Opinion

When platforms choose to label any significant portion of an ad buy as “other,” it’s a deliberate decision to withhold information for the seller’s benefit and the buyer’s detriment.

Managing first-party data – and, by extension, your identity strategy – has never been more critical in today’s evolving digital landscape. The landscape has also never been more challenging to navigate.

If the court ultimately orders Google to spin off AdX or DFP, the result would be a fundamental rebalancing of power across the digital advertising supply chain. For marketers, the implications are just as significant.

The wave of ad tech headlines in recent weeks represents a long overdue moment of reckoning for companies who (still) hold disproportionate control over publishers’ website traffic and revenue potential.

It’s important to have frank discussions with clients, explaining the need and value of brand safety. That way, marketers can make an educated decision on whether they truly need to pay for it.

Many well-intentioned advertising standards efforts gather digital dust thanks to industry politics and competing interests. Here’s how the industry can stop sabotaging its own progress.

Every organization that has installed a marketing mix modeling solution today wants to be more data-driven.

Modern CMOs, marketing analytics leaders and media leaders know marketing is an investment, which must have demonstrable ROI. And they know using data to figure out what’s working and what isn’t is crucial to ensuring waste is controlled.

Here are three areas that marketing technology professionals must handle successfully to get the most out of their AI applications.

Data clean rooms have become a major topic of discussion amid ongoing regulatory changes and evolving industry policies. As advertisers navigate these shifts, it’s important to take a step back and understand what’s available – and how to select the right partners to solve real business challenges.

CTV advertising has made great strides, but it still lags behind social platforms in one critical area: optimizing campaigns based on outcome data. Here’s how standardized conversion API integrations for CTV can help.

Audience suppression may be the missing link between annoying a consumer and building a lasting relationship.

Does AI kill authenticity? Or is it just another evolution of content creation? And does it even matter? After all, consumers say they care about authenticity, but their actions don’t always match their words.

Advanced and generative AI are transforming marketing from fragmented workflows into an engine of profitability and growth. Yet, despite AI’s promise, many in marketing remain trapped in outdated systems that fail to deliver.

The next wave of the boom isn’t going to come from the same online corners as it has over the past five years.

It’s difficult for advertisers to enter into contracts with every company to which they disclose personal information. However, difficulty is no longer an acceptable excuse.

The need for addressability has been a rallying cry among advertisers for the past five years. But clinging to outdated notions of addressability means overlooking the broader needs of today’s modern media landscape.

Many in the industry see Google’s fingerprinting reversal as an irresponsible move due to privacy concerns, particularly in regions with strict data regulations.

Despite diverse hiring initiatives and programs to support women in the workplace, representation in ad tech is lacking. And given threats to women’s rights and the rollback of DEI efforts due to political pressure, the time to take action is now.

Amid shifting habits in media consumption, live sports have demonstrated significant staying power. Over the past five years, the NFL has consistently claimed at least 70 of TV’s top 100 telecasts, and 2024 saw record-setting viewership for major sports events like the Olympics and MLB World Series.

Once considered the “old reliable” next to programmatic advertising, contextual targeting is having a resurgence – and this time, it’s powered by AI. AI is redefining how contextual targeting works, making it smarter, more scalable and more effective. And the timing couldn’t be better, as marketers navigate a landscape increasingly shaped by privacy regulations and the demand for relevance.

Where principal media has gone wrong is that buyers have commoditized it due to an overreliance on vanity metrics in contractual agreements.

Based on the way advertisers deal with publishers, you’d think they were sworn enemies. Our failure to prioritize collaboration on the open web and build a positive value chain has been our collective downfall.

The curation debate is missing a critical piece: standardized reporting. Without it, curation risks leaving publishers in the dark about its actual value.

If we’re to leave behind the third-party cookie era, the rest of the ecosystem must reassert the role it plays in setting the agenda.

GDPR may not be perfect, but it forced European companies to adopt a privacy-by-default position. For US companies, this is a clear signal: Change is inevitable.

I’ve spent nearly a decade in marketing mix modeling (MMM), and I can tell you this: MMM starts with the model and proves itself in product and growth. An MMM without growth is like a car without fuel; it simply doesn’t work.

Now that Chevron is overturned, it will be easier for companies to challenge FTC regulations in court, arguing that they exceed the FTC’s mandate, writes OpenX’s Julie Rooney.

If the past few decades have proven anything, it’s this: Consumers and businesses expect constant innovation, and brands must evolve or perish. Mediocrity won’t cut it. That’s where AI can help, even if it brings a sense of uncertainty.

To solve ad tech’s intractable problems, there’s a solution that the advertising industry could borrow from the hacker world: bug bounties.

As the lines between the gaming and non-gaming worlds continue to fade, gaming publishers are unlocking a massive opportunity: non-gaming advertisers. We’re already seeing a surge of in-app advertising (IAA) spend from non-gaming advertisers, but we’re about to see the flood gates opened by a major tech innovation: modern machine learning (ML) algorithms that turbocharge the formerly slow, resource-intensive and relatively unscientific process of finding audience overlaps.