Ad Tech

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  AdExchanger Talks

  Healthy Growth In The Age Of AI

  Mary Beech, chief growth officer at health-and-wellness brand Thorne, shares how she’s turning marketing into a growth engine amid AI-driven discovery and chatbots that get loose with the facts.

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  AI

  The Boring Infrastructure That Could Make Agentic AI Happen For Ad Tech

  For all the talk about AI transforming marketing, many brands still wait weeks just to push a single audience from a CRM into paid media – a lag that’s hard to square with the rise of autonomous AI agents. “But that’s actually pretty normal in the industry,” said Rio Longacre, a partner and global ad […]

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  Marketers

  Behind NYT’s First Foray Into In-Game Advertising

  Crossplay is NYT’s first two-player game, and marks the first time that users will see ads within the game experience itself.

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  AdExplainer

  Understanding MCP, The ‘Universal Adapter’ For AI In Advertising

  If there are two things ad tech isn’t short on, it’s acronyms and, more recently, AI product demos. But MCP – short for Model Context Protocol – is more than another TLA (sorry, three-letter acronym) or AI buzzword. Metaphorically speaking, it’s plumbing for AI: the piping that lets large language models connect to other software […]

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  AI

  AI-Driven Software Startup Mega Raises $11.5 Million In Funding To Help SMBs Drive Sales

  Mega’s software tools aim to take some of the work out of the user’s hands by automating brand’s strategy development, execution and reporting.

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  Data-Driven Thinking

  The Privacy ‘Zealots’ Were Right: Ad Tech’s Infrastructure Was Always A Risk

  I’ve been saying for years that addressable advertising was a strategic mistake. Not because targeting shouldn’t exist, but because building an ecosystem dependent on granular identity, location trails and behavioral signals was always going to create exposure we couldn’t fully control.  And if we’re being honest, the precision targeting story was oversold anyway. The industry […]

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  CTV Roundup

  Paramount Skydance Is Trying To Buy WBD. Now What?

  Late last week, Netflix walked away from plans to acquire Warner Bros., clearing the way for Paramount Skydance to scoop up the whole company with its hostile takeover bid. But if his merger really does happen, what would it mean on a practical level for the TV advertising industry writ large?

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  Marketers

  Inside Life360’s Plan To Build An Ad Platform On Top Of Nativo

  Family-safety app Life360 has been quietly building an ad tech stack. Last year, it made two acquisitions: Fantix’s advertising unit in February, then publisher-focused ad platform Nativo in November for $120 million. Fantix, an AI platform for privacy-safe targeting and measurement, helped Life360 take its first steps into advertising. Life360 is applying the tech to understand […]

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  The Big Story

  Will The Trade Desk Right-Size Its Margins?

  Fees, fees, fees. The Trade Desk is facing market pressure in all directions: from rival DSPs offering lower fee structures, SSPs and agencies clashing over its OpenPath product and bearish investors disappointed with growth. Guest Sarah Caputo, founder of consultancy Fraction Method, tells us why The Trade Desk should reduce its margin and make its fees more transparent.

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  Marketers

  Men’s Wearhouse Grows Its Audience Through A Campaign Run Solely On Digital Audio

  It can be hard to measure the effect of advertising on in-person sales. Men’s Wearhouse partnered with measurement agency Ovative to see what was working.

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