Data + Privacy

AI is fueling advertising, and AI agents are running ads. As we close out 2025, take a moment to listen to this AdExchanger Talks interview with Paul Longo, GM of AI in ads for advertising, for his POV on both of those topics.

The VAB has a bone with pick with Nielsen about its Big Data ratings, and Pinterest and TVScientific pair up. Then: Google Ad Manager is making changes in the EU, from getting rid of Unified Pricing Rules to integrating with Prebid and sharing more data with publishers.

For the past three decades, most of digital advertising has revolved around one obsession: performance. Marketers leaned on channels that could prove conversions: search ads, programmatic retargeting and affiliate links. A purchase trackable to a click was gold. Multi-touch attribution (MTA) models thrived. Conversely, brand-building was often dismissed as harder to justify next to the […]

Netflix could acquire Warner Bros., unless Paramount swoops in or regulators intervene. How rearranging the streaming leaders could affect the CTV ad business.

Remember the Cinnamon Challenge, when people filmed themselves trying to swallow a spoonful of ground cinnamon in under a minute?  For a short window in the early 2010s, it was everywhere – until it was gone. Now, it’s mostly remembered as one of those “What were we doing?” internet moments. And don’t get me started […]

AI has changed content creation overnight. What once required time, skill or a production budget can now be spun up in seconds.  That’s led to an explosion of low-quality, made-for-advertising (MFA) content, not just across obscure websites but on social platforms like TikTok, YouTube and Meta.  For years, MFA was a mostly web-based problem: cheap, […]

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 […]