Google has announced measurement updates to help marketers strengthen their first-party data strategies, as well as gain more accurate and secure conversion measurements for iOS campaigns.

Complex consumer buying journeys have changed how marketers measure performance. So Google on Friday introduced four new ways that marketers can improve data strategies and app measurement, Kamal Janardhan, senior director of product management and ad measurement at Google, explains in a blog post.

There are four products in the bundled launch: Google tag gateway for advertisers, measurement and data source diagnostics, on-device conversion measurement using event data, and integrated conversion measurement.

Advertisers can use all four products in the bundled launch to collect more accurate and complete data, track conversions effectively across various platforms and touchpoints, make data-driven optimizations, and navigate the increasingly privacy-focused digital advertising landscape.

The goal is to lead to improved campaign performance and a better understanding of the customer journey. 

The integrated conversion measurement -- which uses event data and is probably one of the more important features introduced today -- began rolling out this month.

The measurement tool gives marketers real-time, comprehensive and accurate reporting of their Google App campaign performance directly in third-party App Attribution Partners’ (AAP) interfaces.

Advertisers have historically used alternative reports such as SKAN reporting or Google Ads Front End.

Many mobile marketers often work closely with app attribution partners (AAPs), so this solution provides more accurate and comprehensive cross-channel attribution directly in third-party AAP interfaces. It means a clearer picture of how App campaigns for installs are driving conversions across both iOS and Android devices, providing actionable insights to effectively optimize campaign performance and allocate budgets. 

Apple and Google have a complex relationship. Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS are two of a few dominant operating systems.

Google pays Apple billions of dollars annually to remain the default search engine on Safari and other Apple products, while they offer consumers cross-platform apps for products such as YouTube, Apple Music and more.

The two companies recently worked together to solve an old data conversion problem when sending text images and videos across mobile phones.

As another example, the two worked on unwanted Tracking Alerts. Apple and Google collaborated on an industry specification to address unwanted tracking with Bluetooth location trackers.

Apple on Thursday reported quarterly earnings slightly higher than analysts' expectations, lifted by stronger-than-expected revenue from its services business.

Total revenue rose 5% to $95.4 billion for the first quarter in 2025. Analysts’ consensus predicted around $94 billion.

iPhone sales were $46.8 billion, and services revenue brought in $26.6 billion, up from $23.9 billion a year ago.

Would you let an automated assistant shop for you?

The Visa Intelligent Commerce platform combines Visa’s established payment network with innovations from partnering tech companies to “bring trust and security to AI-driven commerce,” according to a release announcing the launch.

“Soon people will have AI agents browse, select, purchase and manage on their behalf. These agents will need to be trusted with payments, not only by users, but by banks and sellers as well,” Visa Chief Product and Strategy Officer Jack Forestell said in a statement.

 “Just like the shift from physical shopping to online, and from online to mobile, Visa is setting a new standard for a new era of commerce,” he added. “Now, with Visa Intelligent Commerce, AI agents can find, shop and buy for consumers based on their preselected preferences. Each consumer sets the limits, and Visa helps manage the rest.”

Visa believes that “millions” of consumers will soon turn to the use of such predictive large-language models to make purchases online. The company claims it will “remove friction” from the payment part of the process, “making it possible to transact in an AI-driven world in a way that is secure and trusted.”

Visa introduced Visa Intelligent Commerce with a product launch video celebrating the platform’s enabling AI to shop and buy, while reassuring consumers they remain in control. The video demonstrates a number of use cases for individuals and businesses, including being prompted to buy newly available tickets to a soccer match, and a florist receiving an alert about low inventory asking to place an order restocking peony buds.

According to Visa, the company has “more than 30 years of expertise” working with predictive large-language model and machine learning technology in service of “learning to manage risk and fraud to enable safe and secure payment experiences.” It claims the new platform, in partnership with tech companies in the space such as IBM, Microsoft, Mistral AI,  Samsung, and Stripe, will help “enable personalized, secure AI commerce on a global scale.”

Among the offerings Visa Intelligent Commerce is touting at launch are AI-Ready Cards, which replace card details online with tokenized digital credentials for simplified and secured payment processes and identity verification. AI-Powered Personalization, which Visa claims puts consumers in control, allows them to share basic spend and purchase insights to improve agent performance and personalize their shopping recommendations. Visa Intelligent Commerce also allows users to easily set spending limits and other conditions providing clear guidelines for transactions, with transactions shared in real-time with Visa so that the company can effect controls, and help manage any disputes.

When someone asked Willie Sutton why he robbed banks, he was famously quoted as saying, “Because that’s where the money is.” If he were alive today, Willie Sutton would probably work in the programmatic CTV advertising business.

Why would Willie Sutton pick CTV advertising? CTV advertising is where the money is. CTV ad spend in the U.S. is a $30+ billion annual market growing at more than 25% per year, operating on opaque, programmatic trading platforms built for commodity banner ads that neither support media effectiveness nor wholesomeness of transactions. And the platform gatekeepers show little care about policing either who sells on their platforms or what inventory they transact, as long as they, the gatekeepers, get a cut.

What they do support is unknown hordes of intermediaries, each taking their bites of the apple so that, all too often, the original buying and selling principals are left with not much more than over-gnawed cores.

CTV ads are attractive to fraudsters because of the 4-10X spread that CTV ads typically command relative to video ads delivered on the web, in social media, or in mobile apps. As the acronym suggests, CTV ads are supposed to be delivered on “connected TVs,” being viewed on a television or in a television-like viewing experience, dominating the screen, with the sound on by default, and have at least one known human watching them. These definitions conform to requirements by TV and CTV ad measurement and currency companies like Nielsen, ComScore, iSpotTV and VideoAmp.

Of course, with open programmatic platforms and with sellers allowed to “self-label” their inventory, it’s no surprise that the owners of tens of billions of impressions a month of video ads delivered to places like mobile phone flashlight apps, thumbnail web videos with sound off, and bot farms in Malaysia, routinely label their inferior wares as “CTV.” They pipe these impressions into demand-side platforms (DSPs) desperate for too-cheap-to-believe inventory to help willfully ignorant ad buyers bring down the average rates of their CTV ad buys.

Can this be stopped? Yes. We have to care, and there is an easy place to start: We must demand that DSPs adopt and adhere to the 2023 IAB Tech Lab Standard for video, and not label Outstream ads (accompanying video, sound off, below-fold, etc.) as Instream ads, where the video is dominant and the sound is on.

And we have to name and shame those who won’t do this. We need to ensure that the willful ignorance of too many in our business is no longer defensible.

What do you think? Will all the major DSPs adopt and enforce the industry standard for video ads, and force low-quality video ads out of the CTV ad ecosystem?

The post was previously published in an earlier edition of Media Insider.

Consumers will soon delegate online shopping tasks to agentic agents, moving brands into a new world of advertising and online commerce. Credit card and payment systems are working with AI experts to build the technology.

Visa and Mastercard are bringing the power of their respective networks, data, and security to drive AI commerce through agentic agents. Consumers will set spending limits and the AI agents will figure out the remainder of the transaction -- for example, searching for products, ordering groceries or booking vacations. 

The two companies, independently, this week announced initiatives. Visa Intelligent Commerce enables AI to find and buy, but the company said it also opens Visa’s payment network to the developers and engineers to build foundational AI agents that will change commerce.

Mastercard also announced Agent Pay, a program that also introduces Mastercard Agentic Tokens to secure cashless payments based on a secure card on file. This program will also connect with Mastercard Payment Passkeys and programmable payments such as recurring expenses and subscriptions.

Visa and Mastercard on Tuesday were joined by PayPal, which announced its own agentic commerce offering.

PayPal has released developer tools such as a remote Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, which acts as a bridge allowing AI tools to access and interact with external data sources security, and Agent Toolkit at its PayPal's Dev Days event. The company laid the groundwork for agentic commerce by bringing together developers, engineers, creators, and builders with companies like Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Google Cloud, Microsoft.

Its AI shopping companion is supported by Google Cloud and Google’s Agent to Agent (A2A) Protocol that allows merchants to integrate a Gemini-powered chat experiences with PayPal's commerce capabilities.

Amazon also earlier this month announced testing an AI shopping agent it calls Buy for Me.

Mastercard is working with Microsoft and other AI companies to give agentic AI agents the ability to shop online and make payments on behalf of consumers. But who owns the data in those chats related to the transactions -- and will it be used to target advertisements?

The company released first-quarter earnings Thursday topping expectations as consumers kept spent despite uncertain economic conditions. It reported $3.41 billion in adjusted net income for the first three months of 2025. I beleive this is the beginning as it begin to use Mastercard Agent Pay that integrates with agentic AI to deliver consumers a smarter, more secure and personalized payments experiences.

Mastercard also introduced Mastercard Agentic Tokens. The same type of tokenization capabilities that power global commerce such as mobile contactless payments, secure card-on-file, and Mastercard Payment Passkeys.

The technology will identify the request and purchase using Mastercard Agent Pay tokens to complete the transaction. The company provided the following example: A 30-year-old female can chat with an AI agent to curate a selection of outfits and accessories from local boutiques and online retailers based on her style, the venue’s ambience, and weather forecasts. Based on her preferences and feedback, the intelligent agent can make the purchase, and recommend the best way to pay, for example using Mastercard One Credential.

The technology will have the ability to identify and validate a customer using Mastercard’s tokenization technology. 

Mastercard also said small companies will have the ability to use AI agents to handle material sourcing, optimize payment terms and manage logistics with an international supplier. From there, the AI agent can complete the cross-border purchase using a Mastercard virtual corporate card token and arrange for cost-effective, expedited delivery.

MediaPost asked Mastercard whether a consumer's request will be stored, who owns the data, and whether it can be used to build an audience segment for targeting and retargeting ads based on specific preferences. The company did not respond. 

Linking agentic agents is not a common procedure, although it is gaining in popularity. Google and Salesforce are developing frameworks and protocols to enable agents from various vendors to interact with one another.

Calling it the "internet of agents," Forrester Research notes that interoperability will become key to using agentic AI for commerce. "Just as standardized protocols fueled the internet’s exponential growth, a shared framework is crucial to actualizing a globally interconnected agentic workforce," wrote Forrester Principal Analysts Leslie Joseph and Rowan Curran in a research note. 

Mastercard will work with Microsoft to integrate Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and Microsoft Copilot Studio, combining it with Mastercard’s payment technology.

Scuderia Ferrari HP redesigned its mobile app to bring nearly 400 million global fans closer to its cars, drivers and races. The app was created with support from IBM watsonx, an AI and data platform.

“My challenge is to take advantage of all the data coming from the track, the car, the weather conditions, and then to create compelling stories for our fans,” said Stefano Pallard, head of fan development at Ferrari.

The app, which became available in English and Italian on Thursday, creates a digital destination for fans worldwide. It delivers an immersive experience through content and data. IBM used all aspects around a race to train the AI model including results, interviews and recaps, as well as data from the car.

The model collects 10 telemetry data points off the car every second, as well as performance and conditions around the race.

Watsonx also supports the governance within the app and generates a summary to ensure that the brand does not compromise the drivers or brand.

Most is telemetry data or Ferrari-owned data sent to the engineering team, but it is often combined with data from the FIA. Then it is trained on the “language” that Scuderia Ferrari uses to talk about Formula 1 races like complex terminology and slang.

The data also gives fans the ability to visualize data through charts and graphs.

Fans can interact with and see post-race driver and car data such as telemetry, weather, track conditions, session results, and car and tire strategies.

Sports analytics have become important to fans. Historical driver and team data enables fans to compare key 2025 race moments and milestones on cars, drivers, and track moments. There is a place in the app for fans to write to Ferrari and drivers to share their experiences.

Some of the long-term projects on the company’s roadmap include 3-D immersive experiences, and a conversational chatbot. A membership program before the next session also is in development.

We need to have a conversation about AI in media planning.  More specifically, what will agencies be forced to do in the age of agentic media?

AI Agents are everywhere now.  Just watching TV last night, I saw three different companies advertising about the agents they are creating, and the concept of agents is quickly overtaking the media planning world.  Agentic media planning is approaching quickly, with agents now able to intake queries and prompts for audiences, flight dates and other basic buying parameters and activate them in a trading desk seat just as easily as any media buyer. Even more interesting, agents can be set up to recommend and even implement optimization across demand-side platforms, so the question quickly arises: What role does the agency team play when agents can do much of the work?

This is the general question facing the use of AI in the workforce: the fear that our jobs will be replaced.  I have written about this often, and I don’t believe that it's as existential a threat as the media makes it out to be, simply because humans are adaptable and we created this technology, so we need to view it as a tool. 

More simply stated, yes, the role of a media buyer may not exist in a few years, but that role can be repurposed to some other set of responsibilities in the organization.

One of the common gripes against agencies is that they tend to pitch with the best people and once the account is won, they replace them with lower-level people to do the execution work.  This leads to a cycle of agency reviews every few years.

In this new future, the best teams will still be there for strategic planning and guidance, but they will instead use a team of agents for implementation. These tools are standard and the teams managing those tools will be standardized as well, so you won’t be relying on less-experienced teams. 

I see the agentic workflow as a way for agencies to use their best talent more efficiently and supplement with technology, which means more consistency and better margins over time because they will need fewer people to execute. 

So, what happens to those people who were being hired out of school for execution?  My guess is they shift to more experiential activations, which I predict will continue to increase in value over the coming years. 

You cannot evaluate AI in a silo.  AI creates efficiency in media planning and execution.  AI is also going to overhaul digital media. I’ve been writing  the last few weeks that I see a future that revolves around video, generative search, mobile, social, DOOH and experiential media, with a clear decrease in display and traditional search.  Those lower-level, or entry-level people, will shift to more experiential and event-based marketing activations.  Agencies can charge more for those, too.  As a result, agencies are going to shift from a purely digital go-to-market strategy and will start to embrace the balance of digital and IRL once again. 

Needless to say, there is a LOT of change impending in the ad agency landscape. 

Where do you think agency services are headed in the next few years?

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Annie Foster has joined IPG Health as group director, social media creative. Foster will partner with the agency's engagement team to use social media to enhance brand campaigns.

Previously, she worked with Meta on brands such as Bobbi Brown and Roman. Before that, she also held creative director roles in healthcare advertising. 

Foster is charged with expanding IPG Health’s Influencer ID offering, which combines healthcare expertise and customer engagement strategy. The offering provides a tailored HIPAA compliant end-to-end solution for healthcare brands.

“Annie has a distinct background. She has a strong health and pharma base — having grown up in the pharma agency world — and then expanded her horizons at Meta. She knows what great looks like in social/influencer marketing across verticals and across agencies, not just in pharma,” said Dana Maiman, IPG Health CEO.

“Social — and by extension mobile — is a distinct medium. Building social advertising creative requires a deep understanding of its language — both visual and verbal. It’s not just about getting the specs right, it’s about building campaigns that connect authentically because they are well-suited both to the audience and the medium. Creatives at IPG Health understand this,” added Foster.

Taboola has extended its partnership with Samsung in a multiyear agreement to bring its News technology to more mobile devices and news channels worldwide.

The agreement, which helps to drive traffic to publisher pages, comes to more marketers across Europe and India. It is an extension of a longstanding relationship with one of the world's largest smartphone manufacturers.

Adam Singolda, CEO at Taboola, believes the extended partnership will give more of Samsung’s customers greater access to relevant and engaging news.

Taboola has powered news recommendations on Samsung devices in Latin America and some APAC countries since 2019. This major expansion of that partnership covers Europe and India in its entirety, in an exclusive relationship that supports tens of millions of new devices.

Taboola’s business continues to grow. This extended announcement with Samsung follows several others that have seen Taboola partnership pool grow, supported by some of the biggest companies in the world. The goal is to bring news recommendations to mobile device users.

Some recent expansions include partnerships with Apple and Microsoft. Taboola in March signed an agreement with Microsoft to sell display ads for MSN.com, Microsoft Outlook, Games, and Microsoft's broader Office Suite.

The company also extended its Gannett partnership that began in 2013 to include display advertising on publisher’s digital platforms through its new AI-powered offering, Realize.

Taboola also works with LINE, a large messaging app, to provide news to consumers, as well as Xiaomi, a big consumer electronics brand, to provide news to consumers on their devices.