Data + Privacy

The next internet will not be built by humans clicking buttons; it will be built by agents acting on behalf of people, brands, publishers, platforms and enterprises.  Some of these agents will be simple workflow assistants. Others will manage budgets, audiences, inventory and outcomes with increasing autonomy across systems that were never designed to work […]

Women’s sports is having a moment as publishers, advertisers and the tech vendors in between try to capitalize on rising viewership. Digital out-of-home is having a moment, too.

Every industry develops narratives that begin as useful simplifications and eventually become accepted truths. Advertising is no different. But the problem is that many of these narratives survive long after the market has stopped validating them.  The industry says streaming television is becoming a performance channel, then acts surprised when television behaves like television and […]

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 […]