AdExchanger Talks

With Judge Amit Mehta’s ruling expected this fall, Adam Epstein, co-CEO of adMarketplace, breaks down the DOJ’s search-focused antitrust case against Google.

It’s time for advertisers to get more nuanced with their approach to brand safety, says Mia Libby, The Wall Street Journal’s SVP of enterprise. It’s okay to be cautious, but excluding all news from programmatic media plans isn’t the answer.

Once consumers are ready to travel, they’re often ready to spend on almost everything, from beauty and booze to electronics and streaming services. And that creates a unique opportunity for advertisers to reach a new audience with high intent, says Christine Maguire, global VP of commercial business at TripAdvisor.

It’s been almost one year since MediaMath went out of business. Two months later, Infillion acquired the assets out of bankruptcy. Now it’s time for the next phase, says Infillion CRO and CMO Laurel Rossi.

Shoppable TV ads may encourage sales, but they lack the measurement and performance benchmarks advertisers expect. Buyers must create their own benchmarks – and can only do so by actually testing these new ad units, including with their upfront budgets, says Mike Fisher, executive director of investment innovation at GroupM US.

The best way for a brand to devise a company-wide policy for using generative AI responsibly is to get in there and start experimenting with the technology first, says The Brandtech Group’s Betty Louie.

If there’s one thing that makes advertising measurement consultant Andrew Covato roll his eyes and shake his head, it’s the endurance of last-click attribution. Last click may seem “simple” and “tidy,” Covato says, but it doesn’t reflect the full funnel.

Signal loss is real, but don’t write an elegy for data management platforms just yet, says Andy Monfried, CEO and founder of Lotame, which turned 18 this year. Also in this episode: Lotame’s reinvention of itself as a data collaboration platform.

With the rise of generative AI software and major changes to search platforms in just the past year or two, SEO and SEM tactics are back. Everyone and their mother is trying to figure out how to make search work and what the new world of search marketing even looks like. Enter Navah Hopkins.

What is Google’s true motive in launching the Chrome Privacy Sandbox? An optimist might give Google credit for not dropping the hammer like Apple did. But it’s hard not to be a little cynical about Google’s goals, according to Samantha Jacobson, chief strategy officer at The Trade Desk.

Alternative TV currencies are ready for prime time from a technology standpoint. But media buyers aren’t quite there yet when it comes to adoption, says Josh Chasin, VideoAmp’s former chief measurability officer.

Roblox’s head of immersive media Ashley McCollum explains how the online gaming giant built its ad platform with demand for programmatic video in mind. And she previews Roblox’s ambitions to grow an ecommerce platform for real-world purchases.

Quad Media President Joshua Lowcock asks all ad tech partners for log files as a matter of course. And if a company isn’t willing to hand them over, that’s a sign it’s probably hiding something. Plus: The fallacy of scale and pondering the true role of a third-party verification partner.

Cookie deprecation and the reduced availability of mobile ad IDs is rocking the ad tech ecosystem. But signal loss is also an opportunity for a younger company to build new privacy-preserving targeting technology and grab market share, according to Remco Westermann MGI CEO.

Jeromy Sonne began bootstrapping his ad optimization and analytics startup Daypart.AI in 2023, having missed the heady days of low interest rates. Still, there’s gold in them thar hills for a programmatic startup that isn’t exactly a DSP, isn’t built on cookie-based data and is native to cloud-based advertising.

If Alex Schultz, Meta’s CMO and VP of analytics, had his way, the term “performance marketing” would be retired. There isn’t a line [between] brand and performance,” he says. “It all performs.”

It’s been more than a year since Bloomberg stopped running third-party programmatic display ads on its website – and it was the right move, says Christine Cook, Bloomberg Media’s global CRO.

Businesses will always need to find a compromise between privacy and utility, but it’s more than possible to strike a healthy balance, says Graham Mudd, president and chief product officer at privacy startup Anonym.

It’s not that enterprise analytics is broken. The bigger issue, says Obele Brown-West, president of data intelligence platform Tracer, is that enterprise analytics was never all that functional to begin with.

Advertisers expect direct proof of performance from their streaming ad buys. But even though most people don’t shop via their TV screens (yet), new ad formats can still help brands boost consideration, says MediaLink Managing Director Mark Wagman.

If you’re an ad tech or martech vendor thinking about pitching a marketer, then Kamal Bhandal, global VP of brand and consumer experience at Invisalign, has some important advice for you.

“There is no scale in multicultural media.” Lashawnda Goffin, CEO of Colossus SSP, has heard that statement many times – and it simply isn’t true. Yet the misperception persists, in part because of problematic programmatic practices.

Do people hate ads? No, according to Vegard Johnsen, eyeo’s chief product officer. What they don’t like, he says, is not being treated with respect.

Lots of marketers are playing around with generative AI. But for Ally Financial, generative AI is a serious investment, not a game or a gimmick, says CMO Andrea Brimmer.

Over the summer, Gartner placed generative AI at the peak of inflated expectations on its hype cycle covering emerging technologies. Sounds about right. But at the same time, marketers are getting more serious about AI adoption, says Abhay Parasnis, CEO and founder of Typeface.ai.

Rather than a competitor to data clean rooms, Amazon Web Services – which has a data clean room offering of its own – considers itself to be a facilitator of ad tech companies, says Adam Solomon, global head of biz dev and go-to-market for AWS Clean Rooms. Guess there are no competitors in ad tech, only frenemies.

Meet Doceree, a programmatic health care marketing platform with a twist. Rather than allowing brands to target patients on the open web, Doceree has a specialized DSP for targeting doctors with secure messages on physician-only platforms, says CEO Harshit Jain.

Reaching a scaled audience is important for publishers, but scale at all costs is just a race to the bottom in disguise. When publishers have a deep and direct relationship with their readers, advertisers see stronger performance, says Semafor CRO Rachel Oppenheim.

Ad revenue in the US is set to grow in 2024. So pour one out for 2023 – and try not to make the same mistake as last year. Despite a more-than-decent ad market in 2023, media executives nearly manifested a recession out of fear that one was coming, according to professional advertising prognosticator Brian Wieser.

Google’s Performance Max and Meta’s Advantage+ often get tossed into the same bucket, but they’re different animals. And despite certain benefits, advertisers aren’t in love with all that these two have to offer, says Nii Ahene, chief strategy officer at Tinuiti, on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks (our last of 2023!).