The Refresh News: August 18 Walmart–Trade Desk Shift, Google’s AI Ad Fraud Push, and Upfronts 2025 Numbers

This week’s episode of The Refresh dives into Walmart’s evolving partnership with The Trade Desk, signaling potential changes in retail media alliances. We explore Google’s use of large language models to combat ad fraud, achieving significant reductions in invalid traffic. Finally, we break down Variety’s latest upfronts report, showing a continued decline in primetime TV ad commitments and notable growth in streaming investment.

This week we cover:

• Walmart and The Trade Desk’s relationship is moving from exclusive to open, raising questions about Walmart’s retail data strategy and potential in-house platform development.

• The Trade Desk faces growing competition from vertically integrated giants like Amazon, Google, and Meta, which benefit from owned inventory and rich first-party data.

• Google’s traffic quality team, in collaboration with Google Research and DeepMind, deployed large language models to detect and reduce mobile invalid traffic by 40%.

• Variety reports primetime TV ad commitments fell for the third consecutive year, with broadcast down 2.5% and cable down 4.3%.

• Streaming ad commitments surged nearly 18% year over year, driven by advanced targeting, programmatic buying opportunities, and high-value live sports content moving to digital platforms.

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