Publishers

Spotify faces obstacles in its ticket sales aspirations; Apple switches to view-through attribution; and The Washington Post and Meta remove ads that were critical of Elon Musk.

When an ad shows up next to illegal content, there is often not a single point of failure. Adalytics Krzysztof Franaszek walks us through why he found ads showing up next to the worst kind of criminal content — and the simple and complex solutions to this problem.

Meta is no stranger by now to complaints from ad buyers, particularly ecommerce brands and social agencies, reporting major systemic platform issues, including outright bugs and glitches – not to mention decreased marketing returns at higher CPMs.

Roku reported $4.1 billion in revenue for 2024, an 18% jump year over year. Its platform business in particular, which includes ad sales and streaming distribution, reached $3.5 billion last year, also an 18% jump compared to 2023 (or 15% excluding political ad revenue).

US judge rules generative AI has no fair use claim; Snap sets its sights on SMBs; MMM comes to CTV; and Disney introduces ads in live TV, even for paid users.

DDM is expanding its performance-focused contextual targeting solution, D/Cipher, to third-party inventory.

Netflix’s programmatic platform is a tough sell in Europe. Plus, awkward euphemisms makes marketing for sports gambling a problem. 

To attract advertisers, Bloomberg is pitching them on not just reach but contextual relevance. That rationale inspired the company’s latest contextual ad product, AdService, which it launched in January.

The New York Times and News Corp are case studies in how news publishers are evolving to be less reliant on ad revenue. Both publishers have also increasingly looked to new revenue streams for sustained growth.

AdExchanger reached out to a number of major DSPs to gauge the current state of adoption of the IAB Tech Lab’s new video ad standard.

Coinbase has acquired a blockchain-based advertising and attribution startup. Plus, is brand safety on social media a myth?

Criteo’s Brian Gleason shared how it is working with agencies to capitalize on curation and measurement opportunities in retail media and CTV.

Google’s open-source MMM product goes live; Amazon Prime Video’s ad biz turns one; and teens don’t trust Big Tech and have doubts about AI.

In light of T-Mobile’s plans to buy Vistar Media, Atmosphere TV’s business model shines a brighter spotlight on the grey area between connected TV and DOOH billboards.

The first half of this decade has left publishers reeling from a pandemic jab and an AI uppercut that rearranged our reality and knocked us to our knees. Here’s how pubs and their ad tech partners can punch back in the years ahead.

Enjoy this weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem … 

A new storyline is emerging around curation, one in which publishers feel they’ve lost out to middlemen on yet another opportunity to monetize their audiences.

Under the guise of preventing “censorship,” Jim Jordan and the FCC’s Brendan Carr are attacking the First Amendment rights of private companies to choose what kinds of political content they support.

AI-generated slop content is growing exponentially online. Plus, publishers and new organizations are strategizing for a post-TikTok future. 
 

On Monday, T-Mobile announced plans to acquire Vistar Media, an ad platform that specializes in digital out-of-home for roughly $600 million in cash.

Tom Pachys, Co-founder and CEO of EX.CO, discusses the company’s new expanded ad server, and how it sets the offering sets them apart from other ad tech companies.

Nobody is acting like TikTok will actually be scrapped from American smartphones. Plus, Venu Sports got benched – for good.

Helen Havlak, publisher at The Verge, chats with AdExchanger at CES about how publishers should pivot in response to the dropoff in traffic from Google search.

Three years after launching its own data clean room, Roku is trying to bring something new to the table. On Monday, the company announced the launch of a new offering, the Roku Data Cloud, which allows marketers access to more granular streaming TV data via ad tech and agency API partners.

As the new year begins, expect CTV growth to continue blasting along with a vengeance. Experts are “bullish” on the channel and believe that many of 2024’s biggest CTV trends will continue well into 2025.

Dealmaking and AI (and blackjack) are top of mind for those heading to CES. Plus, don’t expect brands to reengage with hard news in 2025.

For all intents and purposes, 2024 is already over. Which means now is a fine time to see how far CTV advertising has come by looking back at some of this year’s most-read stories on AdExchanger.

Publisher C-suite drama has been making headlines recently. Plus, there are now 27 different active lawsuits against various AI content generation companies.

In response to shifting ad industry trends, A360 Media abandoned its made-for-advertising model four years ago and streamlined its site design to court programmatic demand.

The in-game advertising market’s stagnation is both unsurprising and frustrating. The onus is on the gaming industry to make gaming an essential channel for advertisers, rather than a nice-to-have.