M&W SATURDAY SUMMARY: 2Q26 Ad Market Growth Healthy With Varying Results For Individual Companies

Podcasts:

On this week’s M&W Podcast we review our work of the week! Separately, on Agency Business from Madison & Wall and FusionFront Media, Brian interviews Lighthouse Creative’s Sam Slaughter.

Weekly Work:

The Trade Desk, DoubleVerify, Instacart, PubMatic, Roku, Yelp, and E.W. Scripps 2Q26: Growth Concentrates Around AI, Commerce, and CTV + DV Sells to Nielsen

Disney, NYT, Taboola, Clear Channel Outdoor, and Criteo 2Q26: Some Signs of Slowing Growth as Media and Ad-Tech Models Continue to Evolve

Warner Bros. Discovery, Fox, Versant, Teads, USA Today, Lamar, Nexstar, and Canadian Broadcasters 2Q26: Ad Growth Becomes More Concentrated

OutFront, AppLovin, Magnite, LiveRamp, Sinclair, News Corp., and eBay 2Q26: Digital Advertising Infrastructure Outpaces Most Traditional Media

SpaceX, Paramount, Pinterest, MNTN, Booking, BuzzFeed, Spotify 2Q26: Performance Tools Take Center Stage

Snap and People Inc. 2Q26: Better Results Do Not Resolve Core Growth Challenges

WPP and S4 Capital 2Q26 Results: Soft Results, But Improving at WPP and Stagnating at S4

Large Marketer CEO and CFO Commentary: AirBnB, Clorox, McDonald’s, SharkNinja, Wayfair and More

More Context:

There was an absolute deluge of earnings announcements this week, and the results showed a wide divide across the advertising market. Live sports, streaming, in-app advertising, and out-of-home media generated the strong performance, while linear television, publishing, and the broader open web remained under pressure. Patterns were more mixed at individual digital platforms.

For examples, Fox benefited significantly from the FIFA World Cup and continued growth at Tubi while the absence of NBA programming compounded Warner Bros. Discovery’s underlying linear television weakness. OutFront benefited from expanding digital inventory and yield as well as programmatic adoption, while the likes of People Inc. faced further declines in search-driven traffic and owned-and-operated advertising inventory. Meanwhile, we saw weakness at SpaceX’s X and muted growth at Snap, but much stronger results at Pinterest.

Results from The Trade Desk, which raise questions around that company’s plans to return to growth and news of DoubleVerify’s pending combination with Nielsen added strategic dimensions to earnings, too. More generally, we saw many examples of companies across the media ecosystem pursuing a similar objective: making advertising easier to buy, optimize, and measure. expanding AI-powered, automated, and self-service tools, while traditional media companies are trying to emphasize performance-oriented inventory wherever they can.

While the broader advertising market remains very strong, growth is not uniform by company, and highlights the ongoing importance of product focus, customer segmentation, and go-to-market choices for individual companies within the industry.