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How Ecommerce Brands Are Finding Customers During A Tempest Of Headwinds

Americans are dealing with tumultuous change. For an ecommerce ad agency, that means navigating the same tariff craziness, Temu advertisements being pulled from the US market, the Meta ad platform going haywire and platform AI solutions all looking to replace human agency services.

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The Big Story

Bots And Games Are Back (For Ad Tech)

What’s old is new. Time is a flat circle. Trends are cyclical. Choose your idiom, because this week’s episode grapples with two topics that are not new to online advertising, but have both roared back into the public consciousness. The first is the scourge of bot traffic, scrutiny courtesy of a recent Adalytics report, and […]

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Online Advertising

WPP Acquires Data Clean Room Startup InfoSum

WPP has bought InfoSum, a data clean room and collaboration startup. Terms of the deal, announced on Thursday, were not disclosed. This acquisition reunites InfoSum with Brian Lesser, its former CEO. InfoSum will sit within GroupM, now led by Lesser, who was chairman and CEO of InfoSum until he joined WPP in September.

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Marketers

Meet The Free Gaming Platform – Founded By An Ad Tech Vet – That’s Putting CTV Ads In Video Games

It is a rare occurrence for successful ad tech entrepreneurs to venture out of the B2B software landscape and into the consumer-facing world. But the attempt is not unheard of. The latest example came last month when André Swanston, co-founder and former CEO of Tru Optik – which sold to TransUnion in 2020 – raised […]

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Online Advertising

Viant Acquires Lockr, And It’s All About Connecting IDs

Viant announced that it acquired Lockr, a consumer and business service for managing email inboxes and data opt-ins, during its Q4 earnings call on Monday. The goal is to connect the identity Lockr gets from its publisher tech with Viant’s identity graph. The company reported fast growth in its TV-focused DSP business in Q4, earning […]

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Online Advertising

IAS Outperforms Ad Tech’s Q4 Slump And Outgrows Its Verification Roots

Integral Ad Science broke a streak of punishing quarterly earnings reports for public ad tech companies when it announced better-than-expected Q4 results on Friday morning. The company’s total revenue of $153 million in Q4 was up 14% year over year. IAS earned $530 million in 2024 at a 12% growth rate. IAS shares jumped by […]

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Online Advertising

‘Is The Open Internet Healthy?’ Magnite Reports CPMs Dipped In Q4

Magnite ended up with a scrappy 4% year-over-year growth rate in Q4 2024, after a sudden, unexpected drop in display and online video CPMs during November and December, which caused the company to miss its revenue guidance. At least that’s the story from Magnite’s quarterly earnings report on Wednesday afternoon. Magnite, an independent SSP, earned […]

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AI

Seeing Through The Hype: The Difference Between AI And Machine Learning In Marketing

Artificial intelligence is inescapable nowadays. There’s generative AI to create an ad and AI platforms to manage campaigns. Your refrigerator and maybe even your toothbrush have AI embedded in them. Or at least that’s what it says on the box. There are many open questions for marketers who want to implement AI-driven ad tech – and […]

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Marketers

The Trade Desk Promises Big Changes After Missing Its Q4 Guidance

Oh my, oh my. “For the first time in 8.5 years as a public company, our results came in below expectations,” The Trade Desk CFO Laura Schenkein told investors during the company’s Q4 and full-year 2024 earnings reports on Wednesday. “It was on us,” she said. When the company sets revenue guidance, as opposed to […]

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Marketers

Lawmakers Demand Answers From Ad Tech Vendors Allegedly Monetizing CSAM

On Friday, Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn) sent co-written letters to Amazon, Google, Integral Ad Science, DoubleVerify, the MRC and TAG notifying the companies that they have been identified as “responsible for serving or certifying” ads on pages hosting child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The letters request answers to questions about how […]

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