Locality, the leading local TV advertising platform connecting brands to local audiences across broadcast and streaming, announced the appointment of Steve Fish and Adam Quinn as vice presidents of sales to support the continued expansion of its national go-to-market strategy for Collective, Locality’s data‑driven broadcast solution that enables national advertisers to plan and activate local television inventory at scale.

Collective gives national advertisers a unified, audience-based way to access and activate local broadcast with the ability to extend campaigns into streaming for incremental reach.

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Fish and Quinn bring deep expertise in data-driven advertising and national sales leadership. They will play a critical role in scaling adoption of Locality’s Collective solution among national advertisers and agencies. Their appointments reflect Locality’s focus on making audience-based buying across local television easier to plan, activate, and measure at national scale, particularly as Upfront dynamics continue to shift.

“Local television is one of the most powerful advertising platforms, and also one of the most complex to execute at scale,” said Michael Collins, CEO of Locality. “As demand grows for more efficient, data-driven ways to reach audiences wherever they’re watching content, we’re investing in the people and infrastructure required to simplify that process. Steve and Adam bring the experience and leadership to help more advertisers unlock the full value of local television.”

Together, Fish and Quinn bring decades of combined experience in the advertising industry. Fish’s background includes roles at ITN Networks, DirecTV Ad Sales, and most recently Ampersand, while Quinn’s spans ESPN, National Geographic Partners, and most recently Simulmedia. With deep expertise in national sales and advanced advertising solutions, they will focus on accelerating adoption of Collective among national advertisers and agencies, working in close partnership with Brian Morse, vice president and head of Collective, to scale the solution across the market.

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Their appointments come at a pivotal moment as Upfront negotiations evolve within an increasingly converged TV landscape. As buying shifts toward audience-first planning, advertisers are seeking more coordinated ways to execute across markets and channels. Bringing data and flexibility into broadcast buying allows local markets to play an intentional, integrated role within national upfront strategies. This approach supports more effective delivery in underserved markets and expands access to high-demand inventory, including live sports and tentpole events, even as national supply becomes constrained.

This investment in go-to-market leadership builds on a series of recent innovations from Locality designed to modernize how audiences are reached across local broadcast and streaming. Recent announcements include the acquisition of Deben, advancements in audience and planning capabilities, new measurement solution with Nielsen, and the appointment of a new CTO. Together, these efforts reinforce Locality’s commitment to making local TV easier to buy, improving measurement consistency, and aligning how audiences watch today.

By eliminating silos across channels, the integration enables advertisers to better connect, measure, and optimize full-funnel campaigns

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Hi Jana, take us through your time in martech and your role at Cognitiv?

I’ve spent more than two decades at the forefront of advertising innovation. First helping lead the adoption of programmatic across EMEA during its early emergence, launching programmatic at Spotify, to now helping marketers access AI-driven solutions to scale growth. I joined Cognitiv 8 years ago, at the time we were an early player in the deep learning space, with fewer than 10 employees. Joining a start-up is always a gamble, but I felt confident in the technology and the founding team and saw it as a rare opportunity to learn about AI.

Today as SVP of Partnerships, I focus on redefining how brands and media companies leverage deep learning AI to drive performance. In a media landscape that’s more complex than ever, that means building strategic partnerships that help publishers unlock new revenue streams while enabling brands to engage consumers in more meaningful, data-driven ways. I have developed strategic partnerships with major SSPs and DSPs to bring the industry’s most advanced AI-driven curation to media buyers.

We’d love to learn more about your new enhancement, AudienceGPT. Why should marketers pay attention to it?

AudienceGPT is a fundamental shift from reactive audience targeting to predictive, intelligence-driven marketing.

Traditionally, audience segmentation was manual, time consuming, static, and relied on outdated signals like clicks or page visits that didn’t tell you much about the actual stage of the journey a consumer was in.

AudienceGPT solves this by using Cognitiv’s deep learning advertising platform to develop synthetic consumer journey profiles that can then be found programmatically. The result is a more adaptive, predictive approach to audience strategy that aligns media delivery with true consumer intent. Audiences can be activated across web, CTV, social, and audio, meeting advertisers where they are.

Modern marketers manage different types of data and workflows today. What top best practices come to mind for those looking to optimize how they clean and use data to power better outcomes and customer journeys?

During my time at Cognitiv, I’ve evaluated probably 100 data providers across contextual, attention, measurement, and audience segments, so I’ve seen a wide range in data quality and approaches.

A few best practices really stand out. First is understanding the origin of the data, whether it’s deterministic or modeled. Deterministic data, especially in its raw form, tends to be more reliable and transparent, whereas modeled data can introduce assumptions that aren’t always clear or consistent.

Second is freshness and relevance. Marketers often overlook how frequently data is refreshed. An audience labeled as a “travel intender,” for example, is only as valuable as the recency and signal behind that classification. You have to ask: what behaviors actually qualified this user, and how recent were they?

Finally, validation is critical. At Cognitiv, we’re fortunate to test data directly by running it through our models offline to see whether it actually improves predictive accuracy. That kind of rigorous testing helps separate data that sounds good in theory from data that truly drives performance.

Ultimately, the best outcomes come from combining transparency, recency, and real-world validation, rather than relying on labels or assumptions alone.

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What’s the most exciting thing about how AI is leading to a shift in marketing processes and standards as well as a shift within marketing teams in terms of how teams are structured today?

AI is reshaping marketing in a way that feels very similar to the early days of programmatic, but at a much faster pace.

From a team perspective, the traditional silos between media, data, and analytics are starting to break down. We’re seeing hybrid roles emerge, people who understand both the strategic and technical sides of marketing, and are usually proficient in deploying and working with AI.

From a process standpoint, there’s a tendency to think about AI primarily as workflow automation. And while it can help with that, the bigger opportunity lies in real-time prediction and decisioning. That’s where the biggest performance gains will come from.

Five thoughts on the future of AI and martech?

1. Audience targeting shifts towards moments of intent: The combination of contextual signals, real-time behavior, and understanding of content will outperform audience segments. This goes beyond assigning someone to a segment, to predicting their likelihood to act in that moment based on live inputs.

2. Data quality becomes the true differentiator: The future will be built on better data—deterministic where possible, transparent in methodology, and validated against outcomes.

3. AI shifts from automation to intelligence: Today, AI in marketing is primarily focused on automating execution, not redefining strategy. The next phase will move beyond efficiency gains to deliver real intelligence—powering better decisions rather than just optimizing the manual levers we’ve relied on.

4. Personalization will scale without manual effort: AI will enable truly individualized experiences without the operational complexity that used to limit scale.

5. CTV Moves from awareness to performance: CTV is a great channel for reach and scale but we’ll increasingly see it used as a medium to drive performance. The ones who win in CTV will go beyond content targeting.

Some top martech innovations and martech innovators that you’d like to shout out to in this conversation?

Two martech innovators I want to shout out are Magnite and Index Exchange – specifically Paul Zovighian, VP, Marketplaces at Index Exchange, and Zach Pucci Global, Enterprise Sales at Magnite. Both are helping push real-time curation forward in a way that’s shifting intelligence to the sell side and accelerating innovation across the ecosystem.

Real-time curation turns live data signals into actionable inputs for AI, allowing for accurate, real-time predictions. This drives improved performance for buyers in the moment, not after the fact.

Cognitiv is a leading advanced performance partner powered by deep learning. Leveraging cutting-edge AI technology and data science since 2015 to more accurately predict consumer behavior and understand nuance, Cognitiv connects brands with their customers in more precise, relevant, impactful moments at scale. Cognitiv’s Deep Learning Advertising Platform provides marketers with unprecedented flexibility, activating as a Dynamic Deal run through the DSP of your choice, as a managed service DSP, or through its industry-first ContextGPT product. Cognitiv is on a mission to bring intelligence to advertising.

About Jana Jakovljevic

Jana, SVP of Partnerships at Cognitiv, brings two decades of experience driving innovation across the advertising industry. Before joining Cognitiv, Jana was the Global Head of Programmatic Solutions at Spotify, where she successfully launched the company’s programmatic arm and pioneered the first Private Marketplace (PMP) for audio ads. At Magnite (formerly Rubicon Project), Jana held various management positions, building out international buy-side partnerships and playing a foundational role in the company’s journey from start-up to IPO. Known for landing at companies that are at the forefront of the media landscape, Jana is now focused on leveraging AI to propel the ad industry forward. Her dedication to disruption and passion for constant improvement make her a key agent of change, unafraid to break the status quo in the name of innovation.

Brands can now advertise on premium Comcast Linear TV inventory alongside streaming through Universal Ads for the first time

TV agency Marketing Architects announces a new media-buying capability that automatically directs media dollars toward TV placements with the highest concentration of a brand’s target audience.

Clinch, the operating system for autonomous advertising, and OpenGlass, the first SSP built for advanced CTV advertising, announced that Clinch’s ad-serving tags have been certified to run within OpenGlass’s Advanced CTV Formats, beginning with pause ads, across publishers like Paramount, Tubi, TiVo, DirecTV, Sling/Dish, Philo, Xumo, and Plex. The certification gives advertisers a single operational path to deliver personalized, data-driven creative via one of streaming’s highest-attention formats.

“Advanced CTV experiences, specifically pause ads, already deliver some of the strongest performance numbers in CTV. What’s been missing is the ability to optimize and personalize these unique creative with a single platform, in real time, at the publisher-agnostic scale buyers need,” said Jason Higgins, Co-Founder of OpenGlass. “Pairing our programmatic enablement with Clinch’s creative serving capabilities closes that gap.”

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The average dwell times for Pause ads exceeds two minutes, a duration virtually unmatched in any other digital ad format. Since its recent inception, the Pause Ad format has historically been contracted publisher-by-publisher, each requiring their own managed media buy, creative builds and campaign set-up process. That fragmentation made creative personalization operationally impractical at scale. Clinch’s certification with OpenGlass collapses that fragmentation into a single tag running across a single deal across their entire publisher network. With creative versioning, ad serving, and optimization managed through Clinch’s Flight Control platform.

“The pause moment is one of the most valuable ad opportunities in CTV. The screen belongs entirely to the brand, and the dwell time creates an environment where relevance compounds,” said Charel MacIntosh, Global Head of Business Development and Strategic Partnerships at Clinch. “By pairing Clinch’s dynamic creative and personalization capabilities with OpenGlass’s pause ad inventory, we’re giving advertisers the ability to make every one of those seconds count with a message tailored to the household, the moment, and the context.”

The timing reflects a broader shift in how CTV is bought and measured. According to a February 2026 study from TiVo Ads and Convergent TV World, 40% of industry professionals now deploy CTV across the full marketing funnel, and 46% rank sales or conversions as a primary CTV outcome. The same research found 32% of CTV buyers are actively prioritizing less interruptive formats, including pause ads and home screen placements, while 36% cite measurement as the top barrier to non-standard CTV investment.

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OpenGlass’s pause ad inventory has already demonstrated strong baseline performance, delivering a 79% lower cost per store visit for Ulta Beauty relative to other streaming TV partners, and a 276% lift in QR code scans for Zales compared to prior campaigns. The Clinch integration adds real-time personalization and cross-device attribution on top of that baseline.

Through the certification, advertisers can serve pause ad creatives that adapt in real time based on location, weather, time of day, audience segments, product availability, pricing, and behavioral signals. Clinch’s CTV attribution links pause ad exposure to downstream actions on secondary devices, including QR code scans, site visits, and purchases, giving buyers closed-loop measurement of the format for the first time. Flight Control’s reporting surfaces which creative elements and personalization strategies drive the strongest outcomes, enabling continuous optimization throughout the flight.

Campaigns are activated programmatically through PMP/Deal IDs within the advertiser’s existing DSP, with full buyer control. Deal IDs can be provisioned within 24 hours.

Clinch’s dynamic creative personalization for OpenGlass pause ads is available immediately, with support for Home Screen and Livestream Overlay slated for a future release. Campaigns can be activated through OpenGlass Deal IDs on the advertiser’s partnering DSP, or directly through the OpenGlass platform.

Agencies granted no-cost access to ChatEDO’s investment-grade TV data — equipping brands with greater competitive and historical insights before an unpredictable Upfront season

OpenX, The Intelligent SSP, announced the appointment of Lior Charka as VP, Product, alongside the promotions of Joseph Worswick to SVP, Global Partnerships, and Erika Loberg to VP, CTV and Curation. These leadership updates reflect OpenX’s continued investment in simplifying advertising by bringing greater intelligence to the supply side.

To deliver on this strategy, OpenX is strengthening its leadership across partnerships, CTV, and product to reduce ecosystem complexity, making it easier for brands to find and reach their audiences without sacrificing user privacy or performance.

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Joining OpenX as VP, Product, Charka will lead the continued innovation of OpenXSelect, with a focus on simplifying complex curation workflows through AI. By building intelligence into every stage of the curation process, OpenX aims to help customers achieve higher quality and performance while reducing the effort required to activate and optimize campaigns. Charka joins OpenX with more than 15 years of experience in digital advertising and product leadership, including key roles at Outbrain and Teads.

“Lior brings a deep understanding of product innovation and a strong track record of building solutions that drive real business outcomes,” said Joel Meyer, CTO at OpenX. “As curation becomes increasingly central to programmatic performance, his expertise in building intelligence into the curation process will simplify access to high-quality media and data to drive performance.”

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In his expanded role as SVP, Global Partnerships, Worswick will lead OpenX’s global partnerships strategy across agencies, brands, and strategic partners, including data providers, AI-driven companies, and retail and commerce media platforms. Since joining OpenX in 2023, Worswick has been instrumental in building OpenX’s global SPO and commercial agreements practice and will now focus on unifying partnership efforts across the business to accelerate collaboration, break down silos, and drive stronger outcomes across all sides of the ecosystem.

Loberg, who has been promoted to VP, CTV and Curation, will build on her success scaling OpenX’s CTV business to lead the company’s broader curation strategy across all formats. Under her leadership, OpenX has established a leading position in CTV with TV by OpenX, delivering high-quality inventory and audience addressability in biddable environments. In her expanded role, Loberg will focus on advancing OpenXSelect and OpenXBuild, helping buyers leverage supply-side targeting to drive measurable performance and unlock greater value from programmatic investments.

“Joe and Erika have each played a critical role in shaping our business and delivering meaningful impact for our partners,” said Tyler Romasco, EVP, Commercial at OpenX. “Joe’s leadership in building our global partnerships foundation and Erika’s success in scaling our CTV and curation capabilities have fueled growth at OpenX. As we continue to evolve, their expanded roles will help us move faster, operate more cohesively, and deliver even greater value across the ecosystem.”

Advanced HDR by Technicolor and Amlogic, a leading platform provider in the global system-on-chip (SoC) market, today announced that the Advanced HDR solution will be integrated into major NEXTGEN TV (ATSC 3.0) conversion boxes powered by Amlogic platforms. This integration reflects growing industry-wide coordination to increase the availability of ATSC 3.0-compatible devices amid strong U.S. consumer interest in NEXTGEN TV services.

While ATSC 3.0 infrastructure continues its rollout, ecosystem partners are doubling down on the manufacture of NEXTGEN TV converter boxes ensuring greater consumer awareness of and access to enhanced over-the-air (OTA) viewing with high dynamic range (HDR) picture quality. Converter boxes from leading brands, which include: RCA, ZapperBox by BitRouter, MyVeloTV, Zinwell, and ADTH, are using Amlogic platforms to implement Advanced HDR by Technicolor, enabling more viewers to experience HDR from free broadcast television.

Because our solution can carry SDR and HDR in a single signal, viewers can receive the best possible experience without needing to worry about TV compatibility.”

— Rick Dumont, Advanced HDR by Technicolor

The ongoing deployment of NEXTGEN TV (ATSC 3.0) in North America—and the introduction of DTV+ in Brazil, which leverages many elements of ATSC 3.0—signals accelerating global momentum behind next-generation broadcast standards. To enjoy free OTA content in HDR, consumers need an HDR-enabled receiver. By pairing Amlogic-powered converter boxes with Advanced HDR by Technicolor, device makers can help ensure that more households can benefit from improved contrast, brightness, and color performance as broadcasters expand HDR programming.

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As a leading system-on-chip manufacturer, Amlogic powers a broad range of operator and retail receiver devices worldwide. This scale helps accelerate ecosystem adoption by enabling multiple converter box manufacturers to deliver consistent HDR experiences on a widely deployed silicon platform.

“As NEXTGEN TV adoption accelerates, consumers expect premium picture quality from free over-the-air broadcasts, including HDR,” said James Xie, SVP, Corporate Business Strategy at Amlogic. “By enabling Advanced HDR by Technicolor on our widely adopted converter box platforms, we’re helping OEM partners bring a consistent, high-quality HDR experience to market faster and at scale—supporting a growing ecosystem of consumer devices.”

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“Device manufacturers across the industry are recognizing the impact HDR has on consumer perception of video quality,” said Rick Dumont, head of business development for Advanced HDR by Technicolor. “NEXTGEN TV converter boxes extend ATSC 3.0 reception to TVs that don’t have built-in NEXTGEN TV capability, and integrating Advanced HDR by Technicolor enables consumers to maximize picture quality on compatible displays. Because our solution can carry SDR and HDR in a single signal, viewers can receive the best possible experience without needing to worry about TV compatibility. We look forward to continued partnership with Amlogic and other receiver brands to bring NEXTGEN TV content in Advanced HDR by Technicolor to viewers.”

Locality becomes the first broadcast sales organization to implement Nielsen’s MDE offering at scale.

Locality, the leading local TV advertising platform connecting brands to local audiences across broadcast and streaming, and Nielsen, a global leader in audience measurement and media intelligence, announced the integration of Nielsen’s Media Data Engine (MDE) into Locality’s broadcast advertising infrastructure.

This integration accelerates demographic audience delivery and modernizes local television measurement in the U.S.

Per this collaboration, Locality becomes the first broadcast sales organization to implement Nielsen’s MDE offering at scale, enabling demographic audience delivery across all U.S. local markets to within four days of airing. Previously, this process took weeks.

The net industry benefit is a significant modernization of local TV measurement results, bringing greater speed, consistency, and predictive capabilities to broadcast campaigns.

“This partnership marks a major step forward for local broadcast,” said Ann Hailer, President of Broadcast at Locality. “For decades, local television has operated on delayed reporting cycles that limited agility and optimization. By integrating Nielsen’s Media Data Engine directly into our infrastructure, we are accelerating access to trusted audience insights and enabling advertisers and stations to make faster, more informed decisions across local markets.”

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Nielsen’s MDE is a next-generation data infrastructure designed to improve the timeliness and scalability of measurement. Through this integration, Locality gains streamlined access to Nielsen Local TV data across all 210 local markets, enabling more responsive campaign planning, in-flight optimization, and performance monitoring.

“Local advertisers and broadcasters need the same level of speed and insight that has transformed national and digital media,” said Paul LeFort, Managing Director of Nielsen’s Local TV Client Services. “Our Media Data Engine was built to power the future of audience measurement and only Nielsen can reliably measure different demographics, including at the local level. By teaming up with Locality, we are introducing a new level of sophistication, innovation and possibilities for the entire local ad ecosystem.”

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The integration reflects a broader shift toward converged planning and more dynamic campaign management. By accelerating access to demographic audience insights, Locality and Nielsen are enabling local broadcast to operate with greater transparency, comparability, and responsiveness across markets. Beyond immediate speed gains, the partnership also lays the groundwork for future innovation, including predictive analytics, AI-driven modeling, and more advanced audience-based applications in linear television.

“This partnership is about building the infrastructure for the next generation of local advertising,” said Michael Collins, CEO of Locality. “Together with Nielsen, we are redefining what’s possible for local media, bringing broadcast measurement into a more modern, intelligent era.”