Good morning {{first_name|friends}},

The last two weeks of December are when most marketers mentally check out—and honestly, same. But while you're debating whether to blow your remaining budget on that "experimental" influencer campaign or just roll it into Q1, the deal-makers aren't slowing down. Broadsign just swallowed Place Exchange to own the programmatic OOH stack, and in a plot twist nobody saw coming, direct mail is having its revenge arc.

While everyone's racing to automate everything with AI, the channels that are working are increasingly physical. Broadsign is consolidating OOH infrastructure. DoubleVerify is helping you avoid AI-generated garbage. Codazen is making emails feel like video games. And yet, the stat of the week? 80% of brands are increasing direct mail spend. The winners in 2026 won't be the companies that went all-in on one approach—they'll be the ones who figured out how to make digital infrastructure and physical channels work together. The future is omnichannel—for real this time.

The out-of-home ad market just got a major consolidation play. Broadsign, the OOH ad-tech provider, has acquired Place Exchange, an independent supply-side platform, with backing from Crestline Investors. The deal combines Broadsign's content management, ad serving, and buy-sell capabilities with Place Exchange's SSP solutions—creating an end-to-end programmatic OOH stack. For Broadsign publishers, it means access to new demand sources. For Place Exchange's DSP partners, it means premium international inventory. For everyone else watching the DOOH space, it's a clear signal: the fragmented billboard market is consolidating fast.

(Via AV Network)

Plot twist: the most analog channel in your mix might be your best performer in 2025.

A new Winterberry Group white paper shows that 80% of U.S. brands plan to increase direct mail spending next year. The driver? It's not nostalgia—it's data. Brands are using digital media retargeting, third-party tech integration, and QR codes to finally make direct mail measurable. When 29% of brands cite "better data" as the primary reason they're investing more in physical mail, you know the attribution wars have officially gone omnichannel.

(Via Quad)

Here's what nobody tells you about building AI-powered marketing: garbage data in, garbage insights out. Your models are only as good as the behavioral data feeding them—and if you're still stitching together three different analytics tools with duct tape and prayers, your "AI strategy" is built on sand.

PostHog is the open-source product analytics platform that gives you session recordings, feature flags, A/B testing, and user analytics in one stack. No more switching between tabs. No more reconciling conflicting numbers. No more explaining to your CFO why the dashboard says something different than reality.

The best part? It's open source, so you actually own your data. Novel concept, I know.

👉 Get your analytics house in order →

The MFA problem just got an AI upgrade—and not in a good way.

DoubleVerify unveiled a new solution designed to help advertisers identify and avoid low-quality AI-generated content across the programmatic ecosystem. As generative AI makes it trivially easy to spin up content farms, brand safety is becoming less about avoiding controversial topics and more about avoiding meaningless ones. If your ads are running next to AI-generated listicles that no human will ever read, you're not buying reach—you're buying noise.

(Via MarTech.org)

Your inbox is about to feel like a video game. Codazen, in partnership with Meta Reality Labs, launched what they're calling the first immersive email campaign—transforming standard 2D emails into interactive 3D experiences.

The technology works across devices and doesn't require any special apps. It's part Black Mirror, part "finally, something interesting in email." Whether this becomes the future of email or a gimmick that dies in six months depends entirely on whether consumers actually engage—but the early experiments are turning heads.

(Via ClickZ MarTech)

Here's an uncomfortable truth: most marketing data isn't ready for the AI moment.

Marketing Evolution has secured funding specifically to build AI-ready MarTech data infrastructure—addressing the fragmented, unreliable data systems that make enterprise AI projects fail before they start. The pitch is simple: you can buy all the AI tools you want, but if your data pipes are broken, you're just automating garbage. For CMOs who've been burned by AI pilots that "didn't scale," this might be the unsexy-but-critical layer you've been missing.

(Via MarTech Edge)

Pharma and healthcare advertisers just got a serious upgrade. Nexxen has expanded its health advertising suite with real-time measurement and optimization capabilities built directly into its demand-side platform. In an industry notorious for compliance complexity and delayed reporting, the ability to see campaign performance in real-time—and actually act on it—is a game-changer. For health marketers used to waiting weeks for performance data, this is the "finally" moment you've been waiting for.

(Via MarTech360)

Enterprise video just got conversational. Idomoo has partnered with Amazon Web Services to integrate its Lucas AI Video Creator directly into Amazon Q Business, allowing enterprises to generate personalized, brand-consistent videos at scale using AWS's security and compliance infrastructure.

For B2B marketers who've been told "we need more video content" but don't have the budget for a production team, this is the democratization play you've been waiting for. The question now isn't "can we afford video?"—it's "how fast can we ship it?"

(Via Marketing Tech Insights)