Data + Privacy

Google’s SSP and ad server businesses have been ruled monopolies. And Google Chrome isn’t going to change its third-party cookie opt-ins, further preserving third-party cookies. Go inside this momentous news.

A long-simmering antitrust battle concerning Google’s ad tech business has reached a decisive turning point.  On April 17, 2025, US District Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled that Google violated sections one and two of the Sherman Act. She found that Google monopolized the open-web display publisher ad server market (via DFP) and the ad exchange market […]

Marketers looking to drive more social commerce revenue should lean into discounts for social offers, craft visually appealing posts that resonate with their audience and sprinkle a little humor into the mix.

Temu pulled back on its US ad spend this week, as tariffs loom. Plus, in France, the ATT prompt was deemed anticompetitive and, as a result, will likely need to be changed.

When I started working with marketers in the early 2000s, they were advertising on fewer digital channels than today, and there were fewer nefarious challenges, like fraud and malicious advertising attacks. But brand marketing has gotten more challenging over the years. Today, marketers expect their partners to monitor and measure viewability, engagement and conversions, because […]

Many well-intentioned advertising standards efforts gather digital dust. Others have even shut down in the face of lawsuits claiming insufficiently broad industry engagement. Why?  Because we mistake the release of a proposal for the achievement of standardization and create more noise than clarity.  My standards journey began with IAB’s Future of the Cookie (FotC) working […]

The Trump tariff situation is in constant flux, creating uncertainty that spells doom for any potential growth in US ad spending this year. Plus, how retail media and other emerging channels could be threatened by tariff turmoil.

It’s tempting to think AI models can hack their way to the best solution possible, no matter how basic the input we give. But feeding clean first-party data to AI models is an absolute prerequisite to ensuring that the output is on-brand and accurate. And there is little value in generating five times more content […]

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 […]

Advertisers and their agency partners are well-versed in assembling audiences based on who they want to reach. Yet effective audience composition isn’t simply about deciding who is ideal; it’s also about determining who should be excluded. Audience suppression is a superpower that many advertisers don’t realize they have. When used effectively, it can be the […]