Ad Tech

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  AI

  AI Needs Humans In The Lead, Not Just In The Loop, Says JPMorgan Chase Programmatic Lead

  Hot take: Sometimes, having more guardrails isn’t a limitation. Instead, the added responsibilities can actually make automation easier, according to Melissa Bonnick, EVP, head of programmatic for JPMorgan Chase. As a financial services company, JPMorgan Chase is beholden to stricter rules than brands in most other verticals. But those restrictions make it easy to communicate […]

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  The Big Story

  Prog AI Live: AI’s Slippery Slop

  Recorded live in Las Vegas at Prog AI, the AdExchanger team tackles a tricky question: As AI floods the feed with chaotic, addictive content and people engage with it, what does “premium” even mean anymore?

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  AI

  AI Is Finally Doing Real Work In Ad Ops (But Only When It Works With Your Existing Tech)

  For all the AI-in-ad-ops talk, plenty of publisher teams are still trapped in the grind of pulling GAM reports by hand and trying to reverse engineer why revenue dropped. At Programmatic AI in Las Vegas, Jordan Cauley, who launched a publisher monetization tech consultancy after an eight-plus-year stint as a product lead at Mediavine, made […]

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  AdExplainer

  The Programmatic Auction Is Changing In Real Time – Here’s How

  Programmatic advertising has changed a lot in the nearly 20 years since the first RTB ad auction. On the surface, programmatic is just the automated buying and selling of digital ads. Under the hood, there’s a complex, high-speed auction system that decides in milliseconds which ads appear across display, video, CTV, audio, retail and other […]

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  Data-Driven Thinking

  Making Marketing More Modular: What Agentic AI Can Learn From The Shipping Container Revolution

  Today’s explosion of AI service providers has everyone looking back at the dot-com bubble, revisiting the technological boom and bust at the turn of the millennia for historical precedent to help us separate real innovation from BS.  History is a valuable teacher, but I look beyond the history of the ad tech industry for inspiration. […]

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  Data-Driven Thinking

  Brands Don’t Need Perfect Data To Use AI

  There is a common refrain that AI requires high-quality data to deliver high-quality results. “Garbage in/garbage out” refers to the idea that any AI trained on less than perfect data will not be able to produce valuable outputs. Before I get accused of dismissing the importance of quality data, high-quality data does produce the best […]

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  AdExchanger Talks

  Influencer Marketing Grows Up

  If creators want brand dollars, they have to play by the rules of data-driven marketing and measurement, says Ryan Detert, CEO and co-founder of Publicis-owned influencer marketing platform Influential.

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  Marketers

  Publicis Acquires LiveRamp In A Major Shakeup For Indie Data Collaboration

  Hundreds of exasperated and unexpected ad industry phone calls were made on Sunday, as agencies and ad tech vendors discussed the fallout of Publicis Groupe’s $2.2 billion acquisition of LiveRamp over the weekend. Publicis has roughly doubled its market cap over the past four years, as other agency holdcos and ad tech businesses have struggled. […]

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  AI

  These AI Agents Want To Handle All The Annoying Parts Of Media Buying

  It’s the great irony of programmatic. The bidding is automated down to the millisecond, but the day-to-day work of running campaigns is still largely manual, from copying data between systems and reconciling reports to running QA checks and drafting explanations for clients when metrics don’t line up. “Inside of the platforms, it’s AI everywhere – but […]

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  CTV Roundup

  Let’s Be Upfront About Performance

  During upfronts, publishers flexed their ad performance muscles at media buyers all week long in an effort to appeal to the biggest demands media buyers have during their upfront negotiations: flexibility and results.

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