Digiday Daily

July 08, 2026

Another forecast, another reminder that ad spend is running its own race, economy be damned.

This time it’s IAB Europe’s latest AdEx Benchmark Report, which clocked continental ad spend up 10.5% year over year to €131 billion — roughly the size of Morocco’s entire economy, according to the report’s author and IAB Europe chief economist, Daniel Knapp.

TOP STORY

Navigating Economic Instability

What’s really driving Europe’s €131 billion ad boom

Another forecast, another reminder that ad spend is running its own race, economy be damned.

OTHER THINGS TO KNOW

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When AI operates in a unified system, business gains aren’t theoretical. After implementing a single operational layer — which didn’t involve a better creative tool or smarter bidder — one travel advertiser saw incremental bookings rise 34%. Partner insights from Clinch.
Programmatic buying has long relied on a combination of identity-based and contextual signals to guide decisions, but the latter has often been applied more narrowly. Partner insights from Seedtag.

MEDIA & PLATFORMS

Strategizing for the Future

Criteo is subject to a takeover bid, further proving private equity’s continued interest in ad tech

Vista Equity and Quinti Capital place a 50% premium on stock, raising questions over where the PE firms see value.

Evolving Agencies

Advertising’s confidence problem, according to the man who used to price its stocks

Advertising’s inconvenient truth: the industry built a commodity and called it a strategy

PARTNER INSIGHTS FROM PATIENTPOINT

Case study: Programmatic strategies for health and wellness businesses

Between securing attention and earning trust, reaching audiences in the health and wellness space is challenging and often requires more to win them over. Download this case study to see how one healthcare company improved its strategies.

MARKETING

Brands in Culture

How Bandit Running is expanding internationally while staying hyperlocal

Bandit’s focus on core running communities has helped it grow enough to start expanding outward.

PARTNER INSIGHTS FROM TALON.ONE

WTF is agentic commerce?

In agentic commerce, AI agents manage the end-to-end shopping journey. “People are already using tools like Gemini for discovery. The next phases will bring the entire shopping flow into the AI assistant,” said Laurens Van Wiele, chief product officer at Talon.One.

PARTNER INSIGHTS FROM OPTABLE

The state of agentic advertising

From investment and readiness to barriers and impact, publishers, advertisers and agencies are all engaging with agentic advertising in their own ways — and to different degrees. Read this report to learn more.