Opinion

A media plan can only work as well as the data that underpins it. Carrier data reconciles what people do across apps and location patterns, so brands can validate their audiences, find incremental customers and show up before a decision is made.

CTV upfront spend surpassed linear for the first time this year. And yet the industry continues to value audiences using metrics built for a bygone era.

Given the spate of recent cybersecurity incidents that exploited ad tech, and the unreliability of the industry’s own vendor lists, ad tech needs to evolve before we can blame Apple.

As B2B buying behavior shifts toward AI-assisted research, private peer conversations and dark social sharing, buyers become invisible to every measurement system the industry has built. 

Programmatic advertising made media buying scalable, but at a cost: standardized impression auctions often obscure a publishers’ unique value while a complex supply chain eats up nearly half of advertising spend.

Traditional television buying has always required campaigns to work in broad strokes. But political campaigns’ audience-first thinking should carry through to how they use CTV.

Marketers today describe their ideal customers in extraordinary detail, with rich personas that go beyond basic demographics to include attitudes, motivations, values, preferences and even future intentions.

MMM’s next challenge is developing a more rigorous way to challenge, validate and apply its conclusions.

Everywhere you look, our industry is talking about AI: AI-powered planning, AI-driven optimization, agentic media buying, automated curation.

The Prebid Summit in New York City on Tuesday exceeded the event’s reputation for liveliness.

The ad industry has become a community of people who say things like “This is going to sound relatable” and follow it up with a sentence that may as well be Martian to 99% of America.

Anyone old enough to remember drinking martinis from an office liquor cabinet on Monday mornings will tell you the Golden Age of brand advertising ended long ago. Back then, production and distribution barriers limited competition across most consumer categories, while scarce media placements across TV, radio and print allowed a small number of well-capitalized brands to dominate share of voice.

Live sports delivers something increasingly scarce in today’s fragmented media landscape: large, highly-engaged audiences that show up together in real time.

By all means, measure outcomes. Optimize toward sales. Make television more accountable. But if the product is basically a pixel, an attribution window and a CPA column, that doesn’t mean we’ve transformed TV into Google. 

The last decade saw television audiences steadily shift from linear toward streaming. The fact that advertising budgets followed isn’t too surprising. If more people are watching streaming, more TV advertising dollars should move there, too, right?

When a data or measurement provider is acquired by a company that sells media technology, talk of neutrality is cheap. The best way to reassure marketers is to make the measurement tech widely available.

An AI agent can stay inside its budget and still spend too much. It can log every decision. But the evidence of performance can still arrive after the money is committed.

The assumption that an impression is a reasonable proxy for consumption is eroding, and when buyers stop believing it, pricing follows.

Apple’s latest Safari changes are stirring ATT-era concerns – but this time might be more disruptive for ad tech.

Don Draper would be overwhelmed by the sophistication of digital advertising. But he’d laugh at how unsophisticated financial reconciliation remains.

The US combined with Europe’s five largest ad markets are home to roughly 8% of the world’s consumers. Together, they account for nearly half of global ad spend.

MMM helps marketers understand if a channel worked in the aggregate and what happens when the next dollar is added. For CTV, that discipline is badly needed. But MMMs can’t answer everything.

California protects an individual’s right to sue when a company violates data privacy law. So privacy compliance means understanding what a jury of consumers will tolerate. 

Everybody wants to make the most of agentic AI in advertising. The winners will do it with purpose. Here’s how to make a plan, step by step.

On a Tuesday in early September, I found myself bouncing between the NFL, the US Open quarterfinals and Women’s College Volleyball, with a baseball game or two in the mix. Oh, and the FIBA Women’s World Cup had already finished for the day. Multiply that by every American with a remote and a phone, and you get a picture of what fall sports season looks like.

Scaled show-level optimization is not a standard product. In many cases, that functionality is still in the early stages of development.

Retail media’s explosive growth over the past few years is the result of a straightforward pitch to advertisers: the ability to reach consumers close to the point of purchase, connect media exposure to transactions and prove conversion. Retail media is exceptionally effective at capturing existing demand as a lower-funnel performance channel.

The advertising market needs a more cohesive path from the campaign brief to the live buy. Answering a mobile RFP can take three to five days and require four teams across research, audience building, supply vetting and deal setup. Much of that time goes toward assembling evidence and moving information between functions rather than making the decisions that shape the campaign.

Where teens were once swept into the same cohort as 18-34, brands will have to have separate strategies and tactics to engage them. And this shift comes just as Gen Alpha comes of age.

It seems like every athlete has a podcast or docuseries these days. From Travis Kelce and the Mannings to LeBron James and Cam Newton, athletes have gone from being the subject of sports media to becoming media businesses in and of themselves.