Data + Privacy

Build a wall around the right property, and people will line up to get inside. Build one around the wrong property, and eventually you’re the person asking if anyone remembers their AOL password.  Meta is the clean success case. For all the industry’s complaints about opacity, Meta became a walled garden marketers could not ignore […]

I’ve spent over 25 years in this industry, and I’ve staked the last eight of them on a simple bet: a business rooted in responsible practices isn’t at odds with commercial success. It’s hard for me to watch what’s happening right now and stay quiet. Hims & Hers built its business on patients trusting it […]

When Publicis Groupe announced its $2.167 billion acquisition of LiveRamp, the industry found itself asking a question it had never had to ask before. LiveRamp wasn’t one identity vendor among many. It was the connective tissue letting competing agencies, brands and platforms move data and identity across each other’s walled gardens, on the understanding that […]

AI agents could replace direct sales. And a beta product tied to Google’s ad server, dubbed Buyer Direct, could solve this problem better than anyone else, according to our guest Gareth Glaser, co-founder of Gamera and co-host of the podcast Ad Tech Ad Talk.

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 […]