Data + Privacy

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 […]

Amazon’s million-dollar sellers are revolting against changes that undercut their margins and change where their ads run. From inside a meeting of these discontented sellers, AdExchanger Senior Editor James Hercher shares how they are fighting back – and why Amazon made these changes.

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 […]

Marketers are rediscovering MMM. Google Meridian and Meta Robyn are among the tools gaining attention among marketers. We dive into what it means to tie your MMM solution to a search or social media giant. 

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

From avoiding AI slop to achieving show-level transparency on a CTV buy, we talk through how buyers are supercharging performance by focusing on the content where they place their ads.

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 […]

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 […]