Behold: Ken Paxton will now demonstrate that broken clocks are indeed right twice a day. The Texas Attorney General is notorious for, well, a very long list of reasons. But in this case, he at least appears to be doing consumers a solid: He sued five television companies for using ad-targeting spyware on their TVs. Texas sued Sony, Samsung, LG, Hisense and TCL for allegedly recording what viewers watch without their consent.
The 2025 edition of Spotify Wrapped goes beyond just summarizing what you listened to with charts and infographics. This year, Spotify is also assigning each user a "Listening Age," which is based on the release years of their favorite tracks compared to others in the same age group. The feature quickly went rival, as users recoiled at their seemingly geriatric (or juvenile) musical tastes.
The dream was a built-in Chrome system that would have allowed the data used for ad customization to live on your device. This system would have used AI to sort you into relevant groups of users with certain traits. Had it worked, advertisers would have still been allowed to target you with ads, but without tracking you as an individual. Needless to say, it would have also put an end to those awful pop-ups.
Did you know that whenever you turn on your smart TV, you invite an unseen guest to watch it with you? These days, most mainstream TVs use automatic content recognition (ACR), a type of ad-tracking technology that collects data on everything you watch and sends it to a central database. Manufacturers then use this information to understand your viewing habits and deliver highly targeted ads.
and with Connected TV viewing (i.e. people watching YouTube content on their home TV sets) continuing to grow, it's legitimately a competitor for traditional TV channels in many respects. And with YouTube's more advanced ad targeting tools and options, that could make it an increasingly valuable consideration for your campaigns, enabling broad reach to sports fans, with hyper-targeted, even AI-facilitated targeting to maximize reach and resonance.
