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AdExchanger Guest Columnist
Articles By AdExchanger Guest Columnist
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingFirst-Party Data Is About More Than Retargeting And Audience Suppression
When an advertiser trains a model on its full organic converter base, it can better identify patterns that distinguish a casual browser from someone close to buying.
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingQ2 2026 Was The Quarter AI Media Started To Scale
Advertising in AI-native destinations and experiences is already starting to look less like a series of experiments and more like an emerging market.
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingThe Open Web Is Shifting From An Audience Economy To A Context Economy
Instead of relying on rigid audience segments, modern systems can interpret a real-world moment in real time, combining layers of information to better predict what someone might actually care about right now.
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OPINION: The Sell SiderAI Might Not Need Perfect Data – Except When It Comes To Revenue
Finance, legal and billing functions require auditability. Your team will still need to normalize, validate and reconcile data from scratch.
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OPINION: On TV & VideoThe World Cup Is A Live Outcomes Test For Programmatic Live Sports
The 2024 Olympics proved premium live sports could be transacted programmatically. The 2026 World Cup tests something harder: whether programmatic spend holds up amid viable alternatives.
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingAI Agents Are Making Marketing Decisions On Data No One Has Checked In Years
The industry spent years building data verification frameworks for publishers and sellers. The buy side has no equivalent discipline. And it needs one.
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingCannes 2026: The Humans Strike Back
In a world being agentically orchestrated at scale, human judgment is the indispensable guardrail preventing us from optimizing right over the cliff.
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OPINION: The Sell SiderAgentic Advertising Isn’t Reducing Intermediaries. It’s Just Rebuilding Them
If AI-powered sales agents are the future, the instinct is simple: more agents should mean more revenue. But isn’t this the same logic that drove SSP proliferation over the last decade?
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OPINION: The Sell SiderThe Funnel Is Dead. Build A Trust Loop Or Lose Your Audience To AI
The media brands that remain locked in the traditional marketing funnel are the ones AI content farms will maul first. But if they create a trust-driven marketing flywheel, publishers can keep their businesses alive.
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OPINION: On TV & VideoFox’s Roku Deal Signals The Next Phase Of Television
The future of TV isn’t traditional vs. CTV. Rather, it’s a partnership of two sides. Fox and Roku represent this convergence.
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingThe Paradox Of Personalization: Billions Of AI-Tailored Ads Creates A Measurement Mess
We must reject the fantasy of infinite creative variations tailored to individuals – not just because it is technically impossible but because it fundamentally misunderstands how advertising works for the vast majority of brands.
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingWhy Prediction Is Replacing Precision For Outcome-Driven Advertising
With deterministic data like cookies becoming less reliable, advertising’s real value comes from being able to predict where audiences will be and how and when to reach them.
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OPINION: The Sell SiderDynamic Take Rates Are A Market-Wide Squeeze Disguised As Innovation
The pitch for dynamic take rates is reasonable. Total volume goes up, and the publisher sees more impressions clearing. But the problem is where the extra volume comes from.
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingThe W3C Is Making A Critical Mistake About Measuring Advertising Effectiveness
The W3C’s proposed “Attribution Level 1” browser standard deserves far more scrutiny from the advertising and measurement community than it has so far received.
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingDigital Advertising Needs Guardrails For AI
The real AI risk in digital advertising isn’t automation, it’s autonomous decision-making without clear accountability and sufficient oversight.
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingFrom Open Internet To Open Agent: The Architecture Buyers Were Promised Is Finally Here
The programmatic intelligence layer is owned by the same parties that are extracting margin from it. That structure is now being dismantled by an AI-underpinned protocol that moves the intelligence layer into the open.
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingWhy Agentic Measurement Will Reprice The Ad Market
Binary measurement preserves margin and lets late-arriving impressions claim credit they may not deserve. We need a new measurement model for the AI era.
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingMaking Marketing More Modular: What Agentic AI Can Learn From The Shipping Container Revolution
There is a myth that end-to-end platforms and sheer quantity of data yield efficiency and competitive advantage. But most clients need flexible, modular solutions that address their needs and work with their existing tech stacks.
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingBrands Don’t Need Perfect Data To Use AI
Between signal loss, missing audience information and aging data, most of the data that companies have is spotty. But despite what you may have heard, agentic AI can deal with spotty data.
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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.”