The Brief – Thursday 14 April: TikTok’s new ad solutions, RTL Group earnings, BBC’s exec committee pay freeze and more

📱 TikTok announced it would allow third-party AI agents for campaign development at its global annual product summit. It also unveiled a new line-up of advertising solutions, including new high-visibility ad formats when users open TikTok and in search results, as well as new AI tools aimed at creating higher-quality AI-generated video ads and automation tools for campaign optimisation. (TikTok)

📈 RTL Group reported 2.5% revenue growth to €1.3bn in Q1. Subscribers grew 18.8% to 8.4m, while streaming revenue jumped 27% and was profitable in Q1. Linear TV ad revenue declined 6.5%, but digital advertising revenue grew 14.6%. (RTL Group)

💸 The BBC’s executive committee, which includes the director general, are foregoing a pay rise this year amid a £600m cost-cutting drive that could see as many as 2,000 jobs cut. (The Guardian)

⚖️ The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has ruled that Meta must comply with an Italian law requiring that it negotiate with and fairly compensate news publishers for the use of their content. (NiemanLab)

🤖 A group of journalists, podcasters and audiobook narrators have sued Google in Illinois federal court for allegedly misusing recordings of their voices to train the AI models that power its AI assistant, Gemini Live, and other AI voice products, without their permission. (Reuters)

📍 JICMAIL has partnered with geo-data company ShoWhere to launch a new postcode sector mail measurement dataset. Available to JICMAIL Discovery users, the dataset covers 9,000 UK postcode sectors and enables users to build customised postode sector lists based on customer locations, store locations or areas of high mail engagement. (JICMAIL)

📺 Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed a lawsuit against Netflix, accusing it of collecting sensitive user data without consent and using “addictive” design to keep viewers hooked. Netflix has rejected the claims and will challenge them in court. (BBC)

🎙️ Acast claims it has become the first company to successfully monetise Apple Podcasts‘ new video environment at scale. Clients State Farm and T-Mobile have launched the first integrated video campaigns on the platform through Acast. (Acast)