Data + Privacy

For 22 years, I have worked on the buy side – across agencies, brands and now at their intersection – helping buyers navigate ad tech and helping ad tech understand buyers. This past year, I have found a clear common cause: Buyers are exhausted. They spend too much time tracking changes, managing campaign and budget […]

Google won’t have to break up its ads business after being declared an online monopolist. Meanwhile, Amazon faces a lawsuit from the FTC alleging that it charged advertisers more than necessary for ecommerce ads.

Google Ads recently changed how target-based bidding behaves on budget-limited campaigns. The algorithm now bids more aggressively to track closer to whatever target ROAS or CPA you’ve set, regardless of historical performance. Google flagged the change in advance and was transparent about the expected outcome: a campaign with a $10 target CPA that has been […]

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.

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 […]

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.

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.