Artificial Intelligence

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a test case for how ad tech can be used as an instrument of psychological warfare. But some ad tech companies are fighting back with their own AI-powered tools.

There’s been such a deluge of data privacy-related news over the past few weeks – from the TikTok ban in Montana to the $1.3 billion GDPR fine against Meta in Europe – I hardly know what to focus on.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Who Needs Trust And Safety? Big Tech companies are eliminating thousands of positions.  Layoffs have largely impacted trust and safety and AI ethics teams, CNBC reports. Meta announced plans to cut 21,000 jobs in 2023, a culling CEO Mark Zuckerberg described as the […]

From a data-fueled TV upfronts to recent changes in streaming pricing, ad load and bundles, the TV industry is making progress under pressure. Plus: Google’s third-party cookieless plan and new AI features.

ArcSpan’s new DMP, called AMS, was specifically built to organize a publisher’s first-party data into buyable contextual audiences and also highlights which audiences are likely to drive the most revenue.

What’s in a name? Quite a lot, says David Placek, founder and CEO of Lexicon Branding, which specializes in inventing product names, including Dasani, Swiffer, Impossible Burger and Febreze, to name just a few.

Forget Skynet. The robot revolution will be fought between large ad platforms (mainly Google, Meta and Amazon) trying to woo advertisers with generative AI and promises of better performance.

It’s up to technology and media companies to decide whether AI will be an atomic bomb that annihilates countless jobs or if it will power the workforce’s next leap in productivity.

Instead of keeping tabs on static data assets, organizations must adapt to a world in which data is embedded in ubiquitous and rapidly evolving AI tools. 

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Cut Us In, Or Cut It Out Twitter is ticked off at Microsoft over data use. Elon Musk outlined his grievances in a letter sent by his personal lawyer, Alex Spiro, to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Thursday, The New York Times reports. […]

Why is there so much misinformation circulating online? Because, unfortunately, “it’s a great business,” says L. Gordon Crovitz, co-founder of NewsGuard, which estimates that advertisers are funneling as much as $2.6 billion a year programmatically to misinformation websites.

Meta is allocating an increasing percentage of the billions of dollars it spends annually on its infrastructure toward building the company’s “capacity for artificial intelligence,” says John Hegeman, Meta’s VP of monetization.

Historically, AppLovin made most of its revenue from its portfolio of apps. Now the company appears to be nearly finished with the bloodletting necessary to transform itself into a primarily software-focused business.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Prompt And Search-umstance Google is ramping up its AI capabilities for its flagship search product, The Drum reports. During its Google I/O developer conference on Wednesday, the company announced it’s launching Search Labs, an experimental program aimed at expanding AI search functionality. The […]

BuzzFeed is sticking to its conviction that journalism is old news and influencer-led video and generative AI are the future.

On Tuesday, agency holding company Stagwell reported $622 million in Q1 revenue – a 3% decrease year over year – and $53 million in Q1 net-new business, a 1% decrease YoY, according to CFO Frank Lanuto. The company’s stock was down nearly 10% on the news.

Zitron argues that the internet is being ruined by the Big Tech players that control it and that advertising needs to lose its sense of entitlement over everyone’s data.

Ad tech and cloud tech are converging; there’s no doubt about that. But how much of ad tech will get eaten by cloud platforms? That’s harder to answer, says Myles Younger, head of innovation and insights at U of Digital.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Video Jockeys The Trade Desk publicly adopted the IAB Tech Lab’s new video protocols, which create more specificity around the type of online video ads being bought, Adweek reports. The news worried some publishers who run low-quality videos, like easily ignored spots or […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The All-In Risk The natural state for digital media monetization isn’t 100% advertising or all subscriptions, but some balance of both. The Athletic couldn’t get by on subscriptions alone, and BuzzFeed News died on the ad-only vine. But media companies are now creating […]

Trebel Music has released a ChatGPT-powered product called Trebel AI, which instantly generates personalized playlists in response to natural language queries. Advertisers on Trebel AI can target users in the moment based on their intent.

Apple’s ATT spurred Meta to shore up its ad platform and make it less vulnerable to future changes on other platforms – but that doesn’t change the fact that regulators remain ready and raring to crack down.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Can’t Spell “Brain Drain” Without AIs Silicon Valley giants bet the house on machine learning software to automate their businesses, and bringing that same automation to advertisers.  Meta, Alphabet and Microsoft execs used the word “AI” more than 200 times in investor calls […]

Agency holding company WPP met its own expectations in the first quarter of the year. Standout GroupM, its media buying and planning agency, contributed to about 36% of WPP’s Q1 revenue, growing 6.1% in Q1.

The new hot trend in platform advertising is to put the machines in charge of everything. It’s true of Google, true of Meta and, even more so as of this week, it’s true of Amazon.

Meta has managed to defy gravity yet again. On Wednesday, at the same time that ecommerce and DTC advertisers remained on tenterhooks after a major bug wreaked overspending havoc in Meta’s advertising platform over the weekend, the company’s stock soared by more than 11% during after-hours trading based on its first quarter results. Meta’s total […]

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…

One-third of Publicis Group’s revenue comes from its data and tech business, which includes Epsilon and Publicis Sapient. Maintaining a differentiated revenue mix is one reason why Publicis is growing faster than the global economy, particularly since the pandemic, chairman and CEO Arthur Sadoun told investors on Thursday.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Europe? More Like ‘You’re Out’ In 2018, a handful of American ad tech startups abandoned the EU when their services became (more likely than not) verboten. Drawbridge, for instance, left Europe when it became clear that regulators had cross-device graphs in their crosshairs. […]

Omnicom saw 5.2% organic revenue growth, or $178.7 million YoY, in the first quarter of 2023. The agency holding company reported total revenues of $3.44 billion, with net income up by 30.9% to $227.5 million, according to the company’s earnings call Tuesday.