Marketers

At the Cannes Lions, generative AI applications for advertising were out in force. Plus: takes from the Croisette on retail media and cookie conspiracies.

If the nonstop news coming out of Cannes Lions in France this week is making your head spin, this week’s newsletter dispatch will catch you up on how CTV is factoring into this year’s festival.

AI was a hot topic at Cannes Lions, while Elon Musk used the festival as a shot at redemption for X. Plus: Expect more crypto ads this year.

United Airlines really wanted everyone who traveled to Cannes this year for the Lions festival to know it has a media network now. Before takeoff on the 7:50 p.m. overnight Saturday flight from Newark Airport to Nice, France, an ad for Kinective Media, which is the name for United’s new media network, played on every […]

The Global Media Sustainability Framework, which was announced Monday during a panel at Cannes, saw collaboration across all parts of the industry. Supporters include the 4As, IAB, Dentsu, Google, GroupM, L’Oréal, Omnicom, Publicis Groupe, Mastercard, Meta and Unilever.

The ANA and TAG TrustNet released a new programmatic transparency benchmark so advertisers can see how their campaigns stack up compared with the broader industry.

Some ecommerce pros were surprised recently to log in to their Google Merchant Center and see the “Feeds” tabs gone. The disappearance of the word “Feeds” is a sign Google is becoming less reliant on information provided by the brand or merchant to inform its marketing services.

Media governance measures advertisers can put in place to navigate the complexity of brand safety and gain better control of the quality of their media spend.

Equativ (formerly known as Smart AdServer) announced its acquisition of Sharethrough, an SSP with a specialty in native advertising.

Between 2019 and 2021, two-thirds of advertisers bought ads on sites flagged for repeatedly publishing false or misleading content, a recent study found.

The New York Times and Instacart are partnering for shoppable recipe videos.

How big of a deal is The Trade Desk’s top 100 list? AdExchanger spoke to industry experts for their reactions and bounced some of their hot takes off The Trade Desk.

This week’s dispatch explores the new trend of false advertising class-action suits in the food and CPG industry and how the evolution of online, data-driven retail media could exacerbate the problem.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Path Less Traveled We all know what supply-path optimization (SPO) means and why it’s useful. Except, wait, what does SPO mean? “‘SPO’ – perhaps already a bigger buzzword than MFA. Every definition of SPO is different,” tweets Jud Spencer, engineering leader at The […]

Since launch, 82% of advertisers that buy inventory through the Yahoo DSP have tried Backstage at least once. And buyers are seeing lower CPMs from cutting out SSPs.

In today’s newsletter: Ampla suspends loans to DTC brands, putting their ad budgets at risk; why Sony is investing in IP rather than a streaming platform; and Netflix will move on from Microsoft in favor of in-house ad tech by 2025.

If you’re a brand that wants to in-house its programmatic media buying, the best thing you can do is to make friends with the IT guys.

The phaseout of third-party cookies kicked off the sell-side curation trend. But it’s also being driven by advertiser concerns about open web media quality and the need to enhance publisher contextual signals with audience data.

Even if the industry finds a way to replace the cookie, it won’t matter if publishers no longer have traffic to monetize.

Views of Shorts on CTV devices more than doubled last year, people watch more than 1 billion hours of YouTube daily on their TVs – and other fun facts from YouTube’s Brandcast event.

Buyers could solve many of the issues they have with the open web by focusing less on viewability and clicks and more on driving performance outcomes, says Goodway Group director of strategic partnerships Andrea Kwiatek.

Integral Ad Science had a decent Q1 – especially in comparison to its direct competitor, DoubleVerify. Even so, frustration with the opacity of third-party brand safety and ad verification providers is increasingly bubbling to the surface.

Programmers are using their Q1 earnings reports as a dress rehearsal for their upfront pitches. Meanwhile, programmatic platforms, including Magnite and PubMatic, also had upfronts in mind during their Q1 earnings.

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

Will data dazzle media buyers at this year’s TV upfronts? Plus: Why recent changes to Google search results have decimated traffic for some digital publishers – and rewarded others.

For Magnite, the biggest growth opportunity lies in supply-path optimization. The trade-off is the pressure to differentiate itself from other supply-side platforms competing for agency deals.

PubMatic has its supply-path optimization initiative, its strategy to introduce direct deals for CTV and online video, to thank for its quarterly revenue growth.

Google Search, the web’s largest traffic and revenue generator for two decades, is in the midst of sweeping overhauls that have already altered how users are funneled around the internet.

Appealing to advertisers’ better angels is never going to bring ads back to the news. But appealing to their bottom lines might.

Screenverse plans to add about 20 employees over the next 12 months with the help of its new cash reserve. The company also earmarked a portion of its funding for enhancing its publisher suite.