The Big Story features a roundtable discussion with the AdExchanger editorial team on the week’s top news stories. New and previously published episodes are available on this page and on your preferred podcast app.
Wall Street can’t get enough of ad tech – creating a hot market for stocks and making quarterly earnings a who’s who of ad tech companies. Not so long ago, the ad tech bellwethers were The Trade Desk and Magnite, but earnings season now features a parade of companies young and old: PubMatic, DoubleVerify, Viant, […]
Getting online shoppers to click and add a product to their cart – and then have that product ship cost-effectively to a customer – is the latest challenge for CPG companies. During earnings calls over the past week, leaders of CPG companies had to answer to investors about their ecommerce strategies, which have accelerated thanks […]
Connected TV has arrived – a bit earlier than programmers may have expected. The pandemic-related boom in streaming, along with record TV upfronts, means there’s going to be a “wild Q4” ahead as programmatic buyers scramble for access to streaming inventory. One key issue is that CTV measurement capabilities aren’t developed enough yet, noted Kelly […]
Will Xandr find a home with InMobi? As InMobi prepares for an IPO, we talk about the Axios report that the company is in talks to acquire Xandr. AT&T has been shopping the company formerly known as AppNexus around for months – so when will a buyer materialize? Ad tech’s stratospheric public market valuations should […]
What your colleagues and competitors think of digital advertising’s cookieless future was revealed in AdExchanger’s latest research report on identity. On this week’s episode, we delve into the juiciest bits and key insights from the report, which is available in full to our paid members. For example: Even as the industry pins its hopes on […]
The Trade Desk made waves this week with the release of Solimar, its new beach resort brand. Psych! Solimar is real, but it’s the company’s new DSP dashboard. In addition to the updated UI, The Trade Desk also launched a venture capital arm called TD7 – named for the $7 million seed investment that got […]
When Google delayed the end of third-party cookies, ad tech’s first reaction was “stunned silence,” said Matt Barash, SVP of global publishing and platform partnerships at Zeotap and a self-described “ad tech socialite.” For this week’s episode, we talk through the fallout of Google’s decision to delay the phaseout of the third-party cookie by nearly […]
The teacher just gave the class an extension on a hard, confusing assignment. Third-party cookies won’t go away in Google Chrome until the end of 2023, a delay of nearly two years. Google said the decision would allow its Privacy Sandbox proposals to move further along. Currently, only three of more than 30 are in […]
We’re entering the end-game for third-party cookies, but an unlikely group could intervene to keep them alive: regulators. Last Friday, Google agreed to let UK watchdog group Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) approve its decision to remove third-party cookies. The move is unusual, reports senior editor Allison Schiff, because it’s an example of regulators guiding […]
IP address is a tell for several things, namely a user’s location – and it can be used to triangulate identity via fingerprinting. But soon that will no longer be the case, at least not in Apple’s ecosystem. Apple raised the privacy bar at its Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday, and IP address was in […]
The architect of Methbot was found guilty in a New York court last week. The verdict came nearly five years after the ad fraud scheme was first publicized back in December 2016. We dive into the most intriguing details of the case – from the likely political motivations behind the prosecution to the sophistication of […]
Epic has accused Apple of running a monopoly, and this week the trial concluded. Why should we care over in advertising land? While there have been antitrust cases in Europe for some time, now they’re happening on big tech’s home turf. The District of Colombia filed a case against Amazon this week, and of course […]
The upfronts kicked off this week with news of a megamerger between WarnerMedia and Discovery Communications. But Xandr isn’t coming along for the ride. AT&T’s ad tech acquisition remains with the telco. We can only speculate why, but one reason might be that AT&T is planning a second spinoff in light of the currently frothy […]
The sun hasn’t been shining on Wall Street this week as tech stocks dipped precipitously – The Trade Desk among them. Despite turning in decent earnings, TTD’s stock dove by more than 25%, making it one of the most affected of the ad tech bunch. It was a surprising development after more than a year […]
Remember when telcos kept dropping billions on media and ad tech assets because they just couldn’t wait to activate their first-party data for advertising purposes? Didn’t pan out. This week on The Big Story, the team dives into the “why” in the wake of private equity firm Apollo Global Management’s $5 billion acquisition of Verizon […]
After months of anticipation, Apple will start enforcing ATT with the debut of iOS 14.5. Check out our infinite coverage here. Interestingly, this in-the-weeds ad tech story got picked up by the mainstream media, with Apple cast as the valiant steward of privacy. Because we live in a world where the only thing protecting us […]
This week on The Big Story, the team broadcasts LIVE from AdExchanger’s Innovation Labs: Commerce Day event. And here’s your main takeaway if you weren’t able to attend: the fragmentation in the world of commerce-related media is … insane. An emerging cluster of media networks from retailers such as Walmart, Target, Kroger and numerous others […]
Hey kids, are you trying to read the blacked-out redactions on a PDF? Simply copy and paste the text into Microsoft Word, and then read everyone’s legal secrets. It’s the digital hack to reading invisible ink. Google learned that lesson the hard way recently when, in responding to the Texas-led antitrust suit, it accidentally revealed […]
Late last year, with the end of the pandemic hopefully in sight, Luma was beginning to see investor confidence return. If anything, that cautious optimism was understated, as this Spring, Luma saw the best quarter in deals that it had ever seen. This week on The Big Story, we welcome back Conor McKenna, Luma director […]
This week, Vista Equity Partners said it would acquire a majority stake in TripleLift, reportedly investing $1.4 billion. The deal is expected to close in Q2. $1.4 billion is a big chunk of change – and a big story. In this episode, the AdExchanger team welcomes Ari Lewine, TripleLift cofounder and chief strategy officer, to […]
Will FLoCs fly in Europe or will GDPR clip its wings? And, speaking of birds (and identifiers), NBCU’s Peacock is going programmatic – and the broadcaster also recently revealed a new identifier for advertisers to use. But first back to Google, mixed messages from The GOOG this week, when engineer Michael Kleber said at a […]
This week, The Big Story records live at AdExchanger’s digital conference: Innovation Labs. While our April 20 one-day event will focus on Ecommerce, and our May 18 event will focus on CTV, our event on March 16 was all about Identity. And the big story around identity, no pun intended, is that it’s still a […]
Online identity resolution solutions. Two years ago, they were all ambition – but today, they’re undergoing tests and people are starting to figure out how they work, where they work … and where they don’t. In other words, the ad industry is finally discussing the practical challenges that these solutions must overcome. The biggest and most […]
Big news week from three heavy hitters. On Wednesday, Google sent shockwaves through the industry with its declaration that it wouldn’t use cross-site browsing data to sell ads, and that it really disapproved of the industry’s attempts to develop email-based identifiers as a substitute for third-party cookies. Arguably, this is a development the world should […]
This week on The Big Story, we present the latest in privacy protection regulations – true-false style. Because, honestly, this stuff can be pretty dry unless you make a game out of it. As you might know, Virginia’s Consumer Data Protection Act (CDPA) will likely soon become law. But how is it different from the […]
Maryland isn’t a merry land if you make most of your money off of digital advertising. This week, on The Big Story, we’ll look at the Old Line State’s new line of taxes. AdExchanger’s resident expert on all things legislative Allison Schiff drops by (Plot twist: SHE WAS ALWAYS HERE) to drop knowledge on how […]
This week’s episode of The Big Story is brought to you by the letters M and A. Because if you haven’t heard, Magnite bought SpotX for $1.17 billion, and then District M and Sharethrough merged to form a giant exchange. So what’s going on? The team takes a look at both acquisitions, and digs into […]
There are more platforms than Super Mario on this week’s The Big Story. First up, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has exited stage… right? Left? To pick a more workable metaphor, he’s passed the reigns to Andy Jassy, former Amazon Web Services chief. That decision should give you an indication of Amazon’s coming priorities. We’ll chat a […]
Google announced this week that its federated learning of cohorts sandbox proposal (FLoC) is nearly as effective as cookie-based advertising. And the rest of the ad industry collectively said, “Whaaaaaat?” Needless to say, there’s a lot to unpack behind all the hype. This week on The Big Story, the team welcomes Flashtalking CEO John Nardone […]
The transformation of the way TV advertising is transacted will be a major theme in 2021. Everyone – both buy- and sell-sides – seems to be talking about addressability these days. Traditional broadcasters have reorganized around streaming and TV-related acquisitions have accelerated – one of the most notable being Roku’s $150 million acquisition of dataxu. […]
