Kate (Merchitecture) (27:36)
Foreign welcome back to the Refresh, your weekly download on what went down in advertising. I'm Kate with Merchitecture and Today is Tuesday, September 2nd. This week on the Refresh we're covering Magnite launching Pause Ads, Anthropics, cloud extension for chrome and the ANA's Q2 2025 Programmatic Transparency Benchmark Report. Before we kick off, shout out to our sponsor Adform for their support. 40% of Internet users are unreachable on cookieless browsers due to identity fragmentation causing wasted impressions, inflated CPAs and revenue loss. Reclaim your audience and find your 40 with Adform. Now let's get into it, starting things off with Magnite, who's rolling out the ability to buy pause ads programmatically across streaming providers including DirecTV, Dish and Fubo. Inventory can be purchased through their own product, Clearline as well as third party buyers and DSPs like Curve, AI Mountain and Yahoo. The announcement marks a moment of triumph not just for advertisers, but for publishers and the broader ad tech ecosystem. Making a non standard ad format like a pause ad available across a variety of streaming platforms, devices and ad tech partners is a complex task given each of these may have their own technical specifications that they're working within. As non standard ad formats like pause ads continue to be rolled out within the CTV ecosystem, fitting these formats into a standardized framework like Vast, AKA Video Ad Serving Template allows for more universal transaction of these formats in programmatic environments. To help move the entire industry toward a unified framework that enables scalable programmatic transaction of these formats, the IAB Tech Lab has launched an initiative called Ad Format Hero and expects to issue guidance in Q4 of this year. The pause ad represents a rare phenomenon in advertising. It's a format that both advertisers and consumers actually enjoy a unified response that's virtually non existent in the rest of the advertising world. Advertisers want CTV ad formats that give them the ability to create measurable user actions, whether that's scanning a QR code, visiting a website, shopping for products, or texting a phone number for a promo code. Pause ads provide this, but they also hold another benefit for advertisers. They offer extended visibility. 54% of viewers who pause content do so for one to five minutes, while 11% report pausing content for up to 15 minutes. On the consumer side, a Magna and DirecTV study found that two thirds of Millennials and Gen Z prefer pause ads over a frozen screen. And IAB data demonstrates that just over half of overall viewers take an action after viewing a pause ad. Personally, I love pause ads. I think they strike the right balance between a novel high value ad experience and consumer choice in a way that isn't found within other ad formats. And you'll never catch me advocating against making more unique opportunities available via programmatic pipes, whether that's ad formats, inventory selection, or data and measurement capabilities. However, I do worry that offering these ad formats in a programmatic capacity could enable a degree of carelessness when it comes to their actual execution. Pause ads are most brilliant when the message directly aligns to the context of the programming someone is watching. It makes the ad feel like it's part of an inside joke. But running these ads programmatically could have an unintended consequence in the form of generic creative messaging that plays well within any CTV content. Generally speaking, buyers usually only have so much control over and transparency into where their ads will show up, making that creative to content alignment difficult to achieve. I've already started to notice this shift in my own viewing experience. My pause ads have gone from that inside joke feel to generic messaging that I kind of glaze over. If I was purchasing pause ads programmatically, I'd make sure I could have control over the viewer experience, aligning content to creative messaging to maintain that relevance and unique contextualization that the format does so well. Switching gears a bit to Anthropic, who's begun piloting a new Chrome browser extension that allows its AI Claude to browse alongside users and assist them with tasks or take those tasks on entirely. Similar to other emerging AI agents, these browser based tools aim to support user actions and workflows, for example Researching family friendly travel spots, building out the itinerary for that trip, and even booking travel or activities the user has approved. Anthropic is taking a cautious approach to rolling out this browser extension with their blog post announcing its launch, emphasizing their prioritization of ensuring user safety and security. One major risk they're addressing is prompt injection attacks where malicious actors insert covert instructions into websites, emails or documents to manipulate the AI agents agent into performing unintended actions. For example, in an early test, Claude followed hidden instructions in a malicious email that told it to delete user emails due to security concerns without confirming with the user before it did so. To address this, Anthropic has introduced several safeguards. These include site level permissions, allowing users to control which websites Claude can access, and action permissions which require Claude to check in with users before engaging in high risk actions like publishing content, making purchases or sharing personal data. Claude is also automatically restricted from operating on sensitive categories like financial services, adult content and pirated material. Alongside these guardrails, Anthropic is also training Claude to detect suspicious behavior and unusual data requests. The pilot will initially be rolled out to 1,000 ClaudMax plan users, giving Anthropic a controlled environment to collect feedback from trusted users and refine both the product and its guardrails. A waitlist has also been opened for others who are interested in trying the extension Anthropics pilot is launching as several players race to secure their spot as an exclusive access point to the Internet and control the future of AI powered browsing. Perplexity has launched its own assistant enabled browser, Comet. Google continues to integrate Gemini into Chrome, and OpenAI is also reportedly working on an AI browser. Whoever can capture meaningful market share within the browser environment could carve out a strong position for themselves as a next gen advertising services provider for advertisers. Browser integration of these agents is another step toward upending the ways consumers and advertisers have traditionally engaged with the Internet, and they bring us one step closer to a world where AI to AI interactions must become a part of our media strategies. For now, it's nice to see Anthropic and Google to some extent taking a more measured approach to how these tools are rolled out, giving the general population and the advertising industry alike a bit more time to prepare rather than to just react. Finally, a quick update in the world of media quality. The ANA has just released their Programmatic Transparency benchmark report for Q2 of 2025 and the results are equal parts progress and setbacks. Getting the setbacks out of the way first, the report found that Programmatic Ad spend waste continues to increase, jumping up to $26.8 billion compared to 22 billion in early 2024. The waste is fueled by redundant or inefficient supply paths, low quality inventory like MFA, and insufficient ability to measure what's going on behind the scenes of programmatic transactions. The percent of programmatic ad spend going toward working media has also declined quarter over quarter in 2025. The ANA uses a metric called the True Ad Spend Index to measure this, with the percent of effective ad spend slipping from 41% in Q1 to 37% in Q2. Alright, let's round things out with some more positive news. Advertisers do appear to be taking steps towards ensuring more of their programmatic ad spend goes towards effective or working media. Private marketplace or PMP transactions accounted for 88% of transactions, a significant jump from 64.5%. And in another shift towards more effective media, programmatic CTV spending has increased from about 30% to 44% of ad spend. As for MFA spending, this has been steadily declining down to 0.8% in this most recent report, a massive improvement on the 15% of budgets that were being consumed by MFA in 2023. One thing the ANA is still struggling with is getting log level data from every participant in the study. Among the 39 participants in this most recent study, only 21 could provide full access to log level data, leaving blind spots in the ANA's understanding of exactly where every percent of programmatic AD spend is going. That's all we have time for this week. Thanks for joining us for the refresh and we'll catch you next week.