Samba

At Cannes, Ruth Mortimer, Global President of Advertising Week, opened our Samba Session with a defining idea: Automation follows instructions. Agents make decisions. The shift: → Tools that execute → Intelligence that reasons The conversation explored how agentic AI is reshaping advertising workflows and enabling faster, smarter decisions. Agents are only as good as the signals they use to reason. Accurate deterministic data powers smarter agents. That’s Samba. #Cannes2026

Dutton Ranch took back number 1 from House of the Dragon this week. Beth Dutton and Rue Bennett are now the only two characters whose shows have reclaimed the streaming throne. That is exactly the energy both of them would want. Holiday weekend also brought Enola Holmes 3 and Project Hail Mary onto the chart. What did you watch this weekend? #StreamingTV

We're tracking all three through streaming next. But tell us now: when a movie blows up, are you seeing it opening night, renting at home, or waiting for streaming? Reply with your move 👇

The theater spreads movies apart. The living room pulls them back together. Box office was never built to measure that second part.

A movie made for $750,000 beat Disney and Warner Bros. at the box office. Then it beat them in the living room too. A thread on what box office can't see 🧵

@TonyHinchcliffe's new @Netflix special: 169K US households, week one. His 2025 MSG special: 1.6M. An 84% drop. Same guy. Same platform. The data doesn't editorialize. You can. What happened?

The people most actively researching AI are the ones least likely to see AI ads (Q1 2026): Online traders & investors: 4.3x more likely to research AI than see its ads Asia travel intenders: 4.2x Clean energy advocates: 3.6x High intent. Barely reached. That gap is the opening. bit.ly/4h0Qta2

The lesson for anyone buying TV in this category: impressions and impact aren't the same thing. The most-seen brand wasn't the most effective. Full scoreboard for all four brands 👇 samba.com/report/adverti…

Response winner: Claude. 41% online interest response after seeing the ads, the highest in the category, at the lowest frequency (2.9x). Fewer impressions. More action.

In Q1 2026, the four biggest AI brands all bought their way onto TV to become household names. We measured who actually broke through. It wasn't who you'd think 🧵

Last week: House of the Dragon S2 at #6 (catch-up wave). This week: House of the Dragon S3 at #1. We called it. The catch-up-to-premiere pipeline is real. Also The Bear's final season debuted and brought Hulu back onto the chart for the first time in a while. Nine platforms and counting. #TopStreaming

AI agents are already buying your media. Most are using incomplete or inaccurate data. Samba hosted panels on a rooftop in Cannes last week with candid discussions on agentic buying, the ad tech tax, and the overall impact of AI. When an agent makes the call, is it making the right decisions based on accurate media intelligence? More videos from our Samba Sessions at Cannes coming soon. #Cannes

Whether AI is a fresh start or just another closed box comes down to one question: Are the results verified by anyone other than the platform selling the ads? Independent, cross-screen measurement doesn't get easier as the walls get higher.

That's the pattern: every AI ad surface grades its own homework. The fourth wave of advertising is also the fourth walled garden, lining up next to search, social, and retail media.

AI advertising more than doubles to $68B by 2030. Almost none of it happens inside a chatbot. The EMARKETER numbers everyone keeps misreading 🧵