Opinion

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.

Viewers aren’t just watching streaming content anymore; they’re living in it. And while they’re streaming, they’re telling us something important about how they want to experience advertising. They want to do more than watch; they want to engage.

The era of “managed decline” is over; the era of existential clarity has begun. Publishers are no longer guessing what the post-platform world looks like. We are living in it.

Programmatic media buying is expected to account for the majority of growth in the CTV market in 2026. This year alone, over 90% of CTV ad dollars were transacted through programmatic pipes. That data isn’t surprising. Programmatic has solved a real problem by helping brands reach TV viewers with targeted precision at much lower costs.

Unauthorized ID stuffing, rampant reselling and misaligned signals inflict incredible damage on the programmatic ecosystem. If publishers want to compete with the walled gardens, we must raise our standards. 

CTV isn’t an emerging channel anymore. It’s a fully established, essential part of the media mix. Advertisers now understand its reach, flexibility and ability to drive measurable outcomes.

AI shopping agents are breaking the traditional attribution loop. Marketers must ensure that AI is aware of their brand and track how that awareness influences ecommerce outcomes.

Almost everything in AI feels big. But are you looking at the next Gangnam Style or the birth of a new industry? Here’s how to assess whether an AI vendor is likely to matter in two years.

Marketers used to wait for obvious signals, like a product page view, a cart add or a keyword search, before triggering campaigns. But in today’s fractured landscape, those signals can arrive too late.

For years, MFA was a mostly web-based problem. Now, generative AI has supercharged the made-for-advertising model, and it’s infecting social media feeds and vertical video platforms.