Data + Privacy

Consumer spending on Black Friday Cyber Monday was up 7%. But prices are high, and the most affluent customers are doing the most spending in the US. Plus: the challenges faced by the ad buyers managing campaigns on Meta during Glitchmas.

Broadsign’s acquisition of Place Exchange last week is a defining moment for programmatic out-of-home (OOH).  But it is not the endgame; it is merely the setup. The OOH stack is being rebuilt from the inside out. The final owner is not yet in the room. When you look at the sequence of recent deals, the […]

YouTube is more transparent than CTV. Let that sink in.  In 2025, the fastest-growing segment in programmatic media is now less transparent than the walled garden we have spent the last decade criticizing for opacity. And the consequences are already showing up in the market. Look where the major media companies landed this quarter. Disney […]

Generative AI is the new ad land obsession: a shiny promise of a fully autonomous world of self-driving advertising.  But behind the hype lies the costly delusion that automation can replace judgment and more content somehow means better marketing. We’ve entered the age of machine-made abundance, where content can be generated faster than it can […]

Inside Omnicom’s shift in spend from The Trade Desk DSP to Amazon DSP.

Private right of action isn’t just a talking point for future privacy laws; it’s already law. The California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA) has included an individual’s right to bring a civil suit since 1967. With privacy under unprecedented attack by data brokers and social media, it is the wrong time to weaken these protections, […]

The world of marketing measurement is buzzing about AI. But when it comes to complex techniques like media mix modeling (MMM), the field is awash with false promises about the benefits that these new technologies offer. This creates enormous risks for enterprise marketers who regularly base multimillion-dollar decisions on such models. The hard truth is […]

Every once in a while, we like to pull the curtain back here at AdExchanger and discuss how we decide what’s worth covering. Which is why this week’s episode of The Big Story opens with an important question: Why do we report on earnings calls in the first place?

A new survey from Forrester suggests that many B2C CMOs are planning to make the customer experience (CX) their top priority in 2026 — a notable shift from last year, when CX didn’t even crack the top five priorities in the same survey.

Low-quality, AI-generated content – or AI slop – is flooding the open web. The entire digital ecosystem is adapting to the challenges that generative AI’s exponential growth presents.  As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about media waste and ROAS, I’ve seen how easy it is for bad actors to spin up thousands […]