Platforms

When The Trade Desk sneezes, ad tech catches a cold.

Today’s biggest retail events are noisy, fast-moving and fiercely competitive. From back-to-school time and Prime Day to Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the entire holiday shopping season, success comes down to securing attention before the rush begins.

Data brokers de-index their opt-outs; Meta is still the go-to for influencer ads; and Perplexity offers to buy Chrome.

Product review site HouseFresh bounced back from losing 91% of its Google traffic last year. Here’s how it’s pivoting in response to stiffer affiliate marketing competition and zero-click AI search.

The ad tech startup Vaudit, founded last year by Mike Hahn, aims to automate the process of campaign reconciliation atop major ad platforms.

Sometimes, price can itself be promotional marketing; Reddit is no longer playing nice; and AI scrapers are reshaping the web in another way.

New social media content moderation policies will enable connections with audiences that reflect a broader range of perspectives, expand inventory, and provide opportunities for contextual alignment.

Creative agencies are trying to adapt to AI’s sudden invasion of their turf; it’s a sunny day for TikTok travel influencers; and publishers have more than just Google’s AI overviews to worry about.

Why sue Google now, when so many years have passed? Because “the pattern of anticompetitive behavior continues,” OpenX CEO John Gentry tells AdExchanger.

OpenX filed a lawsuit against Google over its anticompetitive practices. And HyphaMetrics claimed victory against Nielsen in court over a patent lawsuit.

The SSP is betting on the DOJ’s antitrust remedies, plus closer relationships with agencies, DSPs and mid-sized advertisers, to help it eat some of Google’s lunch.

The New York Times’ growth rate blows other large news companies out of the water; Shopify’s shares leapt by 20% after an upbeat Q2 earnings report; and Google’s AI Overviews may or may not be causing web traffic to plummet, depending who you ask.

RE/MAX gets into the retail media game; Meta loses a class-action lawsuit over how it handled period-tracking data; and the IAB Tech Lab unveils its ad delivery playbook for live events.

People Inc. – the former Dotdash Meredith – is fighting on multiple fronts to keep its business growing as Google Search declines precipitously as a source of referral traffic.

CleanTap, an ad tech startup launched by the founder of Method Media Intelligence, wants to separate the wheat from the chaff in CTV by serving as a curation layer between DSPs and SSPs.

Agentio’s AI connects advertisers with relevant content creators through an automated bidding process, similar to the programmatic system.

As the quality of answer engines improves, people will click through to publisher websites less often. The solution isn’t to wage war against AI. It’s time to build a sustainable future for all stakeholders.

Coinbase is getting into ads; Etsy can’t rely on search ads for very long; and Zuckerberg wants to buy AI companies.

Change can be bumpy. From The Trade Desk’s Solimar-to-Kokai transition to Nielsen’s transition to its Big Data + Panel offering, we go inside customers’ challenges with these two transforming platforms.

My YouTube creator obsession has me fascinated by an ongoing trend I’ve noticed in the CTV industry: A lot of companies that produce free ad-supported channels rely on content that already exists on YouTube.

While Reddit’s ad business is ascendent, it’s still working on a strategy for getting the most out of its generative AI deals.

NBCU’s streaming losses were down to $100 million in Q2 from $348 million year-over-year, representing significant progress as the platform nears break-even.

Meta is making a massive investment in AI because “we have a conviction that superintelligence is going to improve every aspect of what we do,” Mark Zuckerberg told investors.

SaaS companies are abandoning interoperability in search of more revenue; Spotify’s ad business is growing slower than expected; and sports is an upfronts winner for Disney and NBCU.

Ride-hailing app company Curb Mobility is bringing TikTok’s user-generated content to Taxi TV, its network of more than 15,000 in-taxi screens across 65 US markets.

ChatGPT will google that for you; the Canadian TikTok shutdown gets real; and Elon’s crusage against media ratings organizations goes on.

FC Barcelona is giving the beautiful game an AI-powered upgrade.

Reddit is surging with advertiser demand; not everyone is Substack material; and Trump released his AI Action Plan.

The Trade Desk currently has no concrete plans to deprecate its legacy Solimar user interface in order to push adoption of its new UI, Kokai.

Netflix cracks Nielsen’s top 3 channels, but YouTube is still tops; CTV is maturing as a marketing channel, but it comes with zits; and Google rolls out another core update for search.