Opinion

Complexity hasn’t made the CTV supply chain difficult to trust. This is a transparency problem and, more specifically, an ads.txt problem.

The advertising industry is full of noise about AI making buy-side and sell-side processes more efficient. That framing is convenient, but it misses a broader point, writes Snowflake’s Dennis Buchheim.

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

Consumers today switch between screens and viewing interfaces to seamlessly view content. Now it’s time for advertisers to catch up to this convergence, so they can make ad experiences better – not worse, said Cadent CEO Doug Rozen.

Marketers who want to remain competitive need to reexamine the way they view, plan and measure performance across video and streaming platforms. If they’re still debating programmatic vs. direct or linear vs. streaming, then they’re missing out on the real meaning behind convergent TV, according to Mike Fogarty, head of client development, brand and agency […]

The US government wants to use digital ad infrastructure for the exact type of surveillance the industry’s critics have long warned about. We should have seen this coming.

The divergence between the DSPs reveals shifting buy-side priorities. Advertisers have grown wary of how The Trade Desk earns margin, where its algorithm steers inventory and how these strategies compete with buyer goals.

As the video landscape evolves, one thing is clear: CTV is no longer operating as a standalone line item. It is now a foundational component of fully converged, total video strategies. The implications are especially significant for regional and local advertisers.

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.

The future of publishing won’t be defined by where content lives, but by how it’s created, licensed, distributed and valued, writes David Kohl.

Traffic didn’t drip. It dropped. In 2026, publishers are prioritizing stability over scale as AI, automation and curation reshape the sell side.

The future of retail media depends on a shift away from siloed in-store and online metrics to a full-funnel approach that reflects how customers actually shop.

ICE wants to know how ad tech and location data could aid investigations. The question is: Will ad tech finally draw a line – or cross one?

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.

AI in advertising has gone from a buzzword to a full disruptor in what feels like just a few months. If CES was any indication, there is no sign of this slowing down.

Brands allocating a sizable chunk of their marketing budgets outside of Google and Meta achieve the best customer acquisition costs, proving that diversification is a performance strategy.

Programmatic’s biggest promise was never automation for its own sake. It was accountability. But today, the industry is moving from reporting performance to steering performance.

For brands, this opens a new lever beyond impressions. For publishers, this is a business problem, as their first-party data and on-site inventory could become less valuable for targeting.

When measurement systems are optimized for transactions rather than enterprise value, marketing is forced to justify spend instead of leading growth.

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

“Performance CTV” oversimplifies how television actually drives value, and the focus on performance all but guarantees that campaign results will be misinterpreted.

Ripping out battle-tested infrastructure and starting from scratch – as some emerging agentic protocols propose – is the slowest and most painful path to advertising’s agentic future.

The brands seeing the greatest lift from Andromeda have adjusted not by outsourcing judgment to the algorithm but by refining their creative strategy. Here are three best practices to keep in mind.

Advertising’s “agentic” future is a compelling vision, but one that relies on capabilities that do not exist yet. AdCP may one day make buying easier, but it will not make buying better by itself.

For most of the last decade, privacy compliance lived in a gray zone. Companies could point to a cookie banner, update a policy and reasonably believe they were doing enough. Not anymore.

argue the Outcomes Era is already fading, writes Joe Zappa. But the evidence suggests the opposite. The Outcomes Era isn’t receding; it’s accelerating.

Political advertising has always evolved alongside media consumption. But the shift from linear television to streaming has introduced challenges that campaign managers are still working to navigate. While connected TV (CTV) promises precision and flexibility, the reality facing political advertisers today is far more complex and less standardized.

Bold, accountable leaders who publicly embrace conflict and challenge industry fraud are essential to spark innovation in digital advertising and ad tech, writes Alessandro De Zanche.

Don’t ask whether any other company has created a similar product to yours; the answer is probably yes. But there are other ways to stand out.