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AdExchanger Guest Columnist
Articles By AdExchanger Guest Columnist
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingWalmart’s Wall: Will The Vibe Deal Make It Meta, Or Another AOL?
Will Walmart’s acquisition of Vibe.co create an AOL-esque walled garden – or a CTV platform advertisers actually want to use?
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingAd Tech's Trust Problem Isn't Going Away. We Just Stopped Talking About It
The FTC’s lawsuit that alleging Hims & Hers shared sensitive health data with advertisers is only the latest reminder that trust must be an operating principle, not just a marketing promise.
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingAd Tech’s Last Neutral Party Just Picked A Side
The Publicis/LiveRamp acquisition raises a stark question: Can shared identity infrastructure really stay neutral under competitor ownership?
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingAI Can Interpret Data. It Can’t Vouch For It
The next internet will not be built by humans clicking buttons; it will be built by agents acting on behalf of people, brands, publishers, platforms and enterprises.
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OPINION: On TV & VideoCTV’s Real Divide Isn’t PMP Vs. Open Market. It’s Quality Control
With the right safeguards in place, open-market CTV can match PMP performance, proving that quality controls – not deal type – drive results, argues Ayse Pamuk, director of platform operations at Basis.
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingThree Advertising Industry Myths The Market Has Already Debunked
Somewhere between what the ad industry says and what the market rewards is often where the truth lives. Here are the three industry storylines most in need of debunking.
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingGoogle’s Buyer Direct Could Beat Agentic Ad Tech At Its Own Game
Agentic AI shows promise for direct deals. But if Google has its way, Buyer Direct could put an end to all sorts of agentic direct sales opportunities while they’re still in the cradle.
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingAdvertising’s Next Audience Isn’t Human. So We Must Rethink The Value Of Non-Human Traffic
Historically, non-human traffic was viewed on a spectrum from benign to intentional fraud. But AI agents represent a legitimate audience that brands will have to understand and engage.
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OPINION: The Sell SiderThe Pageview Era Is Dead. Now, Your Audience Is Worth More Than Your Traffic
We’re witnessing the end of the pageview era. But the interesting question isn’t how publishers replace their lost search traffic; it’s what they do with the audience they already have.
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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 Thinking
Why 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.