Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, for one, is looking forward to Donald Trump’s second ascension to the presidency. “I’m actually very optimistic this time around,” said Bezos at the NY Times’ Dealbook Summit on Wednesday. “He seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation. If I can help him do that, I’m gonna help him.”

At its AWD re-Invent conference last week, Amazon introduced Amazon Nova, a new generation of foundation models that include fast text-to-text model Amazon Nova Micro; Amazon Nova Lite, Pro and Premier, multimodal models that can process text, images and videos to generate text; Amazon Nova Canvas, which generates studio-quality images; and Amazon Nova Reel which generates studio-quality videos. “Inside Amazon, we have about 1,000 generative AI applications in motion, and we’ve had a bird’s-eye view of what application builders are still grappling with,” said Rohit Prasad, SVP of Amazon Artificial General Intelligence. “Our new Amazon Nova models are intended to help with these challenges for internal and external builders, and provide compelling intelligence and content generation while also delivering meaningful progress on latency, cost-effectiveness, customization, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and agentic capabilities.”

A federal appeals court on Friday upheld the sell-or-ban law that calls for TikTok to shed its Chinese ownership. “The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States,” wrote Judge Douglas Ginsburg for the court. “Here the Government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States.” TikTok has until January 19 to be sold off from its Beijing-based owner ByteDance, or face a nationwide ban, a deadline may be extended by 90 days if there is “significant progress” toward a sale. However, President elect Donald Trump has said he will save TikTok, which could mean brokering a sale, or instruct his attorney general not to enforce the law.

Teads is expanding its partnership with smart TV operating system VIDAA. Under the agreement, Teads maintains exclusive access to VIDAA’s on-screen placement for native CTV home screen ads.

Almost half of advertisers now ‘”completely” or “mostly” trust AI ad tech to make decisions for their campaigns without human oversight, up from one in four last year. That’s according to Advertiser Perceptions’ second annual Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning in Advertising report. Key findings include:
· The use of AI technologies for advertising purposes is significantly up from 2023. Among the sample of advertisers who were at least familiar with AI or machine learning, 68% report currently using AI for advertising, up from 56% in 2023.
· Three in five advertisers using generative AI chatbots are using them to generate content, ahead of the share generating ad copy. Half of advertisers are using text-based gen AI for ideation and strategy, including for audience segments, general marketing plans, and campaign results and optimizations.
· Advertisers are most likely to measure the ROI of AI based on lift over a non-AI benchmark, whether in performance, awareness, or engagement.
· There’s been a shift in the importance of expanding knowledge of AI within companies. Learning more about AI is now “very important” to almost 2 in 3 advertisers, up from almost half a year ago.
· Last year, it was rare for advertisers who aren’t already using generative AI or performance optimization tools to say they completely or mostly trust AI ad tech to make investment and optimization decisions. Now, even those not using gen AI tools tend to trust AI ad tech to make decisions without human oversight.

Marketing intelligence platform MediaRadar announced the launch of its AI Outreach Writer tool. The Generative AI solution was designed to help media sellers and marketers create effective, personalized outreach with their publisher and platform clients by providing data-driven insights previously unavailable in the media industry.

Addressable infrastructure 33Across announced an expansion of its partnership with PubMatic to incorporate Lexicon’s addressability capabilities. With the integration with PubMatic Connect, buyers now target cookieless audiences across more than 500 unique audience segments. “Expanding our supply-side audience partnership with PubMatic to include Lexicon capabilities is a pivotal move in helping marketers connect with users across all browsers,” said Paul Bell, President of 33Across. “By integrating cookieless addressability into PubMatic Connect, we’re empowering clients to expand their reach while prioritizing user privacy.”

Kargo announced a partnership with TVision aimed at helping advertisers to better understand audience engagement on CTV. “Kargo’s new partnership with TVision allows us to offer our clients unparalleled insights into how viewers engage with CTV content, ensuring that each impression counts and that brands can connect with viewers in a more intentional and effective way,” said Kargo COO Michael Shaughnessy.

Clear Channel Outdoor’s Airports Division announced that through a five-year contract renewal with Signature Aviation, it will continue with advertising programs across more than 100 private aviation terminals in the US. As a strategic advertising partner to Signature Aviation, CCO will expand its network of digital media assets, which will be available for to interact with air travelers.