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Three Advertising Industry Myths The Market Has Already Debunked

Every industry develops narratives that begin as useful simplifications and eventually become accepted truths. Advertising is no different. But the problem is that many of these narratives survive long after the market has stopped validating them. The industry says streaming television is becoming a performance channel, then acts surprised when television behaves like television and […]

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Data-Driven Thinking

Google’s Buyer Direct Could Beat Agentic Ad Tech At Its Own Game

The new agentic world is exciting. Not a day goes by that I don’t discuss something cool I’ve seen using Claude or realize that I can now vibe code an app to handle a task for my wife. But with all new things, there’s a risk of neglecting our product management discipline in the bliss […]

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Data-Driven Thinking

Advertising’s Next Audience Isn’t Human. So We Must Rethink The Value Of Non-Human Traffic

For years, advertising has been all about reaching the right human at the right time. That premise, however, is shifting in an unexpected way. Agentic AI has created new complexity, with autonomous “agents” that can increasingly evaluate, compare and execute decisions, from product research to actual purchases. Human-to-agent isn’t an incremental change. It’s a structural […]

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Data-Driven Thinking

First-Party Data Is About More Than Retargeting And Audience Suppression

Brands have spent years and serious money building a direct understanding of their customers within analytics platforms, CDPs, loyalty programs, consent frameworks and CRM systems. And yet, when it comes time to make a media buy, they still hand the process over to algorithms shaped by someone else’s data. In 2011, AdExchanger asked me to […]

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Data-Driven Thinking

Q2 2026 Was The Quarter AI Media Started To Scale

Advertising in AI-native destinations and experiences is already starting to look less like a series of experiments and more like an emerging market. Three months ago, I argued that AI platforms had started acting like media companies. Now, the conversation has already changed. It wasn’t simply that OpenAI introduced ads in ChatGPT and advertisers started […]

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Data-Driven Thinking

The Open Web Is Shifting From An Audience Economy To A Context Economy

The open web is moving beyond identity-based systems built around audience data to context systems that understand who a person is, where they are, what surrounds them and what’s happening right now. We already know what this next stage of open web ad tech will look like. At my daughter’s recent dance studio gala, a […]

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Data-Driven Thinking

AI Agents Are Making Marketing Decisions On Data No One Has Checked In Years

Ask anyone in ad tech about data governance, and they’ll talk about the supply side. The industry spent years building verification frameworks for publishers and sellers, proving that the data powering supply-side decisions is what it claims to be. Standards exist, enforcement is maturing and the consensus is clear: If automated systems act on your […]

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Data-Driven Thinking

Cannes 2026: The Humans Strike Back

I’ve been making the annual June pilgrimage to the Côte d’Azur long enough to recognize the difference between conversations that will still matter in September and those that evaporate faster than rosé in 95-degree heat. Threaded through every serious discussion at the Cannes Lions this year, I detected a growing consensus that humans in the […]

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Data-Driven Thinking

The Paradox Of Personalization: Billions Of AI-Tailored Ads Creates A Measurement Mess

The dawn of digital advertising came with a seductive promise: the right ad served at the right time to the right person. We were told this paradigm would finally solve John Wanamaker’s century-old conundrum, eliminating the legendary 50% of wasted ad spend. It was a beautiful fantasy. Setting aside the dystopian, “Minority Report”-style surveillance required […]

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Data-Driven Thinking

Why Prediction Is Replacing Precision For Outcome-Driven Advertising

For years, the advertising model was contextual. If an insurance provider wanted to sell its product, it would prioritize advertising on insurance-related sites. The thinking was that you had to go where the signals were strongest. Only those actively visiting a site that offers information about what insurance packages to buy could be guaranteed to […]

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