Platforms

Ecommerce and DTC marketers may be overrelying on YouTube and Meta for advertising. Plus, song recognition technology is becoming a problem.

Black Friday ecommerce continues to surge, mainly on mobile; social platforms pull optimization features for health and beauty brands; and Google’s antitrust lawyers subpoena info about rival AI search startups.

Call it a Glitchmas miracle. Maybe. Meta finally appears to have resolved a glitch in its ad platform that prevented new financial services advertisers from running campaigns.

Meta’s privacy policies are uniquely impenetrable. Plus, Google once thought Apple would likely expand its ad business to third-party apps.

Google and the DOJ were given roughly 90 minutes apiece to present their closing arguments, and Judge Brinkema could interrupt and ask questions throughout. She had some great ones.

As we close the books on 2024, we’ve noticed some trends over the past twelve months. Any of these could summarize the “theme” of 2024: the rise of AI, the debate over supply curation, the “will they, won’t they” around cookie deprecation. Together, these trends have laid the groundwork for what’s to come in 2025: It will be the year of empowerment for buyers through choice and control.

Meta changes policy on “sensitive” ads; Texas AG launches an investigation into GARM; and the CMA takes it easy on Apple and Google when it comes to cloud gaming.

Rumors are swirling that DV is exploring an acquisition of Lumen Research to add eye-tracking capabilities to its attention measurement solution.

Bluesky’s user count is booming, but it lacks the scale marketers crave; “individual-level prices” are ruining airline rewards programs; and Meta details its fight against forced-labor camps that perpetuate online scams.

Current ad pricing often doesn’t correlate to a site’s attention score, which means there’s an arbitrage opportunity for buyers and resellers.

Political ad strategies evolved quickly this year, as campaigns moved beyond exclusivity, focusing on flexibility and reach. Here’s what this cycle taught us and how it will guide our business in the medium term.

Why the agency pivot to alternative payment models is good for M&A; Zeta Global responds to a short-seller’s explosive claims; and X sees a mass exodus after the election.

Threads will introduce ads to capitalize on users fleeing X; Perplexity tests ads and sponsored queries; and Amazon pulls the plug on Freevee.

The deal is a “platform investment,” in which Inverness Graham sees Alliant as a foundation to build on, potentially through further acquisitions.

Meta continues to tinker with its business model as it deals with the new European regulatory environment. Plus, Government officials liberally used location-tracking software Locate X in criminal investigations dating back to 2018.

Remember last quarter when PubMatic projected a $5 million revenue dip from a large DSP buyer having switched to a first-price auction?

Advertisers new to CTV tend to misunderstand performance metrics and overemphasize cost per thousand impressions (CPM) as a measure of success.

AppLovin might be the next breakout in retail media. Plus, some advertiseres have already turned off TikTok Smart+.

CTV advertising continues to drive significant growth for Magnite. That’s all thanks to “increasing programmatic adoption by the industry’s largest players,” CEO Michael Barrett told investors on the company’s Q3 earnings call this Thursday.

Opera Ads – the online ad platform Opera released in 2019 – doesn’t use third-party cookies for targeting. Opera monetizes its browser using other signals, including search intent and context.

Trump won the 2024 election. To recap why Trump won, and how paid media played a role (and didn’t) in his victory, we bring on guest Jordan Lieberman, CEO of Power Interactive. The programmatic buying company handled more than 1,000 digital campaigns across the political spectrum this election cycle.

Walmart’s latest data play: an app for unlocking barricades on store shelves; training generative AI may rely more on scraping big-name sites than previously thought; and tracking the issues that mattered most to Trump and Harris, based on ad spending.

If you’re trying to read more than 1,000 pages of legal documents about the US v. Google ad tech antitrust case on Election Day, you’ve come to the right place.

To court new programmatic buyers, SoundCloud is now selling its display and video ads via open auction and private marketplace deals that combine multiple types of inventory.

Snapchat probably isn’t the first thing you think of when you hear “CRM,” but Snap is trying to change that.

Brands have two options for avoiding election misinformation on YouTube: block all news, or only monetize credible news. But blocking all news restricts campaign reach and harms reliable journalists, just when we need them most.

Brands need more automated tools for buying podcast ads at scale, says Publicis Groupe. Now, Barometer will provide brand safety rankings for all of Acast’s podcast inventory to assist pre-campaign planning.

In the world of online advertising on big walled-garden platforms – Meta in particular – October through November truly is the season of giving. Of giving advertisers ulcers and panic attacks, that is.

Google holds court with bloggers bumped from its search algorithm; a backlash is brewing as the online recommendation engine goes into overdrive; and X pushes conservative politics to accounts with nonpartisan interests.

Meta’s capex in 2024 will clock in somewhere between $38 billion and $40 billion, roughly $1 billion more than previously anticipated. Where’s most of that money going? AI, of course.