Data + Privacy

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 […]

How can companies put ads in new places, but still get the user experience right? Smart TV home screens, like Samsung, are adding programmatic ads. Roblox will show ads to kids under 13. We look at the challenges and opportunities faced by platforms expanding their ad footprint.

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 […]

A word of caution to digital advertising companies, as they go all in on AI algorithms: They need to build these solutions with ownership, governance and accountability from the start – or AI could sink them with a single mistake.

The W3C’s proposed “Attribution Level 1” browser standard deserves far more scrutiny from the advertising and measurement community than it has so far received. The public comment period remains open through June 10. At a moment when advertisers face enormous pressure to justify spending and many publishers outside the largest platforms are struggling economically, industry […]

The biggest AI risk in digital advertising is probably not the one most people are talking about. It’s not creative generation. It’s not job replacement. It’s not whether AI can optimize campaigns faster than humans. The real risk is what happens when autonomous systems begin making commercial decisions without clear ownership, governance or accountability. That […]

You know the call. It happens every month, sometimes every week: The DSP number doesn’t match the SSP number. Nobody is sure whose pixel fired twice. The deal you activated three weeks ago is still not delivering. The brand safety report came back clean, but the placement was anything but. A meaningful percentage of your […]

TV piracy of sports streams is siphoning away millions of viewers. Then: Vox Media and BuzzFeed found new owners this spring, punctuating the end of the pageview era.

Every era of advertising is defined by what its reporting layer cannot see. In the 1960s, the industry was defined by the Nielsen diary. Households recorded their viewing on paper and mailed it back. Advertisers and broadcasters waited weeks for the data. Nielsen’s diary wasn’t replaced because it was wrong, but because it was slow. […]

Recorded live in Las Vegas at Prog AI, the AdExchanger team tackles a tricky question: As AI floods the feed with chaotic, addictive content and people engage with it, what does “premium” even mean anymore?