Advertising Perspectives

No More Rose-Tinted Glasses Cindy Rose joined WPP earlier this year with a turnaround plan for the world’s one-time biggest ad buyer and agency holdco. Easier said than done.  WPP’s like-for-like revenue less pass-through costs ... read more

Reddit took a victory lap on its Q3 earnings call on Thursday. For the first time, the social platform achieved its pre-IPO profitability goal of 40% adjusted EBITDA, said CEO Steve Huffman. Reddit is also ... read more

If Roku’s third quarter earnings call could be distilled into a single phrase, it would be “early days.” (With “bullish” as a runner-up, perhaps.) The post Roku’s Recent Investments In DSPs and Performance Are Still ... read more

Comcast has had a pretty rough go of it lately – but there’s still plenty of room for a turnaround. The post Peacock and Sports Are Still Shining Beacons For Comcast’s Advertising Business appeared ... read more

Alphabet felt the painful comeuppance of years of antitrust penalties, publisher enmity and customer blowback as it reported a serious blow to revenue … Lol. Can you imagine? Alphabet reported on Wednesday that its total ... read more

Artificial intelligence has become marketing’s favorite headline. Every platform, publisher and technology partner now promises “AI-powered” solutions that will make campaigns smarter, faster and cheaper. But as the noise grows louder, one truth remains: AI ... read more

Hey Readers! Welcome back. This is James Hercher, AdExchanger senior editor. And an actual person. I say that because AI agents have infiltrated retail media. At least, that’s how it felt to big Wall Street ... read more

Tylenol maker Kenvue navigates pushing back against the Trump administration's claims; viewers of Nobody Wants This are tired of product placement; and US Census data might become less privacy-safe. The post Tylenol’s Marketing Team Feels ... read more

Meta's Q3 earnings saw increased growth in its ad business and continued the conversation on superintelligence. The post Meta’s Q3 Was A Net Win Disguised As A Loss appeared first on AdExchanger. ... read more

Meta wants marketers to trust the machine. Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASC), Meta’s automated ad product, promises to take care of everything – budgeting, creative, targeting, optimization. Just hand over the keys. But here’s a plot twist: ... read more

Publisher monetization choices are among the most covered and critiqued aspects of our industry. I’m as guilty as anyone; it has been the throughline of everything I’ve written about since 2023. If you’d prefer to ... read more

Prebid changes its mind on universal TIDs; streaming media takes advantage of live events; and short-form video clips are (still) all the rage. The post Never Mind About The Whole TID Thing; Live Sports Still ... read more

Despite its steady growth, digital audio still carries the reputation of an underachiever. In an attempt to close the gap between ad spend and time spent with podcasts and music, many of the big audio ... read more

When Tony Stubblebine became CEO of Medium in 2022, the online publishing platform was losing more than $2.5 million each month, shedding subscribers and struggling to find a clear product-market fit. The situation was dire, ... read more

My Marketing Pro has set out to automate the entire marketing process, from brainstorm to launch, via conversations with an agent. The post This Startup Wants To Automate The Entire Marketing Process Via A Conversation ... read more

Condé Nast doesn’t think advertising will save it; AWS strikes a blow against Google’s cloud service; and Paramount+ is going to have to pivot. The post Condé At A Crossroads; The Cloud Wars Heat ... read more

A DSP, an SSP, an agency and a publisher walk into a room. Believe it or not, that isn’t the lead-in to a bad joke. It’s the model used by Medialive, a new AI startup ... read more

Prebid.org has established itself as a respected open-source software maker and standards-setter in online advertising. It has the necessary scale, leverage and momentum to help shape programmatic trading and drive interoperability across the ad tech ... read more

While the promise of agentic AI in advertising is intoxicating, autonomous systems optimizing campaigns and making real-time adjustments still face a sobering reality: The economics don’t work for everything – yet. Let’s look beyond the ... read more

Procter & Gamble is spending less on ads; OpenAI is spending more on ads; and guess which side of the scale Mondelez is falling on? The post Its Ads Or Innovation; And For OpenAI, It’ll ... read more

High school sports are very different now than when I was a teenager. As is the case with basically all forms of modern entertainment, they’ve faced some disruption by the rise of streaming video – ... read more

Last week, after nearly six years of development and delays, Google officially retired its Privacy Sandbox. Which means it’s time for a memorial service. The post Rest In Privacy, Sandbox appeared first on AdExchanger. ... read more

On the latest episode of AdExchanger’s The Big Story podcast, our associate editor – and this week’s guest host – Victoria McNally posed a crucial question about the end of the Privacy Sandbox. What the ... read more

Enjoy this weekly comic from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem …  The post Comic: Well, This Is Embarrassing… appeared first on AdExchanger. ... read more

WPP puts AI tools in the hands of brands; YouTube's dynamic sponsored segments could redefine creator monetization; and Hollywood is getting into “microdramas." The post The DIY Agency; YouTube’s Dynamic Change appeared first on AdExchanger. ... read more

On Thursday, Comcast Advertising announced that the cable provider’s linear TV inventory will now be available on a targetable, biddable basis for advertisers that want to transact programmatically. The post Comcast Intros Biddable And Programmatic ... read more

Hightouch's new ID Express solution aims to simplify the process of converting email addresses and phone numbers into UID2s. The post CDP Hightouch Has A Shortcut For Making UIDs appeared first on AdExchanger. ... read more

A new integration between Amazon and Clinch allows advertisers to access Amazon custom audiences via a third-party platform. The post Amazon Audiences Help Keurig Dr Pepper Improve Personalization And Reach appeared first on AdExchanger. ... read more

Programmatic advertising requires serious real-time computing power. And that bandwidth consumption is only growing as AI takes on a bigger role in deal curation and, eventually, full campaign activation. Which is why AWS debuted a ... read more

Reddit sues four companies for scraping and selling (and buying) its data; Unity Software's new zero-fee product is good news for mobile developers; and brands aren't thrilled by TikTok shop's latest updates. The post Sour ... read more

Last year, the online transaction company PayPal hired Mark Grether, former CEO of Sizmek, who has also had stints as head of Amazon Advertising and Uber Ads, to lead its nascent advertising division. And in ... read more

Publishers, brands and agencies today are navigating a new landscape. With rising consumer expectations and evolving regulations, delivering personalized campaigns requires a fresh approach. The old model of broadly sharing consumer data has given way ... read more

Marketing often gets unfairly pegged as a cost center. But that wouldn’t happen if marketers had access to better measurement that gave them clarity on what truly drives business growth, argues Henry Innis, CEO and ... read more

Prebid doing away with universal Transaction IDs is just the latest example of the ad industry’s counterproductive history of information asymmetry and obfuscation. When both sides of a transaction aren’t working with the same information, ... read more

Wouldn’t it be great to enact standards rather than talk about them?; Amazon wants to go fully automated; and revenue doesn’t seem to drop like search traffic does. The post Why Don’t Marketers Demand Better?; ... read more

In a livestreamed presentation to investors on Tuesday, co-CEO Greg Peters shared that Netflix had its “best ad sales quarter ever” in Q3, and more than doubled its upfront commitments for this year. The ... read more

Last year, TTD announced plans to launch a TV operating system, called Ventura OS, that powers the viewing experience on smart TVs with an open, ad-supported system. Now, SVP Matthew Henick has lofty goals for ... read more

Viamedia has transformed into Viamedia.ai, a next-generation ad tech company built to solve the challenges of today’s fragmented media ecosystem. The firm has rebranded as Viamedia.ai while also introducing a fresh AI-powered platform built from ... read more

Marketers today are tasked with delivering hyper-personalized messaging at scale. Luckily for them, AI has made it possible to reach individuals with uncanny precision (as we all know: right message, right time, right channel). But ... read more

Apparently, we're in for a hardware revolution; advertisers don't know what to expect from the US's new version of TikTok; and live sports should take better advantage of ad opportunities. The post The Things We ... read more

A quarter of all Connected TV (CTV) bid requests can’t be trusted. That doesn’t mean fraud every time. Sometimes, it’s incomplete data. Sometimes, it’s oversimplified or mislabeled content. And sometimes, it’s more intentional misrepresentation. But ... read more

Deli meat company Land O'Frost has been leaning into a new MMM approach to figure out which opportunities it's been overlooking – or even inhibiting. The post MMM Isn’t As Scary As Marketers Think – ... read more

If there’s one thing marketers don’t need, it’s another measurement dashboard. “Death by dashboard is real,” said Dane Buchanan, chief data and analytics officer at performance agency M&C Saatchi. But not only is “a plethora ... read more

Walmart’s Gamble Wall Street considered Walmart’s OpenAI shopping integration with ChatGPT a big win. But this AI partnership could threaten Walmart’s other big bet on retail media, writes Mike Shields at Next in Media. In ... read more

In T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men,” he writes: “This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.” Well, the same could be said of Google’s Privacy Sandbox. Nearly five ... read more

CTV has become a powerful full-funnel channel, attracting advertisers of all sizes – and the momentum isn’t slowing. CTV ad spend is projected to rise another 16% this year to $26.6 billion, according to the IAB. ... read more

Shortly after Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green said the DSP would splinter off from Prebid, he showed up at the Prebid Summit. Then, at ScreenShift, we learn what the TV industry thinks about AI. The ... read more

What does it feel like to be a media buyer and planner in 2025? That question launched a fascinating “Ask Me Anything”-style discussion at Cynopsis ScreenShift in New York City on Tuesday. The post Everything ... read more

Enjoy this weekly comic from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem …  The post Comic: Race To The Bottom appeared first on AdExchanger. ... read more

Cloudflare restricts how bots can scrape content; TiVo's customer base stays loyal, even as TiVo leaves the DVR business; and Nestlé announces a stark reduction in headcount. The post Scrapers Gonna Scrape; No More Fast-Forwarding ... read more

The Prebid Summit in New York City on Tuesday offered plenty of new details about The Trade Desk’s OpenAds and PubDesk products that were announced earlier this month. For one thing, OpenAds – TTD’s version ... read more

The remedies phase of the Google antitrust trial concluded last week. And after 11 days in the courtroom, there is a clearer sense of where Judge Leonie Brinkema is focused on, and how that might ... read more

As AI sweeps the tech landscape, new startups continue to emerge. Here are seven former ad tech execs' thoughts on best AI practices and starting their own companies. The post 7 Ad Tech Veterans Who ... read more

It has long been understood that brand is advertising’s most powerful driver of growth. Yet, in a marketplace worth more than one trillion dollars, less than 10% of digital campaigns track brand outcomes. This leaves ... read more

The 25-year-old cosmetics brand Milani is one of the only independent makeup companies to compete in the mass-market retail category. The company combines the old-school retail world with the new world of digital-native marketing. One ... read more

SSPs are looking pretty ripe for acquisition; agencies want real man-on-the-street content from actual human men; and AI slop is taking over the internet. The post Supply In Demand; Like Pigs In Slop appeared first ... read more

The AI advertising agents will need their own trade group eventually. For now though, a bunch of companies are forming the Ad Context Protocol, or AdCP. The consortium of ad tech and AI ad software ... read more

In today’s economic climate, every marketing dollar is under scrutiny. CMOs aren’t just required to build brands and grow demand; they’re expected to prove that their budgets drive measurable business value. And no one is ... read more

When sustainable advertising startup Scope3 launched in early 2022, the carbon footprint of digital advertising quickly became an ad tech talking point. One of the company’s co-founders, Brian O’Kelley, is often called the “godfather of ... read more

The out-of-home channel has a reputation for being behind the digital times. That reputation often means advertisers treat OOH as a separate channel that’s the domain of specialists, rather than as part of their omnichannel ... read more

Ceci N’est Pas Un Récession It seems like the last quarter treated agency holdcos pretty well – the French ones, anyway.  Take Publicis Groupe, which exceeded analyst forecasts yet again with an organic YoY growth ... read more

What can publishers expect from PubDesk, The Trade Desk’s new publisher dashboard? Not world domination, according to Mike O’Sullivan, The Trade Desk’s GM of product. Since 2022, when TTD launched OpenPath, its direct-to-publisher supply connection, ... read more

Unity has a gameplan for programmatic. On Tuesday, the game engine, which has a growing advertising business, announced the appointment of Chris Feo as its new SVP of programmatic. Feo is joining Unity from Experian, ... read more

For all of the ad tech industry’s sophistication, fragmentation remains its original sin. The solution isn’t a mystery. Everyone agrees that greater interoperability is the answer. So what’s standing in the way? For many platforms, ... read more

Apple TV is losing its plus; Agentic AI is ruining the ad tech equilibrium; and Google insists that search is still solid. The post Subtracting The Pluses; From Frenemies To Good Old Enemies appeared first ... read more

People in New York City are bombarded by ads at every turn. But targeted ads? For your industry? While you’re on your way to an event for that industry? The surreality of that experience can ... read more

For as long as I’ve been in marketing measurement, people have been searching for the “easy button,” the one tool, model or platform that will finally tell them which marketing dollars truly drive growth. But, ... read more

Brand safety has been broken for a long time. Kieran Geyer, a paid media manager at insurance company Prudential, is still having a lot of the same brand-safety problems today as he did years ago, ... read more

The Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google marks a watershed in digital advertising. But while proposed remedies like forcing Google to divest its ad exchange (AdX) may target real problems, focusing narrowly on Google’s ... read more

American publishers are hamstrung by antitrust law; should marketers lean into ragebait?; and Pexplexity is hitting pause on its ads business. The post The Collusion Boogeyman; Can Performance AI Resist Rage Bait? appeared first on ... read more

With its OpenAds wrapper, The Trade Desk is putting roots into ad tech’s sell side. But publishers are wary. The post The Trade Desk’s Sell-Side Settlement appeared first on AdExchanger. ... read more

TiVo has officially halted the sale and manufacture of its once-revolutionary DVR products. Which raises the question: What does TiVo even do anymore, anyway? The post It’s Official: TiVo Is No Longer A DVR Company. ... read more

Enjoy this weekly comic from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem …  The post Comic: “If You Want It Done Well, Do It Yourself” appeared first on AdExchanger. ... read more

The Viant-Tubi integration offers new data insights; advertisers can buy sponsored product ads on Gopuff, thanks to TTD; and publishers continue to face traffic woes. The post Mind The CTV Data Gap; TTD Tries Sponsored ... read more

Here’s another sign that it’s hard out there for digital publishers: People Inc., the former Dotdash Meredith, announced Thursday it is laying off 226 employees. Altogether, People Inc. is cutting about 6% of its headcount. ... read more

You just launched a new campaign across multiple channels, from search to social. Perhaps you’ve gone out on a limb – maybe even against the recommendation of your CEO or board – and included streaming TV in ... read more

The AdExchanger Commerce Media Newsletter has been on a brief hiatus due to some in-court legal issues (Google’s, not my own) and the call of the conference circuit (Programmatic IO and Advertising Week). But there’s ... read more

Social Butterflies The employees who know Meta’s platform best work there, right? Wrong. The CMO of Meta believes the people who know the platform best are the marketers using the platform. In 2012, when people ... read more

When the peer-to-peer site Napster unleashed digital audio on the web, the record industry couldn’t move fast enough. It took about a year and a half for the first major lawsuit to shut the service ... read more

Another industry research report is raising the alarm about invalid traffic (IVT), exposing glaring vulnerabilities in the programmatic CTV supply chain. A report released Wednesday by curation startup CleanTap claims to have proof that CTV ... read more

Optable introduced AI agents this week, allowing clients to improve their workflows with the help of AI and integrate with multiple tech platforms. The post Optable Rethinks Data Collaboration With The Introduction Of Autonomous AI ... read more

Online advertising’s privacy problem isn’t just about bad actors; it’s about bad metrics, says Marc Guldimann, CEO and founder of attention startup Adelaide. “I think a lot of the invasive behaviors in the ad tech ... read more

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you’re not getting your clicks back.  Today, your customers can discover, decide and often convert without visiting your website. Google, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Amazon, Reddit ... read more

Judge Leonie Brinkema is ready to be done with the DOJ v. Google saga; Amazon DSP comes out on top; and Mozilla brings programmatic ads to to the Firefox browser. The post Judge Brinkema Has ... read more

On the bot-riddled open web, it can be a struggle to prevent ads from being served to invalid traffic (IVT). To filter out IVT and prevent ad serving to bots, the ad industry focuses on ... read more

When it comes to deal curation, data is a differentiator. Index Exchange knows this – hence why the SSP launched what it calls its Data Vendor Ecosystem on Tuesday. The idea is for the product ... read more

Retail media networks (RMNs) burst onto the scene as a transformative solution for lower-funnel, point-of-purchase conversions. It’s no wonder the category is surging: eMarketer projects retail media spending will top $60 billion in the US ... read more

Speaking My Language Duolingo is getting half-serious about advertising.  The language learning app has a base of 47 million daily active users and plenty of attention to harvest. However, Duolingo has been standoffish toward advertising, ... read more

Health care and life sciences have long lagged in digital advertising, still focused on mass-audience approaches. But as the blockbuster drug era fades and precision medicine rises, broad strategies often fail to make precision therapies ... read more

No TIDs? No problem. Well, according to The Trade Desk, at least. In August, Prebid.org made the controversial decision to nix universal Transaction IDs – which advertisers use to track ad transactions across multiple SSPs ... read more

Is programmatic really broken—or just in need of a reset? In this episode of Inside the Stack, Yieldmo founder and CEO Mike Yavonditte joins AdExchanger head of communities Lynne d Johnson to unpack the misalignments ... read more

People don’t really gather around water coolers anymore. But that doesn’t mean streaming and live events can’t still create water cooler moments like there once were for broadcast audiences watching appointment TV. The post Paramount+ ... read more

You know that feeling when you try to develop a post-cookie, privacy-focused advertising identifier but you end up getting sued for allegedly “secretly harvesting and monetizing directly identifiable user data from millions of US residents ... read more

Law firms are targeting marketers for class action suits; Discord is trying to go mainstream; and ICE’s media presence is getting unavoidable. The post Advertisers, Join The Fun!; Finding Clarity In Discord appeared first ... read more

What happens when an ad tech developer partners with a cybersecurity expert to start a new company? You end up with a consumer product that is both a privacy software service and a programmatic advertising ... read more

Enjoy this weekly comic from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem …  The post Comic: The Remedy Phase appeared first on AdExchanger. ... read more

If you didn’t happen to watch the main stage of AdExchanger’s Programmatic IO New York this week, then you missed a great (albeit way too brief) conversation about CTV’s programmatic progress. The post Here’s What ... read more

The Trade Desk insists its OS is still coming; TikTok Shop is becoming a grocery store; and for AI studios, bad press is still press. The post It’s An Adventure Alright; The Thumbstop And Shop ... read more

Maybe advertisers should rethink their involvement in anything that monetizes the attention of kids and teens online – especially as it pertains to new AI chatbots and software. That’s according to former FTC Commissioner Alvaro ... read more

As AI quickly advances and legislators struggle to keep up, it can feel like the Wild West when choosing whether and how to disclose the use of AI in advertising and other communications.  However, even ... read more