Data + Privacy
The Trade Desk’s Bumpy Ride Down
The Trade Desk’s recent reduction of 15% of its workforce comes after nearly two years of challenges on Wall Street, leadership turnover and bumpy product decisions. Independent analyst Richard Kramer comes on to dissect how Wall Street views TTD – and what it got wrong in the first place.
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The Big Story
There’s A Meta Diaspora Building The Fastest-Growing Ad Platforms
The great Meta migration is in full swing. Ex-Meta employees are, filling the ranks at Open AI, TikTok, Amazon Ads and Roku and bringing their expertise with them.
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Data-Driven Thinking
Marketers, The Free Token Lunch Is Over. Is Your Stack Ready?
Anthropic just dropped Claude Sonnet 5, reigniting a broader debate about how AI should be priced. Some argue that published token rates no longer tell the full economic story because changes in token consumption and model behavior, such as the use of reasoning tokens, can materially affect real-world costs. Meanwhile, other alternatives like Fable 5 […]
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The Big Story
Bridging The World Of TV And Ad Tech
Senior editors Victoria McNally and Alyssa Boyle chat about why ad tech insiders should learn more about the larger TV media industry (via our sister brand Cynopsis!), and what’s new in the world of home screen ads.
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Data-Driven Thinking
I Used An AI Agent To Do My Back-To-School Shopping. It Was Easy. So Why Do I Feel Sad?
Back-to-school shopping is one of my most treasured late-summer activities. When the school supply list came out as a kid, I would wait with anticipation until my mom could drive me to Office Max in her minivan. I’d spend as long as I could in the store deliberating between seven different types of highlighters and […]
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Data-Driven Thinking
Your Team Is Working Faster With AI, But Are They Really Getting Better Results?
A lot of marketing leaders are wondering whether AI is really bringing incremental value to their business. Teams are moving faster than ever. Campaign briefs, social copy, first-pass creative and competitive research can now be produced in a fraction of the time it used to take. Yet it’s not clear if the work is actually […]
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Data-Driven Thinking
For Agentic Advertising To Work, We Must Decide What AI Can Never Touch
Every company in our space is wrestling with what their agentic AI strategy is. The answer that seems obvious is to wire up an LLM, give it access to Meta or Google through MCP and put it to work. The reality is more complicated, and the complications matter a lot when it’s your budget on […]
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The Big Story
AppLovin’s Play To Reach Non-Gaming Advertisers
Gaming apps are filled with ads for more gaming apps. Why not other advertisers? We go inside AppLovin’s play to bring non-gaming advertisers into the fold.
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Data-Driven Thinking
Walmart’s Wall: Will The Vibe Deal Make It Meta, Or Another AOL?
Build a wall around the right property, and people will line up to get inside. Build one around the wrong property, and eventually you’re the person asking if anyone remembers their AOL password. Meta is the clean success case. For all the industry’s complaints about opacity, Meta became a walled garden marketers could not ignore […]
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Data-Driven Thinking
Ad Tech’s Trust Problem Isn’t Going Away. We Just Stopped Talking About It
I’ve spent over 25 years in this industry, and I’ve staked the last eight of them on a simple bet: a business rooted in responsible practices isn’t at odds with commercial success. It’s hard for me to watch what’s happening right now and stay quiet. Hims & Hers built its business on patients trusting it […]
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Data-Driven Thinking
Ad Tech’s Last Neutral Party Just Picked A Side
When Publicis Groupe announced its $2.167 billion acquisition of LiveRamp, the industry found itself asking a question it had never had to ask before. LiveRamp wasn’t one identity vendor among many. It was the connective tissue letting competing agencies, brands and platforms move data and identity across each other’s walled gardens, on the understanding that […]
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