Week in Review: Viaplay Exits the Netherlands, ProSieben Brings Video Podcasts to Joyn, and WPP Expands WPP Enterprise Solutions

In this week’s Week in Review: Viaplay sells its Dutch operations, ProSieben brings video podcasts to its Joyn streaming service, and WPP expands its Enterprise Solutions umbrella brand.

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Viaplay Sells Dutch Operations to DPG Media’s Videoland in Netherlands Exit

Nordic media group Viaplay has agreed to sell its Dutch streaming and broadcasting operations to Videoland, a streaming business owned by DPG Media, for €142 million on a cash and debt free basis. The transaction is expected to close in the coming months, subject to regulatory approvals.

Three years ago, Viaplay announced its exit from international markets, with the aim of “focusing on our core Nordic, Netherlands and Viaplay Select operations”. This week’s announcement sees the group exit the Netherlands, with the focus now squarely on the Nordic market. It follows Viaplay’s full acquisition of Nordic TV provider Allente Group at the end of last year.

“The sale is in line with our strategic transformation and the priority to focus on the Group’s operations in our core Nordic markets, where we have the greatest scale and synergies,” said Viaplay CEO Jørgen Madsen Lindemann. “The proceeds of the sale will enable us to accelerate the deleveraging and strengthening of the Group’s financial profile. It follows on the transformational acquisition of the remaining 50 percent of Allente Group, and subsequent refinancing, at the end of last year. We are delighted that a Dutch business with such strong local roots is acquiring the operations, and will be able to focus on developing them further moving forward.”

ProSieben Brings Video Podcasts to Joyn Streaming Service

ProSiebenSat.1 is bringing video podcasts from its Seven.One Audio division to the Joyn streaming service, the German media group announced on Tuesday. The announcement mirrors moves by Netflix to expand into video podcasts, and “creates an even broader premium video inventory for advertisers”, according to ProSieben.

At launch, the offering will include Der Sophie Passmann Podcast, SCHÖN LAUT, Make America Good Again!, Gysi gegen Guttenberg and Sisters in Crime, with more titles to follow in the coming months. Sales will be handled by ProSiebenSat.1’s sales house, Seven.One Media.

“With video podcasts, we’re strategically expanding our curated video offering on Joyn and providing our advertisers with even greater digital reach in a high-quality CTV environment,” said Lennart Harendza, CRO at Seven.One Media. “What’s particularly exciting about the content is the close relationship between the hosts and their community: it fosters trust and makes video podcasts a particularly effective and credible advertising environment.”

WPP Expands WPP Enterprise Solutions

British holding group WPP this week announced plans to expand WPP Enterprise Solutions, the umbrella brand housing its commerce, consulting, content transformation, CRM, loyalty and first-party data, customer and product experience, and engineering & platforms capabilities. With this expansion, WPP is launching an initial portfolio of proprietary solutions which it outlined as follows:

AI transformation consulting – helping organisations realise AI value through strategic advisory, architecture and agentic systems.
Agentic commerce – converting brand equity and product truth into machine-readable signals that shape how AI agents discover, evaluate and recommend brands.
Owned intelligence – converting client-owned data into strategic, AI-ready competitive assets that fuel brand-specific and commercially attributable results.
Adaptive, real-time relationships – pairing first-party data with AI to anticipate and personalise every interaction, deepening loyalty and growing lifetime value.
Intelligent content – a closed-loop operating system that plans, produces and activates content using intelligent automation.

“WPP Enterprise Solutions exists to help organisations remove the friction that holds growth back,” said Jeff Geheb, Global CEO at WPP Enterprise Solutions. “Most organisations don’t have a growth problem – they have a systematic constraint that limits their potential. Customer experience, content, commerce, data and technology too often evolve independently of one another. We help clients bring those elements together into growth systems they can continuously optimise, operate and scale.”

The Week in Tech

AI Video Company TwelveLabs Raises $100 Million

TwelveLabs, an AI video intelligence company, has raised $100 million in a Series B funding round co-led by NEA and NAVER Ventures, with participation from Amazon, Radical Ventures, Korea Investment Partners, Index Ventures, Quadrille Capital, and Red Bull Ventures. The funding will be used to advance the firm’s video-language and embedding models, which are called Pegasus and Marengo. In a blog post, Jae Lee, CEO and Co-founder at TwelveLabs, said video “is still mostly dark matter” to AI systems. “The richest record of reality is still largely outside the semantic layer that modern AI systems use,” said Lee. “We are changing that. Our goal is to make every second of video addressable, searchable, and usable by agents.”

OpenAI is Recruiting Ad Format Developers

After pitching its new ad offering at Cannes last week, OpenAI is now starting to develop new ad formats, according to job listings on the AI firm’s careers page, as reported by Digiday. The roles include an ad formats software engineer (with at least seven years experience) to sit within the monetisation team. According to the listing, the role is responsible for defining how ads are structured, rendered and delivered across different surfaces, platforms and media types.

Covatic Raises £1.5 Million for CTV Targeting Technology

Covatic, a Birmingham-based ad tech firm, has secured £1.5 million in a pre-B Bridge round led by the West Midlands Co-Investment Fund (WMCO). The funding will accelerate the commercialisation of Covatic Sense, the company’s person-level CTV targeting technology, whose customers include Sky, BBC and Bauer Media. “CTV ad spend is accelerating, but the measurement infrastructure is still catching up,” said Nick Pinks, Founder and CEO of Covatic. “Person-level targeting on the big screen has been the missing piece, and Covatic Sense solves that structurally. This funding lets us move faster: more integrations, more markets, more publishers getting the yield they should already be seeing from their CTV inventory.”

Nectar360 Receives IAB Europe’s Retail Media Certification

Nectar360, the retail media arm of Sainsbury’s Group, has received certification from IAB Europe’s Retail Media Certification Programme, becoming the first UK retailer to complete the programme. The certification ensures that key performance metrics are defined and reported in line with programme requirements, and covers Nectar360’s display and video ad products for off-site properties, including Meta, Google DV360 and YouTube. The announcement follows the certification of Dutch retailer Albert Heijn in 2025.

The Week in TV

Comcast to Split NBCU and Sky From Broadband Business

Comcast has announced plans to spin off its media division, including NBCUniversal and Sky, from its broadband arm, creating two separate publicly listed companies. The NBCUniversal business will comprise Sky, Universal film and TV studios, NBC, Telemundo networks, Bravo, and the Peacock streaming service. “The transaction we are announcing will unlock a more entrepreneurial management approach and open up a multitude of new opportunities for each business,” said Brian Roberts, Chairman and Co-CEO of Comcast.

UK Government “Minded to Intervene” in Paramount’s WBD Takeover

UK culture secretary Lisa Nandy said on Tuesday that she is “minded to intervene” in Paramount Skydance’s $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), citing concerns around media plurality. The merger was cleared in the US last month by the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, while the European Commission looks likely to approve the transaction after Paramount offered remedies to address EU competition concerns, according to Reuters. Details of the remedies were not disclosed, but Paramount said it was “confident that this remedy ⁠directly and comprehensively addresses any concerns expressed in the European Commission’s preliminary assessment and support the path for timely clearance.”

Ofcom Proposes Enforceable Rules for the BBC’s Online Content

Ofcom is proposing changes to how it regulates the BBC, the UK media watchdog announced on Thursday, as it aims to enhance protections for audiences who increasingly access BBC content online. The regulator is seeking views on a proposed new code for BBC online material, which would introduce enforceable rules for content posted on BBC websites, apps and social media accounts. “The aim is to ensure that the BBC’s online material meets similar high standards to those which audiences expect from traditional broadcast content,” according to Ofcom.

Australian Regulator Sues Amazon Over Ads on Prime Video

Australia’s competition regulator is suing Amazon over alleged unfair terms in Prime subscription contracts that allowed the company to introduce ads to Prime Video, Reuters reported on Tuesday. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) said the terms enabled negative changes for over 1 million annual subscribers without offering compensation. After July 2024, subscribers had to pay an additional A$2.99 per month to maintain ad-free streaming, despite ⁠annual subscribers already having paid A$79 upfront for the service.

ITV Drops In-Game Ads From Nations Championship Rugby

ITV will not include in-game, in-picture ads in its Nations Championship broadcasts this month, according to the Guardian, but the UK broadcaster plans to bring them back for the autumn leg of the rugby tournament in November. The ads caused a backlash from viewers when they were introduced in the Six Nations, but the reports suggest the decision to drop the ads is down to ITV being unable to sell the slots due to brands focusing on the World Cup.

TF1 Accuses Canal+ of “Undermining Documentary Sector”

French commercial broadcaster TF1 has criticised the decision by rival group Canal+ to cease the broadcast of several of its channels in France and Africa, including TV Breizh, Histoire TV and Ushuaïa TV. “The TF1 Group would like to emphasise that beyond the loss of these three channels for Canal+ subscribers, this decision more broadly undermines the documentary sector,” TF1 said in a statement. The broadcaster added that the channels remain available through all other distributors in metropolitan France, but that the decision has led the group to “consider its distribution strategy in a context where the digital offering is growing at a rapid pace.”

The Week for Publishers

The Telegraph’s Long Takeover Saga Finally Ends as Axel Springer Completes Takeover

This week Axel Springer announced it is closing its £575 million acquisition of The Telegraph, having received regulatory approval in the UK, Ireland, and Austria. “The Telegraph has shown remarkable resilience over the past three years and remained both agenda-setting and award-winning,” said Telegraph Media Group CEO Anna Jones. “During this period we have also delivered double-digit digital commercial growth and increased digital subscriptions by a third. Being part of Axel Springer is an exciting next chapter for TMG.” Axel Springer’s plans for its newly owned newspaper include an expansion into the US market, a strengthening of its commercial and subscription offerings, and the launch of new events and premium offerings. The holding group will also take an active role in The Telegraph’s AI strategy. Read more on VideoWeek.

The Economist Targets Young Audiences with Video and Audio Subscription

British business and current affairs magazine The Economist has launched a new subscription tier targeted at younger audiences which specifically grants access to its video and audio content, Digiday reported this week. ‘Economist Play’, as the subscription has been named, is cheaper than a full subscription, and will also include subscriber-only newsletters and games. Nada Arnot, The Economist’s EVP of marketing, told Digiday that audio and video are increasingly important for the publisher, as it seeks a more gender-balanced and younger-skewing audience.

The Guardian Opens Up New Video Roles in Editorial Expansion

UK newspaper the Guardian announced this week it is creating around 55 new permanent positions across its UK, US, and Australian offices over the next 12 months, as it invests more in digital, visual, global and experimental journalism. The company says some of these new roles will support a growing focus on video in areas including opinion, features, and sport, while a new US video team will also be hired. “As the Guardian’s business becomes ever more digital and more global, we are intent on making further investments to maximise the reach and impact of Guardian journalism, and to ensure the Guardian remains financially sustainable for the long term,” said Anna Bateson, chief executive at the Guardian.

Local US Newspapers Sue Microsoft and OpenAI

A consortium of local US newspapers and newsgroups has filed a lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI, Press Gazette reported this week, stating that the two companies have scraped and copied their content without permission in order to build their commercial AI tools. Participants in the lawsuit include Richner Communications, CherryRoad Media Inc, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Rust Publishing, Sentinel Media Co, and Straus Newspapers Inc. OpenAI maintains that its practices are grounded in US fair use law.

Google Says it’s Exploring “Value Exchange Models” with Publishers

Google is exploring new “value exchange models” with publishers, according to Press Gazette, and has accepted the need for independent regulation of AI in a new white paper published last week. The paper, ‘A Pragmatic Approach to AI Governance in America’, defends the use of publicly available online content for training AI models, but notes that the tech giant is “piloting novel ways to partner with websites whose content meaningfully contributes to the freshness and factuality of generative AI responses”.

The Week for Brands & Agencies

US FTC Settles Dispute with Havas

The US Federal Trade Commission said on Tuesday that it has reached a settlement with agency group Havas relating to the trade watchdog’s allegations that the French company engaged in collusive conduct. The FTC has accused all of the major agency holding groups of illegally colluding to direct ad spend away from specific media companies via brand safety initiatives. The Commission has already reached deals with other agency groups, barring them from entering agreements which set common brand safety standards or restrict advertising based on “biased and politically motivated criteria” (in its own words), and says this Havas deal sets similar boundaries.

Former GroupM China Executive Receives Life Sentence in Bribery Case

Di Fei, former chief investment officer at GroupM (now WPP Media) in China, has been handed a life sentence in a major bribery case. Fei was found guilty of accepting kickbacks from brokerage firms in return for directing business in their direction, with bribes reported to have reached around $176 million, according to Bloomberg. Two former colleagues who were also involved both received shorter sentences. WPP Media says it has fully cooperated with police enquiries.

Omnicom Confirms IBM Account Win

Omnicom Media confirmed this week it has been named global media agency of record for tech company IBM following a competitive review, and has taken charge of media planning and buying responsibilities across the Americas, EMEA, Japan, and APAC regions. “Omnicom Media brings a globally integrated approach and a deep appreciation for how data, technology, and creativity come together at scale,” said IBM’s SVP of marketing and communications Jonathan Adashek. “That alignment gives us confidence in their ability to build more connected, relevant experiences that support IBM’s long-term growth.”

Carat Named Media Network of the Year at Cannes Lions

Dentsu-owned media agency Carat was named Media Network of the Year at this year’s Cannes Lions awards. “At a time when our industry is being reshaped by AI, algorithms and fragmented attention, being named Media Network of the Year is evidence of what’s possible when exceptional talent, deep human understanding, market-leading agentic capabilities and trusted partnerships come together,” said Will Swayne, global practice president of media and integrated solutions at Dentsu. “I’m incredibly proud and grateful to our teams and our clients around the world. This award belongs to all of them.”

Adidas Appoints Omnicom Media as Global Media AOR

Sportswear giant Adidas has appointed Omnicom Media as its global media agency of record, according to reports this week, winning the account from WPP’s EssenceMediacom. The account has been held by WPP since Mediacom first won it back in 2018, and was contested by WPP, Omnicom, and Publicis according to Marketing Interactive. Omnicom’s PHD will lead the Adidas account.

Hires of the Week

Axel Springer Makes Carolin Hulshoff Pol CEO of Telegraph Media Group

Following the completion of Axel Springer’s takeover of The Telegraph, the European media giant has appointed Carolin Hulshoff Pol as CEO of Telegraph Media Group. The executive has been with Axel Springer for more than 20 years, becoming CEO of BILD in November 2024. She replaces Anna Jones who is leaving The Telegraph after three and a half years as CEO.

Adform Announces DACH Leader and Chief Growth Officer

Adform, a demand-side platform (DSP), has named Daniel Neuhaus as Senior Vice President & Regional President for the DACH region, and promoted Stefan Sommer to Chief Growth Officer. Neuhaus brings more than two decades of ad tech experience in the DACH region, including co-founding emetriq and xplosion. Meanwhile Sommer has been with Adform for 10 years, most recently leading the DACH business.

UKTV Names Matt Berry as General Manager – Marketing

UKTV has announced Matt Berry as General Manager – Marketing, a newly created role focused on driving viewership and commercial performance across the portfolio. The broadcaster said Berry will “help shape how UKTV’s brands show up and connect with audiences in an increasingly competitive and fast-changing media landscape.” His previous roles include Head of Brand at Channel 4, and Head of Product Marketing at News UK.