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When a creator already loves the product they’re marketing, it’s easy to work it into their content in ways that feel natural. That’s exactly what the Try Guys did.

Perplexity and other LLMs are mounting massive social influencer marketing campaigns. Also: Xbox is not giving up on its advertising ambitions.

The court has unsealed Judge Leonie Brinkema’s full remedies opinion in US v. Google (ad tech edition). So, what’s in there?

Horizon is bringing Roku’s streaming-TV data into its homegrown intelligence platform to help advertisers act on viewing signals while campaigns are still in flight.

The advertising market needs a more cohesive path from the campaign brief to the live buy. Answering a mobile RFP can take three to five days and require four teams across research, audience building, supply vetting and deal setup. Much of that time goes toward assembling evidence and moving information between functions rather than making the decisions that shape the campaign.

In the AI era, according to Tim Frank, the man in charge of AI monetization at Microsoft, “information is the new bid.”

Creator Sports Network is trying to monetize the ad industry’s two biggest buzzwords: creators and sports. Creator Sports Network, which launched in 2023, helps influencers livestream sports events on their social media pages. The platform doesn’t livestream the actual sports games; it acquires sports airing rights and shares them with influencers, who then stream the […]

Sports leagues swimming in gambling ads cry foul over their players being harassed by gamblers; news publishers consider pivoting to bot audiences; how AI agents are already ruining the web.

Chrome is introducing new metrics that give advertisers and publishers a more data-driven picture of what users actually experience on ad-heavy sites.

Good marketing tools need to be accessible across teams and account for a company’s unique strategy. Marketing orchestration platform Auxia thinks its tools fit the bill.

Where teens were once swept into the same cohort as 18-34, brands will have to have separate strategies and tactics to engage them. And this shift comes just as Gen Alpha comes of age.

Google tests out a “pay per value” AI licensing scheme; Netflix, Amazon and YouTube join forces; and Apple may soon launch integrations with third-party LLMs.

It seems like every athlete has a podcast or docuseries these days. From Travis Kelce and the Mannings to LeBron James and Cam Newton, athletes have gone from being the subject of sports media to becoming media businesses in and of themselves.

Waiting rooms are the latest surface to get screenified. Meet PatientPoint, a point-of-care video ad network with 145,000 screens in 32,000 doctor offices across the US.

After Judge Brinkema declined to order a Google breakup, ad tech leaders weigh in on how the FTC should approach its case against Amazon.

While Eric Seufert’s “everything is an ad network” mantra keeps being proven correct, a new truism is also taking shape: “Wherever an advertising business emerges, the measurement challenge follows.”

McDonalds is hiring humans again; Madison and Wall predicts “unusually rapid” growth; and families want tech out of their schools.

The Trade Desk is less than a third as valuable as it was a year ago. It retains about one-tenth of its high-water market cap from December 2024, when the company was worth almost $70 billion. Why did investors lose the faith?

Two Big Tech moments capped the summer: The FTC sued Amazon over its kinda-sorta second-price auctions, alleging deceptive practices. And Judge Brinkema declared that Google will not have to spin off its ad server.

FAST’s credibility gap is structural: Platforms are sitting on audience data that would validate the inventory they’re selling, and they are choosing not to share it.

The IAB raises its forecast for ad spend growth; Google continues to develop Meridian, its open-source MMM tool; and Partiful is still learning how to monetize.

AI is transforming how the pharma industry approaches drug development. On average, the industry invests $2.6 billion to bring a new treatment to market, taking 12 to 15 years with a 10% success rate. But pharma pioneers are leveraging AI to rethink traditional models. Sanofi, for example, is developing a “lab-in-a-loop” that uses AI agents to potentially compress elements of discovery work from years to weeks.

McGrath left Prebid in June following five years as board chairman after stepping down as SVP of product management at Magnite. But now, overseeing Prebid will be his full-time job.

Showing up in AI search is top of mind for advertisers. But it’s hard to know how to do it, especially when best practices seem to be changing every day.

Google must rework search in Europe to comply with the bloc’s Digital Markets Act. Plus: Brands are still trying to figure out how to advertise in video games.

Qortex’s video intelligence platform ingests information like a campaign’s objectives and its start and end dates, then offers up the audience segments or content categories that it predicts will perform the best.

Telly, the startup that gives away free smart TVs in exchange for data and ad exposure, is making its home screen ads available for brands to buy programmatically – and pushing for industry standards to help attract more spend. 

Look at ad tech’s press releases this year. Magnite is rebuilding SpringServe to own the decisioning layer, AI-driven demand routing, price setting and coordination between buyer and seller agents. Raptive launched an intelligence division, appointed a chief AI officer and outright acquired an AI company.

Actionable uses causal AI to determine what leads to customer dissatisfaction, and addresses those problems before they lead to churn.

The burden of understanding ad auction dynamics should not sit with buyers. Platforms built the systems, and only platforms can fully explain how they set the price.