Measurement

Spotify expands its ad offerings; the case on a fraudulent real estate campaign draws to a close; and browsers must provide GPC opt-outs starting next year.

Inside how Jones Road Beauty is trying to turn messy, conflicting measurement signals into a single testing roadmap for its media mix.

An upcoming paper from CIMM doesn’t just demonstrate that differences in media quality can be measured. It also argues that tying media value to short-term outcomes has perpetuated longstanding industry challenges.

Hotel chain Red Roof is using Zeta’s new voice-activated AI agent to guide its campaign creation, deployment timing and audience development.

Smartly is acquiring INCRMNTAL, an incrementality measurement startup founded in Tel Aviv in 2019 that focuses on causal lift rather than user-level tracking.

Mike Finnerty is leaving TransUnion to become Mutinex’s US president and lead the company’s expansion stateside.

When marketers get too fixated on measuring short-term performance, they miss opportunities to capitalize on TV’s strength as a brand-building channel.

Inclusive measurement is more than a nice-to-have, says Charlene Polite Corley, Nielsen’s VP of inclusive insights. Because undercounting Black, Hispanic and intersectional audiences isn’t just a measurement failure; it’s a missed growth opportunity for brands.

Meta will now measure social interactions like likes, shares and comments under a new “engage-through attribution” category, replacing click-through as the default.

Yes/no binary logic was the right tool for programmatic. But autonomous AI agents can evaluate 10 million impressions per second, combining data from hundreds of sources, and human-defined targeting logic can no longer keep pace.

On Wednesday, and in time for the upfronts, Nielsen added more than 200 advanced audience segments in Nielsen ONE, its cross-platform analytics dashboard.

For most of the last decade, performance marketing was rewarded for momentum. Spend efficiently. Scale quickly. Optimize continuously. If the line went up and to the right, few questions followed. But that era is ending, because performance without accountability is no longer credible.

A 2004 statute prevents owning enough TV stations to reach 39% of households. But without the scale afforded to other digital content companies, local TV is at a competitive disadvantage.

When it comes to managing fraud, there are four steps CTV publishers should take to remove bad actors from the supply chain.

Triton Digital’s new tool lets publishers see how their audience size compares to other podcasts at the show and episode level.

The IAB unveiled its Project Eidos on Monday, a new program uniting its numerous measurement initiatives under one banner.

Ad operations don’t always get easier when a publisher has a strong first-party data foundation to build on. In some cases, the strength of the underlying data can complicate monetization decisions. Ancestry can attest to that.

PayPal announced plans to acquire Cymbio, a startup that helps brands improve their presence in AI searches. Plus: Hollywood seems to have forgotten how to do good movie marketing.

A jury in California awarded $18.3 million to video measurement firm iSpot to resolve its lawsuit against EDO, a measurement company co-founded by actor Ed Norton.

Traffic is down, but publisher content is still driving purchases. Partnerize’s new attribution model lets publishers see what’s working and strike fair compensation deals.

Content is still king – so long as you measure it correctly, Comscore’s Chief Commercial Officer Steve Bagdasarian told AdExchanger at CES 2026 in Las Vegas.

NBCU’s early embrace of ad tech – led by Ryan McConville, its chief product officer and EVP of ad platforms – set the stage for a pandemic-fueled digital transformation that blurred the line between traditional TV and streaming. But that doesn’t mean linear isn’t still a top priority.

A few years ago, “data clean rooms” were all the ad tech trades could talk about. Fast-forward to 2026, and maybe advertisers don’t need to know what a data clean room is after all.

The generative AI trend generated endless hot takes this year, but the ad industry also had plenty to say about growing competition between DSPs and SSPs. Here are AdExchanger’s top 10 most popular guest columns of 2025 and why they resonated.

TV ad measurement is breaking down. Tatari’s Benjamin Heaton explains why signal loss and privacy shifts are reshaping how TV campaigns, and how it can be fixed.

Roku’s streaming data will now be integrated into Nielsen’s campaign measurement and outcome tools, the two companies announced on Monday,

First, the VAB clashes with Nielsen over Big Data, and Pinterest teams up with tvScientific. Plus, Google Ad Manager rolls out major EU changes, from ditching Unified Pricing Rules to deeper data sharing with publishers.

Let’s close out the year with a roundup of the most impactful CTV stories of the year, from Netflix’s ad surge to Nielsen’s measurement missteps.

Attribution measurement is still a mess; video podcasting struggles with effective advertising; and NIL deals are taking off for student athletes.

The VAB is accusing Nielsen’s Big Data + Panel of producing “instability, inconsistency and irrational” TV audience measurement results, particularly when compared to its legacy panel-only product.