing the market as a whole.”

Consumers in Japan have already embraced an omnichannel world. The opportunity now is to ensure advertising evolves alongside audiences. If the industry can simplify how premium media is planned, measured and activated – and establish common frameworks that better demonstrate business outcomes – Japan is well positioned to unlock the full potential of its premium open web ecosystem.


As buyers seek smarter ways to activate premium inventory, real-time bidstream data is creating new opportunities to drive performance and unlock greater value. Cognitiv, a leader in deep learning-powered advertising, has embraced this approach, integrating its AI models with Magnite’s RTD offering. Zach Pucci, VP of Enterprise Sales at Magnite, sat down with Jana Jakovljevic, SVP of Partnerships at Cognitiv, to discuss why real-time data has become an important part of their strategy, how RTD is helping them deliver better outcomes for advertisers, and where they see the opportunity going next.

The industry is moving beyond traditional identity-based targeting. How is access to real-time bidstream signals improving the way we evaluate and package premium supply?

Identity has always answered one part of the equation: who. Who is likely to be interested in a product, who falls into a particular demographic, or who has shown intent in the past. But driving performance is about more than identifying the right person. Context tells you when and where an ad is most likely to influence a decision.

That’s why real-time bidstream signals are so valuable. Instead of relying on audience segments built days or weeks ago, Cognitiv’s deep learning models evaluate every impression in under 10 milliseconds, assessing both the user and the context surrounding that impression to predict the probability of conversion.

Having that intelligence at the moment of the bid means we can assign a more accurate value to each impression, driving better performance for advertisers and increased demand for publishers.

How is Cognitiv using proprietary models and data science to create differentiated value for buyers through real-time data?

Our differentiation isn’t just access to data; it’s what our models have learned from it over the last decade. We’ve invested years in building proprietary deep learning models and embeddings that capture complex relationships between content, consumer engagement, and advertising outcomes. Rather than relying on rigid rules or static audience segments, our models recognize patterns that indicate when an impression is most likely to drive a desired outcome.

Our Deep Learning Advertising Platform continuously learns from campaign performance and adapts to each advertiser’s KPIs in real time. Combined with the compute power of our co-location infrastructure, this enables advertisers to identify and act on high-value opportunities that traditional approaches often miss.

How does Cognitiv’s deep learning technology plug directly into Magnite’s ClearLine solution, and what does that workflow look like from the moment a bid request happens to when a buyer activates a Deal ID?

By plugging Cognitiv’s deep learning directly into Magnite’s ClearLine curation platform, we evaluate supply at the source.

  1. An ad request fires: A viewer starts streaming CTV or lands on a publisher’s site, sending an impression opportunity to Magnite.
  2. AI scores the moment: Magnite passes live bidstream signals to Cognitiv, where deep learning models analyze the content and context in under 10 milliseconds. Cognitiv’s ContextGPT analyzes deep page sentiment, while AudienceGPT captures real-time consumer intent to predict campaign performance.
  3. Inventory gets packaged: Qualifying impressions are dynamically packaged into a custom ClearLine Deal ID.
  4. Buyers activate seamlessly: Magnite sends the enriched Deal ID downstream to the buyer’s DSP of choice, clearing the bid through their normal workflow.

Why does Cognitiv do this via a server-to-server integration rather than containerization, and how does Magnite support that S2S integration?

Containerized RTB infrastructure was designed to execute lightweight logic at scale, while deep learning requires significantly more compute to run sophisticated neural network inference within the strict latency requirements of real-time bidding. That’s why we built a server-to-server integration.

Our S2S architecture provides approximately 900% more compute than containerized environments. Magnite’s server-to-server integration gives us direct, low-latency access to the bidstream, allowing our models to score impressions and return decisions within the milliseconds available for an auction.

Looking at the performance buyers have seen from this integration, what benefits are brands experiencing with this deep-learning-powered curation?

Brands are getting more precise targeting, stronger engagement, and better cost efficiency. Real-time curation cuts wasted spend and drives down campaign costs. Our clients saw 31% more cost-efficient CPCs through Magnite DV+ compared to non-real-time curation implementations.

Additionally, in a recent campaign for a leading national insurance brand, Cognitiv’s ContextGPT strategy delivered the highest click-through rate of any tactic tested, with Magnite serving as a key supply partner in the deal.

How does your real-time data help you identify and act on the best opportunities across CTV, display, audio, and mobile through Magnite?

Consumers don’t engage with media in silos, so neither should AI. This means that what someone was reading on mobile, browsing on desktop, or listening to earlier in the day provides valuable context about where they are in their journey.

Cognitiv’s device graph spans more than 250 million U.S. adults, allowing our deep learning models to connect those cross-channel signals and understand the path leading up to an impression. Rather than evaluating CTV, display, audio, or mobile independently, we evaluate them together to determine the probability of a business outcome.

Working with Magnite gives us access to real-time signals across premium omnichannel inventory, enabling our models to identify the moments that matter most.

Looking ahead, how do you see real-time signal activation shaping the future of programmatic curation, and why is collaboration between SSPs and curators becoming increasingly important?

The future of programmatic isn’t about giving buyers more choices—it’s about removing the need to make tradeoffs.

Historically, advertisers layered together audience, contextual, viewability, and brand safety signals in the hope of improving performance, often optimizing one metric at the expense of another.

Deep learning changes that. Our models evaluate hundreds of signals simultaneously to predict the likelihood of a desired outcome, meaning advertisers no longer have to choose between contextually relevant content, high viewability, or the right audience.

Making that possible requires close collaboration between SSPs and AI-powered curators. SSPs provide access to premium inventory and real-time signals, while curators apply the intelligence that determines which opportunities are most valuable. Together, they’re transforming curation from static rules into real-time, outcome-based decisioning.

Digital audio is becoming an increasingly important part of Japan’s evolving media landscape. According to Magnite’s “Decoding the Connected Consumer” Japan research, 51% of Japanese consumers aged 55 and under are streaming more audio than they were a year ago, spending an average of 1.4 hours listening to streaming music and 1.2 hours listening to podcasts each day. Whether commuting, exercising or going about their daily routines, these listening habits are creating new opportunities for brands to connect beyond the screen.

During a recent fireside chat hosted by Magnite and Otonal, the discussion explored why digital audio is emerging as a key component of Japan’s omnichannel future – helping brands extend investments across connected TV (CTV), online video and mobile.

Magnite

Audio’s Advantage: Why “Nagara” Moments Are Audio’s Greatest Strength

One of digital audio’s greatest strengths lies in its ability to connect with consumers during nagara (“while-doing”) moments – everyday activities when people are engaged with content while commuting, exercising, cooking or completing household tasks.

These moments are often beyond the reach of visual media. While consumers may not be looking at a screen, they remain highly engaged through audio, creating valuable opportunities for brands to become part of their daily routines.

Kotono Nakagawa, Publisher Management Specialist at Otonal, noted: “Digital audio naturally fits into people’s daily lives. It allows brands to reach consumers during ‘while-doing (nagara) ‘ moments- times when visual media simply can’t.”

Rather than replacing visual media, digital audio extends omnichannel campaigns into these nagara moments, helping brands maintain a continuous presence throughout the consumer journey.

How Audio Extends Campaigns Beyond the Screen

While audio’s strength lies in reaching consumers during nagara moments, its value grows even further when integrated into an omnichannel strategy.

Magnite’s research found that 89% of Japanese consumers regularly engage with streaming TV, mobile apps, digital audio and digital news, moving seamlessly between these channels throughout the week. Rather than building campaigns in isolation, advertisers have an opportunity to connect these touchpoints.

Digital audio extends the impact of CTV, online video and mobile by reinforcing messages beyond the screen and creating a more cohesive brand experience.

For advertisers, this presents an opportunity to build connected campaigns rather than isolated ones. Digital audio extends CTV, online video and mobile impact by reaching consumers when they step away from the screen, reinforcing messages across multiple touchpoints and creating a more cohesive brand experience.

As Nakagawa explained during the discussion: “In the US, digital audio has already become an established advertising format alongside search, display and video. Japan is now beginning to move in the same direction.”

That momentum is beginning to build locally. In 2025, the Japan Interactive Advertising Association (JIAA) published industry guidelines for digital audio advertising, signalling growing maturity and recognition of audio as an increasingly important part of digital media planning.

Audio’s Impact: From attention to action

As marketers increasingly shift their focus from impressions to attention, digital audio offers a different kind of engagement.

While video and social platforms compete for visual attention—and can easily be skipped, scrolled past or viewed alongside other distractions—audio is often consumed through headphones or speakers, creating a more focused listening experience.

During the discussion, Otonal highlighted research showing that digital audio consistently delivers strong attention levels, making it particularly effective for brand storytelling and message retention.

Rather than simply capturing attention, audio helps strengthen omnichannel campaigns in several ways. By reinforcing messages without creating the fatigue that repeated visual advertising can sometimes cause, brands can maintain a consistent presence throughout the day. Trusted voices and familiar listening environments also help build stronger emotional connections with audiences, while combining audio with visual touchpoints improves memory and brand recall across the consumer journey.

As Otonal explained: “By combining visual and audio touchpoints, brands can reinforce their message naturally while avoiding the fatigue that repeated visual advertising can sometimes create.”

These qualities make audio more than simply another media channel. They help explain why digital audio supports consumers throughout the purchase journey.

Magnite’s research shows digital audio doesn’t just build awareness—it also influences consumers throughout the purchase journey.

Among podcast listeners, 77% discover new products through digital audio, 56% save products or click through for more information, and 55% go on to add products to cart or make a purchase. Streaming music listeners also demonstrate strong engagement across every stage of the funnel, highlighting audio’s ability to support awareness, consideration and conversion within a broader omnichannel strategy.

How Audio Completes the Omnichannel Journey

As Japan’s digital audio market matures, many of the traditional barriers to adoption are disappearing. “The challenges we hear most often are around creative assets and measurement—but both have become much easier to solve,” said Nakagawa.

With brands increasingly able to repurpose existing video creative and measure performance alongside other digital channels, audio is becoming easier than ever to activate.

Rather than replacing CTV, online video or mobile advertising, digital audio strengthens them—extending campaigns beyond the screen and helping brands create more connected consumer experiences.

Hong Kong is one of Asia’s most digitally connected markets, where consumers seamlessly move between streaming TV, mobile, social media and digital marketplaces – often using multiple screens at once. As the traditional path to purchase gives way to fluid, cross-device journeys, marketers face a new challenge: moving beyond reach to capture attention and relevance.

Magnite’s latest research highlights this shift, with more than half of viewers multitasking while watching TV and 55% highly likely to take action after seeing an ad on multiple devices. In Hong Kong, these behaviours are fast becoming the norm.

Against this backdrop, Magnite recently brought together industry leaders from Carousell Media, Havas Media, South China Morning Post (SCMP)  and Publicis Media at eMpower Hong Kong to explore what this multi-screen reality means for the future of programmatic advertising, omnichannel strategies and cross-device storytelling.

The Natural Rise of the “Second Screen”

With more than half of audiences using secondary devices while watching TV, the traditional television set is evolving. Rather than viewing mobile phones as a distraction or a competitor to the big screen, brands are beginning to view them as a natural extension of the consumer journey.

A compelling Connected TV campaign doesn’t necessarily end when the ad finishes – it often sparks an immediate search, product lookup, or deeper exploration on another device. This creates an opportunity to bridge upper-funnel storytelling with lower-funnel action in real time.

Angel Koh, Head of Sales, Carousell Media, highlighted that this behaviour is already playing out across digital marketplaces:

“More than 90% of our users are on mobile, making it the natural second screen. Consumers often discover a product on TV, then immediately turn to Carousell to search and learn more.”

Publishers are adapting just as quickly. Premium media owners like SCMP are redesigning content experiences around evolving consumption habits and investing in multimedia storytelling that better complements how audiences consume content today, explained Jo Liu, Associate Director Digital Advertising, SCMP.

“Consumers increasingly come to us as their second screen. That’s why we’ve evolved beyond traditional articles to deliver video, interactive graphics and richer storytelling experiences that match how audiences engage today.”

From Isolated Silos to Omni-Channel Harmony

Many brands advertise across multiple platforms, but true omnichannel strategy requires a unified, audience-first approach. Consumers don’t see channels – they see one brand.
When CTV, mobile, video, display, and other channels are planned in silos, consumers are often overexposed to the same messaging. By coordinating campaigns across screens, brands can better manage frequency, deliver sequential storytelling, and create a more seamless consumer experience.

As Louis Ng, Head of Programmatic, Havas Media, shared, “Omnichannel starts with a unified audience strategy activated through the right DSP and data stack. In practice, that means using cross-device identity and frequency capping across CTV, mobile and display to sequence messaging and avoid burning budget on repeat exposure, while keeping measurement consistent across every screen. “

Rather than repeating the same creative everywhere, brands can sequence messaging based on where consumers are in their journey: a powerful emotional story on the living room TV, followed by product education, social proof or a promotional offer on mobile.

Prachi Karan, Head of Data & Tech Solutions, Publicis Media, noted that successful omnichannel strategies are about thoughtful orchestration, not simply increasing exposure.

“Reach is important, but consumers don’t need to see the same ad repeatedly. The opportunity is to sequence messages- starting with brand storytelling and following up with ads that move people closer to action.”

Ultimately, Prachi emphasized that every touchpoint should have a clear purpose.

“Consumers don’t distinguish between screens; they simply expect a seamless experience. Our role is to understand how each touchpoint contributes to the journey and delivers messaging that feels connected rather than isolated.”

Rethinking Success: The Industry Needs to Measure Attention, Not Just Impressions

As consumer journeys become increasingly connected, measurement must evolve alongside them.

Traditional buying metrics like CPM and CPC remain important operational benchmarks, but they reveal little about whether advertising actually influenced consumer behaviour or business outcomes. Increasingly, advertisers are shifting their focus towards attention, incrementality and measurable business impact.

Louis from Havas Media mentioned how this shift is already influencing agency planning. “We’re evolving our measurement frameworks to focus less on how much media we buy and more on the attention we generate. Havas Media Network’s global study, analyzing over 9,000 brand lift campaigns and 5.6 million impressions, found attention closely correlates with all key brand outcomes, with multiple exposures that reach a sufficient attention threshold proving most effective at driving awareness and consideration.”

When advertisers look beyond basic impressions and start mapping out the correlation between consumer attention and downstream brand consideration, the true value of multi-screen inventory becomes clear.

Publishers are seeing the same challenge from another perspective.

As Carousell’s Angel highlighted, “Advertisers still buy media on CPMs, but they’re evaluating success through ROAS and ROI. Closing that gap is one of the industry’s biggest opportunities.”

Bringing media metrics closer to business outcomes will require stronger cross-device measurement, better attribution and greater collaboration across the ecosystem.

Collaboration Will Define the Next Era of Omnichannel

Technology alone won’t solve omnichannel complexity.

As media channels multiply and consumer expectations evolve, delivering effective omnichannel campaigns will require closer collaboration across agencies, publishers and technology partners.

Jo emphasised the importance of working together rather than in silos. “By combining publishers’ first-party data and premium environments with agency expertise, we can deliver higher-quality audiences while maintaining brand safety and consumer trust.”

For publishers like Carousell, collaboration also means creating value for every stakeholder in the advertising ecosystem. “The strongest campaigns create value for everyone: the brand, the publisher and, ultimately, the consumer. That’s how we define success.”

Looking ahead, Prachi believes the industry’s greatest opportunity lies in closer collaboration across agencies, publishers and technology partners.

“No single platform has the full picture. The future of omnichannel depends on bringing together data, technology and premium media to create a connected experience for consumers.”

As the omnichannel landscape continues to evolve, the brands that succeed won’t necessarily be those with the biggest budgets or the broadest reach. They’ll be the ones that understand how consumers naturally move between screens and deliver experiences that feel connected, relevant and valuable at every touchpoint.

Want to learn more? Download Magnite’s latest research: Hong Kong Streams & Screens to explore the trends, insights and consumer behaviours shaping the future of streaming advertising in Hong Kong and beyond. 

In digital advertising, there is a shift underway in how data is shared, transacted, and ultimately turned into value. Data, identity, measurement, and activation are no longer operating as separate layers in a sequential marketing stack. They are being embedded directly into the transaction layer itself, shifting from a linear assembly chain to a real-time system where signals flow continuously and shape decisions at the moment value is created.

Industry developments such as WPP’s acquisition of InfoSum and Publicis Groupe’s agreement to acquire LiveRamp both reflect and accelerate this transition. Notably, these developments reinforce the growing importance of neutral architecture in enabling organizations to connect and activate data without sacrificing interoperability or control.

The impact is significant. As data moves closer to activation, its value increases materially. When signals, identity, and activation are more tightly connected, buyers make better-informed decisions, sellers unlock greater value from inventory, and campaigns become more relevant, efficient, and measurable. This tighter connectivity also enables more privacy-conscious activation by allowing data to be applied more intelligently across the ecosystem.

But the shift also introduces structural risk. As data assets, identity frameworks, and activation platforms become more tightly integrated, connectivity can drive the market toward closed ecosystems where access, decisioning, and value distribution are increasingly controlled by a small number of platforms. The challenge is no longer connectivity itself, but ensuring it does not come at the cost of interoperability, collaboration, and market choice.

That is why neutral, independent infrastructure is essential. It preserves flexibility across partners and platforms while still enabling the scale, performance, and operational discipline required to transact in real time.

What follows is a closer look at the forces driving this shift, the emerging models shaping data activation, and Magnite’s role in helping buyers, sellers, and partners navigate an increasingly interconnected ecosystem.

Four Forces Accelerating the Need for Stronger Data Enablement

For years, digital advertising has been built on a basic idea: that higher-quality and more abundant data should lead to improved performance. But as the volume, variety, and velocity of signals continue to expand, the challenge is no longer access to data but how easily that data can be activated in a meaningful, usable way across the ecosystem.

Several structural forces are now accelerating the need for more advanced data enablement across the industry.

1. Signal Proliferation Is Creating Real Complexity

Programmatic advertising has always been built on data. What’s changed is the sheer scale and diversity of signals now flowing through the ecosystem. First-party audience data, commerce signals, contextual inputs, attention metrics, publisher intelligence, and AI-generated predictions are all competing for influence in how media is bought and optimized.

Signals don’t automatically translate into better decisions. In many cases, they create more noise than clarity, especially when they aren’t aligned in how or where they’re applied.

2. Data Collaboration Is Easier to Agree On Than to Execute

There is broad consensus that better collaboration across data, identity, and activation should improve outcomes. In practice, it is far more difficult.

Advertisers want to use their proprietary data without losing control over how it is applied. Publishers want to increase the value of their inventory without compromising their relationship with users or relinquishing data ownership. Agencies want flexibility to maintain differentiated strategies. Identity and measurement providers need their signals to remain usable across increasingly fragmented environments.

As Kevin Longo, VP of Commercial at Fanatics put it, “Our understanding of the fan is one of our most valuable assets. The challenge isn’t whether to use it—it’s how to activate it to enrich fan experiences across different environments without losing control, transparency, or trust.”

3. Interoperability Is Becoming a Competitive Advantage

No single identity provider, clean room, DSP, SSP, or measurement platform can solve every use case in today’s ecosystem. The market is simply too fragmented, and the needs too varied.

A retailer, a streaming publisher, a global agency, and a commerce platform are all optimizing for different outcomes—yield, reach, performance, privacy, or incrementality. Increasingly, the organizations creating the most value are not the ones building the most closed systems, but the ones that can connect across them.

Interoperability, being able to work across partners, signals, and workflows without forcing consolidation, is becoming a source of competitive advantage in its own right.

4. Advertising Is a Multi-Signal Decisioning Environment

The traditional programmatic workflow was largely linear: audience creation, activation, and measurement happening in sequence. That model no longer reflects how the ecosystem actually operates.

Today, audience data, publisher signals, commerce inputs, identity frameworks, measurement data, and AI-driven optimization are increasingly part of the same decisioning moment. Some signals matter most in planning. Others only become relevant milliseconds before an impression is served.

This fundamentally changes what infrastructure needs to do. Data enablement is no longer just about moving signals from one system to another. It is about ensuring the right signals are available, usable, and governable at the exact point where decisions are made.

Together, these shifts are reshaping how value is created across the advertising ecosystem and why data enablement is no longer an adjacent capability, but a core layer of modern media infrastructure.

The Consequence: The Industry Is Being Pulled Between Two Operating Models

As data, identity, and activation become more interconnected, the industry is increasingly defined by the tension between two operating models, each with clear advantages, and each with meaningful limitations.

On one end is the closed, consolidated model.

In this structure, data, identity, planning, activation, and measurement are unified within a single ecosystem. The appeal is clear: tighter integration, fewer handoffs, and more streamlined execution. Signals move efficiently through a controlled environment, and decisioning can happen closer to activation with less friction.

But that efficiency introduces tradeoffs. As more of the data stack is concentrated within a single commercial environment, questions emerge around neutrality, transparency, and control. Buyers, publishers, agencies, and data partners increasingly need confidence that their proprietary assets are not only being activated efficiently, but also independently and fairly across the ecosystem.

At the other end is a highly flexible but fragmented model.

Here, participants can assemble best-in-class partners across identity, data, activation, clean rooms, DSPs, SSPs, and measurement providers. This preserves maximum choice and customization, allowing each participant to optimize for their own strategy.

However, fragmentation introduces operational strain. As signals move across more systems, complexity increases. Workflows become harder to manage, latency can rise, and data can lose fidelity as it travels through multiple environments. In effect, the flexibility that enables choice can also dilute performance at the point of activation.

The market is increasingly converging on a third requirement: a model that preserves the performance characteristics of integration without sacrificing the openness of fragmentation.

That is the role of neutral infrastructure.

Neutral infrastructure does not force convergence into a single ecosystem, nor does it rely on disconnected point solutions. Instead, it creates a shared foundation where multiple identity systems, data partners, activation platforms, and measurement frameworks can operate together—without losing autonomy or control.

As Devon DeBlasio, Global Head of GTM, Data and Technology Solutions, WPP put it: “We need infrastructure that is transparent, interoperable, and truly decentralized—so valuable real-time intelligence can be connected and leveraged across the ecosystem while still applying our unique approach that combines IDs and diverse signals to drive meaningful experiences across all corners of the consumer journey.  The catch-22 is that the more flexible and interoperable a system becomes, the more important it is to maintain control, governance, and clarity over how that data is actually used.”

Why Neutral Infrastructure Wins

Neutral infrastructure is emerging as the operating layer that reconciles two competing demands in modern advertising: the need for real-time scale and performance, and the need for openness, transparency, and control.

It combines the processing power and decisioning capability of a scaled platform with the interoperability of an open ecosystem. Instead of forcing participants into a single closed framework—or requiring them to stitch together fragmented point solutions—it establishes a common layer where data, identity, activation, and measurement can interact in real time, without loss of control or fidelity.

In practice, neutral infrastructure delivers three core advantages:

Scale Without Constraints

Interoperability Without Fragmentation

Transparency Without Performance Tradeoffs

This becomes especially important as data-driven decisioning moves closer to the supply side.

Publishers increasingly sit at the source of high-value audience, contextual, and engagement signals. As a result, mediation is evolving beyond its traditional role as a yield tool. It is becoming a real-time decisioning layer where data, identity, demand, compliance, and inventory intelligence converge.

The same dynamic is playing out across the streaming ecosystem. As CTV publishers increasingly leverage first-party audience and content signals to drive monetization, the need for broad interoperability is even more pronounced. Dylan Moorhead, Sr. Director, Global Strategic Advertising Partnerships at Roku notes “As streaming continues to mature, our data and content signals are increasingly valuable in how inventory is packaged and decisioned. We need an open and interoperable ecosystem that lets us activate those signals across a broad range of partners while maintaining transparency, preserving control of our assets.”

When supported by neutral infrastructure, this layer can operate closer to the transaction point, reducing signal loss, improving match quality, and creating more efficient pathways between data and inventory.

Building for What Comes Next

The WPP acquisition of InfoSum and the Publicis agreement to acquire LiveRamp are not isolated developments. They both reflect a broader shift across advertising as data collaboration, identity, and activation become increasingly connected, while the need for neutral architecture is key.

The ecosystem still depends on a broad set of capabilities, data providers, identity solutions, clean rooms, measurement partners, and activation platforms, but it also requires enough flexibility to accommodate new signals, evolving privacy standards, and new ways of buying and selling media.

That balance is becoming essential.

Particularly because data enablement only works when it works for everyone across the ecosystem. Advertisers want access to the highest-quality signals to improve decisioning and outcomes. Publishers are focused on increasing the value of their inventory while preserving audience trust and control. Agencies are looking for flexibility to build differentiated workflows across partners and platforms. Data and identity providers prioritize portability, ensuring their signals can operate across environments without losing fidelity or context. And across the supply path, spanning SSPs, exchanges, and infrastructure partners, the focus is increasingly on enabling cleaner, more efficient routing of demand and data, ensuring value is preserved rather than diluted as it moves through the ecosystem.

Neutral infrastructure is what makes these objectives compatible. It bridges the gap between integration and independence while delivering the performance benefits of scale and preserving the flexibility of an open ecosystem.

Ultimately, in an increasingly multi-signal market, neutrality is an operational requirement. It determines whether data can be activated efficiently, transparently, and at scale, without sacrificing the flexibility that underpins an open internet.

Magnite’s role is to support that flexibility by providing independent infrastructure that connects buyers, sellers, and partners across the ecosystem.