In today’s Digest, we discuss double-digit growth ahead for digital ad spend, Alibaba unveiling a multimodal AI, and eBay moving to buy Tise. 

Double-digit growth ahead for digital ad spend

According to IAB UK’s latest H1 Digital Adspend report, produced with Oliver Wyman, UK digital ad spend is forecast to grow by 10% year-on-year in both 2025 and 2026. Digital revenues reached £18.7bn in the first half of 2025, led by search (£8.3bn), digital video (£4.3bn), and display advertising (£2.9bn), while retail media surged to £1.5bn. Other formats such as gaming (£620m), digital OOH (£490m), classifieds (£450m), and digital audio (£160m) contributed smaller shares, with mobile accounting for 71% of total spend.

With digital ad spend projected to hit £45bn by 2026, IAB UK CEO Jon Mew said the industry is entering “a new phase of maturity,” driven by programmatic trading, AI, and emerging formats like retail media and audio.

Alibaba unveils multimodal AI

Alibaba has unveiled Qwen3-Omni, a new multimodal AI model designed to rival OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s “Nano Banana”, intensifying global competition in advanced AI systems. The flagship release can process text, audio, images, and video, responding in both text and speech. According to developers, two variants of Qwen3-Omni outperformed GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini-2.5-Flash (“Nano Banana”) in tests on audio, image, and video comprehension. 

Qwen3-Omni supports inputs in 119 text languages and 19 spoken languages, with spoken output in 10 languages including English, Chinese, French, and Japanese. Alibaba says the system’s multimodal and multilingual capabilities make it suitable for hardware with cameras, microphones, and speakers, allowing it to perceive visual and audio inputs and respond vocally.

Lin Junyang, a researcher on the Qwen team under Alibaba’s cloud unit said “This year, our audio team has spent great efforts on building large-scale audio data sets for both pretraining and post-training. We have combined everything … to build our Qwen3-Omni.”

eBay moves to buy Tise

eBay is acquiring Tise, as part of its push to modernise its platform and attract younger shoppers. Financial terms of the deal, announced Monday, 22nd September, were not disclosed.

Tise offers community-driven features such as following sellers, liking and commenting on listings, and personalised recommendations, tools that eBay says will enhance its consumer-to-consumer (C2C) experience. eBay first invested in Tise via eBay Ventures in 2022.

According to a statement from Oliver Klinck, VP, GM Global Markets Success and C2C at eBay, in the company’s press release:“With Tise’s on-trend inventory, loyal community, and social-first approach, we’ll strengthen eBay’s C2C offerings, and more deeply connect with the next generation of enthusiasts.”