Opinion

A year ago, agentic advertising was mostly theoretical. AdExchanger Managing Editor Allison Schiff sat down with Vlad Stesin, CEO and Co-Founder of Optable, to talk about what’s actually changed — and which companies are doing real work rather than chasing the buzzword. Stesin breaks down why workflow automation is the unglamorous but essential starting point […]

For years, algorithmic decisioning lived on the buy side — inside DSPs that only ever saw a fraction of available inventory. Containerization changes that, moving custom AI decisioning models directly into SSP environments and reshaping the programmatic supply chain in the process. At Cannes Lions 2026, AdExchanger Editorial Director Sarah Sluis sat down with Pirouz […]

Retail media and CTV have been on a collision course for years. Walmart Connect and Magnite are making that convergence real. AdExchanger Editorial Director Sara Sluis sits down with Mike Laband, Group SVP of Revenue at Magnite, and Khurrum Malik, VP, Business and Product Marketing at Walmart Connect, to talk about what it looks like […]

Finance, legal and billing functions require auditability. Your team will still need to normalize, validate and reconcile data from scratch.

The awareness-consideration-conversion funnel isn’t dead — it’s just moved faster than the org chart has. At Cannes Lions 2026, AdExchanger Editorial Director Sarah Sluis sat down with Liane Nadeau, Chief Media and Investment Officer, Digitas, to make the case that channel planning — the TV budget, the search budget, the audio budget, the programmatic line […]

The 2024 Olympics proved premium live sports could be transacted programmatically. The 2026 World Cup tests something harder: whether programmatic spend holds up amid viable alternatives.

The mood at Cannes 2026 is complicated — rosé in one hand, existential dread in the other. AdExchanger Editorial Director Sara Sluis sat down with Michael Lehman, President, Americas of Equativ, aboard the company’s yacht to cut through the noise. What they got was a rare thing: a genuinely optimistic take on AI’s impact on […]

As more brands, agencies, and media companies join in on the AI chorus of “better, faster, smarter,” the teams administering AI tools are singing a dissonant tune — managing a growing stack of AI-powered tools layered across planning, activation, measurement, reporting, and workflow management. It’s a familiar irony to anyone in advertising: Another innovation designed to […]

The industry spent years building data verification frameworks for publishers and sellers. The buy side has no equivalent discipline. And it needs one.

Optimization has been the golden promise of AI in advertising. From audience targeting and bid management to media buying and creative optimization, the industry’s first wave of AI investment has focused on helping campaigns perform better.

In a world being agentically orchestrated at scale, human judgment is the indispensable guardrail preventing us from optimizing right over the cliff.

AI is rapidly moving from promise to practice in streaming TV advertising, reshaping how campaigns are planned, executed and experienced. But as adoption accelerates, there remains no clear answer to what success actually looks like across all parts of the industry.

If AI-powered sales agents are the future, the instinct is simple: more agents should mean more revenue. But isn’t this the same logic that drove SSP proliferation over the last decade?

Signal loss used to be something the industry managed around. Now, with AI in the mix, it’s becoming something you can actually monetize. AdExchanger Editorial Director Sarah Sluis sits down with Fabrice Beer-Gabel, SVP of Strategy and Partnerships at Intent IQ, to unpack how publishers and advertisers are flipping the script on identity-less environments — […]

Everyone at Cannes is talking about AI — but CivicScience CEO and founder John Dick says the industry is missing its most important stakeholder: the consumer. Drawing on survey data, Dick argues AI may be among the most unpopular technologies ever introduced to the public, with the average person “somewhere between skeptical and terrified.” While […]

The media brands that remain locked in the traditional marketing funnel are the ones AI content farms will maul first. But if they create a trust-driven marketing flywheel, publishers can keep their businesses alive.

Healthcare marketers have never had more data, channels or targeting capabilities at their disposal. Yet many organizations still struggle to answer a fundamental question: what actually drove performance across a campaign?

The future of TV isn’t traditional vs. CTV. Rather, it’s a partnership of two sides. Fox and Roku represent this convergence.

I’ve always loved sci-fi movies and the way they portray futuristic worlds shaped by advanced technological innovation. One of my favorite movies is the ’80s classic “The Terminator.” And the more I hear about “agentic AI” in ad tech, the more I think the film is a perfect analogy for what’s happening right now.

Earlier this year, I wrote in AdExchanger about the 20% to 30% of programmatic video spend that gets lost in the gap between what inventory labels promise and what the actual viewing experience delivers.

Ask yourself where conversion data goes after a campaign runs. It flows back to the advertiser, the measurement vendor and the DSP. It does not flow back to the SSP.

We must reject the fantasy of infinite creative variations tailored to individuals – not just because it is technically impossible but because it fundamentally misunderstands how advertising works for the vast majority of brands.

With an anticipated viewership of more than 1.5 billion people, the 2026 World Cup is expected to represent the most-watched live event in history. For advertisers, that creates an obvious opportunity to reach soccer fans around matches, highlights, team coverage and tournament content.

With deterministic data like cookies becoming less reliable, advertising’s real value comes from being able to predict where audiences will be and how and when to reach them.

Most competitive intelligence is backward-looking. Earnings calls tell us what happened last quarter. Annual reports tell us where budgets went last year. Traditional competitive intelligence tools often focus on creative libraries, estimated spend or campaign archives.

For years, independent agencies won business by being different from holding companies: agile, responsive and flexible, with closer client relationships.

Connected TV has entered a new phase.

For years, the channel was primarily a reach vehicle, a way to follow audiences as viewing shifted from linear TV to streaming. That migration has reached critical mass. Audiences are engaged across CTV, and advertiser dollars are following. According to eMarketer, US CTV ad spending is projected to reach $53.42 billion, reflecting continued double-digit growth as streaming outpaces linear TV.

The pitch for dynamic take rates is reasonable. Total volume goes up, and the publisher sees more impressions clearing. But the problem is where the extra volume comes from. 

The W3C’s proposed “Attribution Level 1” browser standard deserves far more scrutiny from the advertising and measurement community than it has so far received.

The real AI risk in digital advertising isn’t automation, it’s autonomous decision-making without clear accountability and sufficient oversight.