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Enjoy this weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem … 

OpenAI has its own tracking pixel; Amazon sellers are boycotting the platform; and DirecTV hops on the CAPI bandwagon.

Paramount might have outlasted and outbid Netflix in the competition to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, but Netflix is not overly fussed about the loss.

Paramount is merging the ad tech stacks behind Paramount+ and Pluto TV, releasing a new performance product, offering more control over ad placements and introducing dynamic ad insertion in live sports.

One acquisition often begets another. Take Viant, which announced its plan to acquire TVision for $40 million on Wednesday.

The IAB’s Connected Commerce event in New York City this week felt to me like the retail media industry’s first sit-down explanation to a child who is now a “big kid” and must act accordingly.

Multicultural publishers are under pressure to grow and scale their audience to remain competitive in an increasingly selective marketplace. To adapt, some publishers are turning to tools like AdGrid’s Audience Accelerator to activate first-party audiences across channels. 

Reward Apps faces data broker allegations; Apple bolsters its advertising business; Comments are all the rage in social media marketing.

Meta is simplifying its CAPI setup and teaching its pixel new tricks, including adding an AI-powered feature that automatically pulls in data from an advertiser’s website.

The Dynamic Traffic Engine, an open-source tool, is geared toward optimizing bid requests and reducing programmatic waste.

TelevisaUnivision is the latest TV publisher to join the self-serve trend that’s rising in popularity across connected TV advertising. Its streaming inventory is now available to buy through fullthrottle.ai’s self-serve platform. The collaboration includes an ad bidder designed to improve both targeting and measurement.

Law firm Keller Postman is leading mass arbitration suits against Google, seeking advertiser damages for alleged monopoly overpricing. The total available pot is a quarter-trillion dollars.

Surprise! Platforms ignore users opting out of ad tracking; the marketing machine claims credit for Geese’s popularity; and Meta’s MAGA-friendly moderation makes an unforced error.

Kim Rosenblum, CMO of investment app Betterment, unpacks her “anti‑marketing” playbook, which involves telling customers not to engage and shifting away from chasing cheap CAC to prioritizing lifetime value.

Opal launched Gem, a new AI solution, to help large brands unify the layers of media and tech within their organizations.

Live sports is one of programmatic’s biggest opportunities, even if the buying process is still kind of a mess. But efforts are being made.

For years, programmatic advertising has operated on the assumption that most buyers didn’t really want to know how the system works. That’s changing. More advertisers are asking harder questions about where their media dollars actually go, and those questions are increasingly come from mid-market agencies that would historically rely on DSPs to manage the complexity of supply for them.

In-store audio ads grow, but attribution and headphones raise doubts; Hidden fees persist as drip pricing draws scrutiny; World Cup ad costs surge.

Mula’s AI native content feed helps On3 keep its engagement and RPS consistent amid traffic drop-offs to publisher sites and the growing scarcity of online attention.

Hearst is stitching together its far‑flung news properties into a single programmatic marketplace to simplify buying local news and shore up its business as the ad market shifts.

AI is only as good as the data that fuels it. In advertising, however, that foundation is often flawed.

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.

ChatGPT’s ads manager leaves something to be desired; beware booking vacations via search ad; and YouTube is jacking up its premium prices again.

Earlier this year, datafuelX rehired Dan Aversano, one of the company’s co-founders, to take the helm as CEO. Aversano will lead the company through its next growth phase, which revolves around – surprise, surprise! – connected TV and digital expansion.

If a brand wants to improve its search visibility, there are all sorts of well-understood mechanisms – paid, organic and earned – to do so. But for a brand marketer whose CEO says, “We need to appear in these customer journey recommendation engines, and we’re willing to pay for it,” what can they do?

Enjoy this weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem … 

Measurement and performance are expected to dominate convos at upfronts; Tubi doubles down on AI; and Meta takes down ads encouraging anti-Meta lawsuits.

Every company wants an AI-powered product. So what do they all look like? From A/B testing and media optimization to agentic interfaces for customers, we give a rundown on AI’s most popular applications in ad tech.

When Apple launched AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) in 2021, access to deterministic identifiers fell sharply as roughly 80% of users opted out of tracking. User-level feedback loops became sparse and biased, and iOS performance marketing shifted into a different measurement environment under SKAdNetwork (SKAN). Apple’s AdAttributionKit (AAK) later delayed postbacks, compressed conversion values and set privacy thresholds that made signal availability dependent on campaign structure and scale.

European TV has never been an easy ad market, with content distributed across different languages, currencies and regulatory frameworks. RTL Group’s total video strategy aims to help global advertisers navigate this fragmented market.