Hook: Given social media users’ collectively short attention spans, “an effective hook is critical” for marketers that don’t want their content to be skipped over, according to a new report from TikTok and creator marketing platform CreatorIQ.

And ad spend on films this year is off to a strong start. From the beginning of the year through June 4, around $530.3 million in estimated media value was devoted to advertising upcoming theatrical releases, according to data from iSpot; that’s more than half of the estimated $1.01 billion in estimated media value throughout all of 2022.

Viewership: iSpot.TV didn’t share ad spend figures for this year, but said regular season games that aired live nationally on ABC, ESPN, TNT, and NBA TV saw about 29 billion household TV ad impressions.

Okay, so what does this mean for advertisers? Well, while Carlson might have had one of the most-watched television shows in the country, his often racist and controversial tirades made marketers unsurprisingly uncomfortable, and advertiser boycotts of his program have popped up every couple of years.

Age of ads: Amazon added VideoAmp and iSpot as streaming measurement providers to give advertisers more ways to measure the effectiveness of their ads. Freevee will soon roll out “brand storytelling ads,” which let brands tell sequential stories over the span of several ad breaks.

That’s right. Kroger, the largest supermarket operator in the country, spent $2.5 million, per iSpot estimates, on an ad that emphasized the brand’s own private-label products, about a fifth of what Kroger spent nationally in 2022. “When you get proven quality at lower-than-low prices with Kroger brand products, it feels like you’re winning,” the ad’s voiceover said.

Despite the limited inventory, though, automakers are advertising electric vehicles at a frantic pace. In 2022, marketing for EVs and hybrid vehicles accounted for nearly a quarter of estimated national TV ad spend among automakers, according to estimates from iSpot.

Taylor Swift’s Midnights was released on Oct. 21, and Capital One wasted no time using the star and hit song “Anti-Hero” in its TV advertising. The brand’s “Multiple Taylors” spot burst onto the scene on Nov. 1, and in the time since, it’s the second-most-seen credit card ad on TV, according to iSpot.

This month, NBCUniversal unveiled In-Flight Linear Optimization, a tool for marketers that will enable them to shift their linear ad buys midway through campaigns to help prioritize reaching the audiences they’re targeting. The tool, codeveloped with Amazon Web Services, will use daily forecast data from companies like VideoAmp and iSpot in an effort to make linear ad dollars more efficient, McConville told Marketing Brew.

Number two, I’m kind of keeping my eye on CTV measurement. The whole Nielsen debacle, you’ve got this gold rush into CTV measurement, and everybody wants a piece of it—iSpot, TVSquared, Data Plus Math…I think there’s too many of them. I think it’s too crowded. So it’s going to be interesting to see [how] that starts netting out, who starts winning, who starts losing, because I don’t think there’s room for all those players.

“Brand-lift studies were not part of the conversation in influencer marketing five years ago,” Tim Sovay, chief BD and partnerships officer and COO at influencer marketing software platform CreatorIQ, told us.

Tim Sovay, chief BD & partnerships officer and chief operating officer at influencer marketing software platform CreatorIQ, described it as a “double opt in” situation. First, consumers typically choose to follow an influencer, opting in to seeing their content. Then, the influencer opts into working with brands.