New SMBs are increasingly recognizing the role technology plays in driving growth, with 91% of new business owners agreeing that technology has been essential to their success. That’s a according to Small Business Now, a new report from digital marketing platform Constant Contact. Findings from SMBs across the US, UK, Australia and Canada include:
· 72% of new SMBs plan to use AI for marketing in 2025, and 28% believe AI can help them overcome their biggest marketing obstacles.
· The most popular marketing use cases for AI include content creation and brainstorming (37%), customer data analysis (32%), and personalized messages (31%).
· 38% of new SMB owners plan to learn new marketing strategies and tools and 28% will use AI/automation to help them overcome expected challenges like customer acquisition, increasing sales, and working more efficiently.
· 41% of highly confident SMB owners are using AI to analyze customer data.

There will be a panel focused on SMBs at CTV Connect this Thursday. To join that discussion, go here.

Amazon Ads announced Complete TV, a new capability within Amazon DSP that uses AI-powered recommendations to allocate budgets across Prime Video and premium streaming publishers. Advertisers can input their streaming TV plan details and audience signals, and Complete TV leverages real-time insights to optimize delivery across linear and streaming channels. “Advertisers deserve easier ways to plan and manage their streaming TV spend,” said Kelly MacLean, Vice President of Amazon DSP. “Complete TV is a first-ever tool that automatically manages upfront commitments and scatter budgets, using real-time pacing insights and AI-powered capabilities to help advertisers reach high-value audiences, drive ROI, and eliminate media waste.”

At Microsoft’s Advertising Accelerate event, the company announced the first ad formats entirely designed with Copilot in mind. On the way are Microsoft Advertising Showroom ads, enabling users to explore what they are searching for in the digital space, like a physical showroom; dynamic filters that will remove the friction of typing additional questions and narrow down options that are more likely to drive conversions based on an individual’s preferences; and dynamic ad generation, using query signals to dynamically create ads in Dynamic Search ads (DSA).

Advertising automation platform Basis Technologies introduced an integration with content data marketplace IRIS.TV to enable contextual targeting for programmatic advertising on CTV. “Although CTV viewership has grown tremendously, fragmentation and the lack of content transparency has prevented publishers from maximizing yield and marketers from capturing value at scale,” said Richie Hyden, President and COO of IRIS.TV. “With access to IRIS-enabled data, Basis customers can take action from sight, sound, and motion data to ensure truly relevant ads and a better viewing experience for consumers.”

Insight TV and Edge Video AI announced the launch of the Shoppable TV Web Store, starting with INTRAVEL channel in the UK. Shoppable TV is now live, launching with QVC as its first retail partner.

AI-powered technology company Clinch unveiled two creative solutions within its Flight Control platform: Dynamic Fonts and Automated and Dynamic Video Subtitles. “At Clinch, we understand the challenges multinational brands face when scaling creative content for global audiences,” said Ram Alon, VP of Product at Clinch. “These new features directly address those pain points, providing our clients with the tools they need to break down language barriers and maximize the impact of their campaigns.”

Simpli.fi has a new YouTube TV solution aimed at enhancing advertisers’ ability to deliver omnichannel campaigns by incorporating YouTube TV’s content into their broader programmatic solutions. “Our goal is to provide advertisers with a single partner for their omnichannel and programmatic campaigns,” said Simpli.fi co-founder and CEO Frost Prioleau. “With this offering, advertisers have access to Simpli.fi’s proprietary unstructured data targeting, the ability to run Google search and paid social campaigns, and they can now serve ads across YouTube and YouTube TV, all in one place.”

“Video media planning is hurtling toward a CTV-first paradigm, in which traditional linear is no longer the cornerstone of reach and brand building,” concludes the report. “This new paradigm allows advertisers to achieve greater reach, less out-of-target delivery, and less excessive frequency than the legacy linear-first approach.”

Viant Technology has acquired Lockr, the first-party data collaboration platform built to enable content owners to collect, enrich, and activate first-party data. Keith Petri will continue to lead Lockr as its CEO. “Addressability is the future of advertising and Viant’s acquisition of Lockr is expected to accelerate its arrival across the programmatic ecosystem,” said Tim Vanderhook, CEO of Viant Technology. “Similar to IRIS_ID, we plan to make Lockr’s solutions open to the entire ecosystem including other alternative identifiers, as Viant is committed to helping the broader open internet succeed.”

Hearst Networks EMEA has partnered with Synamedia for cloud distribution of its linear channels, including The HISTORY Channel. Hearst Networks will use Synamedia SaaS-based Quortex PowerVu as a fully managed service.