Opinion

With the right safeguards in place, open-market CTV can match PMP performance, proving that quality controls – not deal type – drive results, argues Ayse Pamuk, director of platform operations at Basis.

Performance marketing has fundamentally changed how marketers define success. Better targeting, attribution and optimization finally give marketing leaders what they’ve always wanted, which is a concrete way to prove that advertising works, expressed through performance metrics that CFOs understand.

Somewhere between what the ad industry says and what the market rewards is often where the truth lives. Here are the three industry storylines most in need of debunking.

Two-thirds of consumer attention lives on the open internet, but only one-fifth of ad spend follows it there. That gap is no accident. Walled gardens spent the past decade creating it.

Agentic AI shows promise for direct deals. But if Google has its way, Buyer Direct could put an end to all sorts of agentic direct sales opportunities while they’re still in the cradle.

Historically, non-human traffic was viewed on a spectrum from benign to intentional fraud. But AI agents represent a legitimate audience that brands will have to understand and engage.

We’re witnessing the end of the pageview era. But the interesting question isn’t how publishers replace their lost search traffic; it’s what they do with the audience they already have.

TV convergence has largely been framed as a national conversation: advertisers looking for more connected ways to plan across linear and streaming, measure performance, and understand audiences. But as buyers push for more accountable, performance-oriented TV campaigns, that national-first approach starts to lose precision in local markets.

When an advertiser trains a model on its full organic converter base, it can better identify patterns that distinguish a casual browser from someone close to buying.

Advertising in AI-native destinations and experiences is already starting to look less like a series of experiments and more like an emerging market.

Every retail media network claims its data is different. PayPal Ads actually has a structural reason to back that up. AdExchanger Editorial Director Sarah Sluis sat down with Mark Grether, SVP and GM of PayPal Ads, to talk about what it means to sit horizontally across 25 billion transactions, 400 million accounts, and 30 million […]

Incremental growth is what every marketer says they want. Proving it is another story. At Cannes 2026, AdExchanger Editorial Director Sarah Sluis sat down with Fabrice Beer-Gabel, SVP of Strategy and Partnerships at Intent IQ, and John Koenigsberg, EVP and Head of Platforms at Horizon Media, to talk about what happens when audience amplification actually […]

Instead of relying on rigid audience segments, modern systems can interpret a real-world moment in real time, combining layers of information to better predict what someone might actually care about right now.

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?