• Styles now has 13.7 million subscribers on YouTube—up from 11.9 million in March, according to influencer marketing platform CreatorIQ, which keeps track of these things—and he’s racked up cumulative YouTube views of 4.7 billion as of this writing.
• In May alone, when “Harry’s House” dropped, Styles’ YouTube channel racked up 230 million views, per CreatorIQ.
• Styles now has 47.6 million followers on Instagram—a net gain of 3.2 million since March, per CreatorIQ.

Starz has also signed an agreement with Sony that allows the former to air Sony’s popular films like Venom and Spider-Man: No Way Home and many others on its platform. It recently launched a deal with VIZIO in the United States, making Starz available to millions of VIZIO Smart TV users.

Every weekday we bring you the Ad Age/iSpot Hot Spots, new commercials tracked by iSpot.tv, the always-on TV ad measurement and attribution company. (Scroll down to watch them all.)

A few highlights: Kim Kardashian hypes the launch of a “brand-new system of bra solutions” from Skims, her shapewear/clothing brand. The Maytag Man (Colin Ferguson) promotes the Pet Pro Washer, a washing machine designed to remove pet hair from laundry. And Kohl’s says, “Get ready for fall—and falling prices” during its Friends & Family Sale, now through Oct. 2.

TV networks have long expressed ambivalence about Nielsen’s work — what student loves the teacher grading their homework? — but their tone in past years has evolved into one of frustration. The networks, some of Nielsen’s top clients, have encouraged advertisers to consider new audience measures provided by upstarts and rivals such as ComScore, iSpot and VideoAmp. NBCUniversal, Paramount Global and Warner Bros. Discovery are among the traditional media companies that have offered new measurement system to those advertisers and media buyers willing to consider an alternative.

B+C has partnered with always-on TV ad measurement and attribution company iSpot.tv to bring you a weekly chart we call Promo Mojo: exclusive data showing TV’s most-promoted programming ranked by ad impressions. Our data covers the seven-day period through September 25.

Notably, Celebrity Jeopardy! scores the week’s highest iSpot Attention Index (112), meaning viewers were on average highly likely to watch its promos all the way through (vs. interrupting viewing by changing the channel, pulling up the guide, fast-forwarding or turning off the TV).

Via iSpot.tv, the always-on TV ad measurement and attribution company. Rankings are by TV ad impressions, for new episodes only.

The NFL takes the No. 1 spot in our ranking for the third week in a row, as live games delivered nearly 13.7% of TV ad impressions. That’s down from the previous week, when it accounted for 15.7% (though overlapping Monday Night Football contests ultimately cut into TV ad impressions for both, while also removing a Sunday game from the slate).

Notably, Celebrity Jeopardy! scores the week’s highest iSpot Attention Index (112), meaning viewers were on average highly likely to watch its promos all the way through (vs. interrupting viewing by changing the channel, pulling up the guide, fast-forwarding or turning off the TV).

Through the first two weeks of the season, FanDuel is the second-most seen brand with 2.46% ad impressions, according to iSpot.TV. That is behind only insurance giant Geico with 3.01%.

“FanDuel rising to the top this year could be adjustments coming out of a big last year for sports betting brands overall,” said John Cassillo, an analyst with TVREV. “So while some may be pulling back, others could see the early weeks of the NFL season as their best chance to attract potential bettors for the rest of the fall.”

To that end, iSpot data shows 19.0 billion in TV ad impressions and $354.3 million in est. national TV ad spend during last year’s playoffs — or 760 million ad impressions and $14.2 million in spend per game. Extrapolated out for the maximum number of games this year (the aforementioned 53), that’s 40.28 billion TV ad impressions and $752.6 million in spend. The added reach for brands and ad revenue for networks is why despite an effective sample size of 162 regular season games already, MLB still wants more games to crown its champion.

Some of the adtech that allows you to capture user data is thwarted by incognito browsers, security plugins and so on. About 26% of internet users blocked ads in 2019 and that percentage continues to grow. Cheetah Digital reports a 50% year-over-year increase in the use of incognito mode.

In addition to Lux Capital, Correlation Ventures, Climate Capital and Gokul Rajaram, other investors participating in the seed round include D4 Ventures, Esas Ventures, Paragon Ventures and 23 Fund. Individual investors include Commencis’ Firat and Fatih Isbecer, Livspace’s Ramakant Sharma, Tubular Labs’ Rob Gabel and additional executives and investors from Amazon, Apple, DoorDash, Goldman Sachs, Silverlake and SoftBank.

TV set manufacturers' automatic content recognition (ACR) data, from Samsung, LG, Vizio, for example, are in the sights of TV advertisers and media agency pros. And Adam Gerber, executive director, U.S. investment strategy at GroupM, wants changes.

Samsung Ads: 42 million opted-in devices; Vizio, 19 million smart TV opted-in devices; and LG Ads Solutions, 20 million smart TV addressable U.S. homes. A rough potential of 81 million smart TV homes/devices in the making. That would be a good start.

Every weekday we bring you the Ad Age/iSpot Hot Spots, new commercials tracked by iSpot.tv, the always-on TV ad measurement and attribution company. (Scroll down to watch them all.)

A few highlights: Apple hypes various features of iPhone 14 Pro, including 4K Cinematic Mode, in a spot that shows a filmmaker using it to shoot chase scenes. LeBron James stars alongside “Lily” (Milana Vayntrub) in the latest from AT&T. And Verizon tells the story of Christopher, a student enrolled in the Verizon Innovative Learning program.

And what a surge it was. iSpot ran the numbers for Endpoints News and found a massive jump in advertising that mentioned or directly addressed Covid-19. In the first quarter of 2020, Covid-related ads accounted for just $106 million in TV ads pending — remember Covid-19 was just beginning then and only labeled a pandemic by the World Health Organization on March 11.

However, that rocketed to a whopping $2.13 billion for the next three months. Covid-related advertising tallied another $1.2 billion in the third quarter and $1.62 billion for the last three months of 2020.

This week, iSpot shared data with Endpoints detailing how TV ad impressions and national TV ad spend around COVID themes have dipped considerably since the start of the pandemic — from a high of 389 billion in Q2 2020 to just 23 billion so far this quarter. But additionally, data shows how creatives shifted from being driven by retailers and restaurants to a pharma emphasis in Q3 2022. Further:

Tim Glomb, VP of Content and Data at Cheetah Digital and Chris Muscutt, Head of MarTech at PepsiCo, recently discussed their take on the use of zero- and first-party data and technology to power effective strategies.
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To remain competitive in today’s signal-saturated world, brands need to deliver relevant, personalized content throughout the customer journey. According to a new e-Consultancy report, in partnership with Cheetah Digital, entitled ‘2022 Digital Consumer Trends Index: Consumer Attitudes and Trends in Personalization, Privacy, Messaging, Advertising and Brand Loyalty’, consumers are rewarding brands that make personalization a priority. In fact, more than half of the respondents shared that they would trade personal and preference data to feel part of a brand’s community.

The aim is to measure the change over the period on such metrics as reach, awareness, brand affinity, purchase intent and sales, as well as the change in velocity of these measures, which can inform future growth predictions. Depending on audience targeting strategies, it can also provide important insights into target customer segments.


While we might not always measure brand lift directionally, we always want our KPIs to improve. Improvement equals growth (or as we call it “lift”). So whether they’re conscious of it or not, most brand marketers are always chasing brand lift.

Among the 74% of U.S. TV households who own a smart TV, 88% of them use the native TVOS in that device to stream video.

And according to Hub Entertainment Research, among that latter group, 56% use Samsung's Tizen OS.

Roku (44%) ranks second, followed by LG's webOS (38%), Amazon Fire TV (29%), Android TV (28%) and Vizio SmartCast (21%).

Citing iSpot.TV data, Bloomberg reports beer marketers spent $60 million on TV ads in the last two weeks, with 70% of that going to NFL programming.

One of the benefits of CTV for political advertising is the ability to more narrowly target, including based on interest, as described in a recent report by TVREV analysts on political ads in the streaming CTV space. Written by TVREV co-founder and lead analyst Alan Wolk, the report noted that if the goal is to reach a voter on cable with more left-leaning views, the best option for linear is “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC and then work to find other shows that index high against that program’s viewers or viewers in a specific demo.

“Either way, you are going to get a lot of waste,” TVREV states. “On streaming, however, you can reach viewers who frequently watch Maddow by running ads on others shows they watch.”