AdExchanger Guest Columnist
Articles By AdExchanger
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingThe AI Chat Ad Frontier: What LLMs Change About Brand Safety And Control
LLM environments introduce new dimensions to brand safety and suitability. Understanding them is the starting point for testing ChatGPT ads.
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingOn Neutral Ground: Why Content Licensing Needs Independent Settlement And Verifiable Payments
The AI content licensing boom is real. But without neutral, scalable infrastructure, it’s on track to repeat programmatic’s trust and transparency failures.
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OPINION: On TV & VideoThe Direct Supply Myth: Why CTV Inventory Looks Better Coming From A Streamer Than Directly From A Publisher
There is a clear set of capabilities that CTV OEMs and streamers can offer advertisers that the original content owner cannot. Here are the most material gaps that the buy side experiences between supply sent from the publisher and supply sent from distributors.
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingA “Pay-For-Performance” Ad Industry? Brands And Agencies Will Need A Referee
WPP is shifting to a pay-for-performance revenue model. But there are many barriers to clear before PFP becomes the industry standard.
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingStop Scaling Mediocre Ads: How AI Can Actually Elevate Performance Marketing
We can’t simply trust AI to make up for bland creative with sheer volume. The real performance shift happens when we use AI to push creativity further.
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingThe DROP Is Coming: Why Fines Under California’s Delete Act Are About to Spike
Data brokers will need to process consumers data-deletion requests every 45 days starting August 1, 2026, or face heavy fines.
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingWhat Happens When The Attribution Cartel Meets Advertising’s Halo Effect?
A proposed standard under discussion at W3C aims to redefine how ad effectiveness is measured across the web. This proposal would centralize measurement of ad effectiveness under the control of Google, Apple and Meta.
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OPINION: On TV & VideoWhy CTV Is Becoming The First Real Test Of Agentic Advertising
CTV never fit cleanly into campaign execution models built for RTB-based trading. Whether agentic AI solutions can simplify the complicated CTV landscape for publishers will be their first real test case.
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingThe Creativity Trade-Off: What Marketers Risk Losing In The Age Of AI
We now have plenty of evidence that AI can be an incredibly useful tool. But proof is also piling up that it erodes our creativity.
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OPINION: The Sell SiderAI Has Already Decided: First-Party Data Will Define Advertising’s Agentic Era
The industry has spent years debating third-party cookies, but AI has settled the debate. First-party data isn’t just preferred; it’s structurally necessary. And the capital is already moving.
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingFrom Trend Spotters To Strategic Translators: How AI Is Reshaping The Marketing Scientist Role
Machines can now flag anomalies, surface trends and spin insights in seconds. Yet, even with its speed, AI still can’t decode the “why” behind the “what.”
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingFive Questions To Ask Before Handing The Keys To Your Programmatic Partner
If you want to protect your margins, your data and your long-term strategy, here are five questions worth asking before you sign anything.
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingAI Perfectionism Is Slowing Marketing Down. Decision Velocity Is The New Advantage
As we head further into 2026, the biggest risk for marketing orgs isn’t choosing the wrong AI – it’s letting “AI perfectionism” delay decisions so long that no decision gets made at all.
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingAI Media Is Already Here. Here's What Marketers Need to Know
Should businesses start advertising on AI media platforms? Yes. But it depends on how consumers in your category are already using AI and how quickly your organization can respond.
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingWhy Programmatic Quality Control Needs To Focus On The Bid Request, Not Domains
If a buyer wants real control, “domain rationalization” alone will never be enough. Buyers need “bid rationalization,” shaping the supply at the bid-request level so they see fewer, better, more outcome-relevant opportunities.
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingOptimization Isn’t A Growth Strategy: The Leadership Decisions Hidden Behind Marketing Metrics
Many organizations are encountering a paradox: Performance appears strong, while durable growth remains elusive. How should performance be evaluated when the strongest signals no longer align cleanly with growth?
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OPINION: On TV & Video
Why Ads.txt Needs To Evolve For Connected TV
Complexity hasn’t made the CTV supply chain difficult to trust. This is a transparency problem and, more specifically, an ads.txt problem.
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingBeyond Automation: How AI Is Rewiring Control In The Ad Tech Stack
The advertising industry is full of noise about AI making buy-side and sell-side processes more efficient. That framing is convenient, but it misses a broader point, writes Snowflake’s Dennis Buchheim.
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingThe Privacy ‘Zealots’ Were Right: Ad Tech’s Infrastructure Was Always A Risk
The US government wants to use digital ad infrastructure for the exact type of surveillance the industry’s critics have long warned about. We should have seen this coming.
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OPINION: On TV & VideoWhy Amazon Is Gaining Ground In CTV And The Trade Desk Is Losing Its Lead
The divergence between the DSPs reveals shifting buy-side priorities. Advertisers have grown wary of how The Trade Desk earns margin, where its algorithm steers inventory and how these strategies compete with buyer goals.
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingWhy Binary Audience Decisions Aren’t Fit For The Agentic Era
Yes/no binary logic was the right tool for programmatic. But autonomous AI agents can evaluate 10 million impressions per second, combining data from hundreds of sources, and human-defined targeting logic can no longer keep pace.
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OPINION: The Sell Sider
No Traffic, No Moat: How AI Breaks The Economics Of Destination Publishing
The future of publishing won’t be defined by where content lives, but by how it’s created, licensed, distributed and valued, writes David Kohl.
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingWhy Retail Media’s Next Phase Depends On Full-Funnel Measurement
The future of retail media depends on a shift away from siloed in-store and online metrics to a full-funnel approach that reflects how customers actually shop.
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OPINION: On TV & VideoLocal Media Needs Consolidation To Compete, But An Outdated Legal Standard Stands In The Way
A 2004 statute prevents owning enough TV stations to reach 39% of households. But without the scale afforded to other digital content companies, local TV is at a competitive disadvantage.
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingWhy Smart Marketers Look Beyond The Leading Platforms To Deliver Outcomes
Brands allocating a sizable chunk of their marketing budgets outside of Google and Meta achieve the best customer acquisition costs, proving that diversification is a performance strategy.
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingWhen Conversation Becomes Inventory: How OpenAI Could Reshape Digital Advertising
For brands, this opens a new lever beyond impressions. For publishers, this is a business problem, as their first-party data and on-site inventory could become less valuable for targeting.
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OPINION: On TV & VideoCleaning Up CTV Supply: A Publisher’s Guide To Reducing Ad Fraud
When it comes to managing fraud, there are four steps CTV publishers should take to remove bad actors from the supply chain.
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OPINION: On TV & VideoWhy 'Performance CTV' Is A Misnomer: TV Works Best As A Full-Funnel Channel
“Performance CTV” oversimplifies how television actually drives value, and the focus on performance all but guarantees that campaign results will be misinterpreted.
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingThe Fastest Path To Agentic AI In Advertising Isn’t Reinvention. It’s Using Existing Standards
Ripping out battle-tested infrastructure and starting from scratch – as some emerging agentic protocols propose – is the slowest and most painful path to advertising’s agentic future.
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingWhat Meta’s Andromeda Update Actually Changes – And What It Doesn’t
The brands seeing the greatest lift from Andromeda have adjusted not by outsourcing judgment to the algorithm but by refining their creative strategy. Here are three best practices to keep in mind.