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On Neutral Ground: Why Content Licensing Needs Independent Settlement And Verifiable Payments

The content licensing economy has arrived faster than anyone expected. Microsoft and Amazon have both entered the marketplace business. Venture-backed startups like TollBit and ProRata have built infrastructure for publishers to license their content to LLMs. And, in 2025, AI companies committed an estimated $2.9 billion in licensing fees to a relatively small number of […]

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Marketers

Is Agentic Commerce An Oasis Or Mirage?

This week, I’m ruminating on the word mirage. It is a useful term for the ongoing debate over if and when agentic shopping – as in, people assigning agents the latitude and payment info to make purchases on their behalf – will actually happen. Unlike “illusion,” say, or a term like “potential” or “promise,” the […]

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The Big Story

Identity Without Oversight

If a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound? And if a UID2 doesn’t work — does anyone notice? Inside a UID2 mix-up that has a publisher questioning the value of alt IDs. Then, what Kochava’s settlement with the FTC means for any ad tech company that handles location data.

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Marketers

The Trade Desk Has A Grand Vision, But Needs A New Breed Of CMO To Make It A Reality

The Trade Desk made $689 million in Q1 2026, up 12% from the period last year, while its net income and profit margin dipped slightly to $40 million and 6%, respectively, according to its quarterly earnings report on Thursday. The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green warned of difficult macroeconomic headwinds that make for cautious marketers. […]

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View on Demand

Beyond the Roadmap: What Agencies That Ship AI Actually Do Differently

AI Digital Labs surveyed independent agencies and brand-side teams on AI adoption — not aspirations, not intentions, but operational reality. The results were blunt: 66% are stuck in experimentation purgatory. More than half can’t articulate a differentiated AI story. Almost none have production-grade tools built around their actual workflows, yet nearly half say that’s the […]

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Marketers

Criteo Faces Tough Headwinds Until Agentic AI Ad Revenue Materializes

Criteo shares dropped by 20% Wednesday morning after the company reported shaky Q1 earnings and revised its guidance downward for the rest of the year. The amount spent by advertisers on Criteo was up, and exceeded $1 billion for the first time in Q1 (generally the lowest ebb of the year for advertising overall). But […]

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AI

POSSIBLE 2026: Industry Experts Dish On AI – And Other Trends To Watch

At POSSIBLE 2026 in Miami, the ad industry was over the hype around AI. Industry experts got real about how agentic AI is actually changing advertising workflows today. And they called out the pie-in-the-sky use cases that could be longer-term possibilities for AI, but that aren’t currently – pardon the pun – possible. In conversations […]

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AI

Will OpenAI’s New Measurement Tools And Ads Manager Prove Its Worth As An Ad Channel?

Now that OpenAI is in the ad platform business, the next step is getting into the prove-your-ads-work business. Enter the OpenAI conversion API (CAPI), which the company announced on Tuesday along with the public launch of its self-serve ads manager, a cost-per-click bidding product (which is native to search advertisers, compared to the programmatic CPM) […]

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AdExchanger Talks

Manscaped’s Whole‑Body Media Strategy

Behind the scenes with Manscaped CMO Marcelo Kertész on the brand’s first Super Bowl spot – a musical ad starring singing hair balls (just watch it) – and how he’s shifting Manscaped’s marketing from performance-heavy DTC to a broader, brand-led strategy.

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Data-Driven Thinking

A “Pay-For-Performance” Ad Industry? Brands And Agencies Will Need A Referee

The very concept of AI and its impact on select industries is enough to cause dramatic swings in stock market sectors and wild future-of-work predictions. But when the world’s largest ad agency talks about changing its revenue model – and trots out a real-world client example to back it up – people pay attention. In […]

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