ad tech

In the rush to scale globally, US brands are often content with “accidental attention.” But attention isn’t a lottery; it’s a strategy that requires a deep familiarity with context in real time.

In 2011, three media devices captured 87% of consumer attention. Today, that figure has dropped to 65%, according to McKinsey. The fragmentation isn’t slowing down; it’s accelerating. Streaming services, social media, podcasts and gaming now compete for eyeballs, making traditional media planning feel like navigating with an outdated map.

Traffic didn’t drip. It dropped. In 2026, publishers are prioritizing stability over scale as AI, automation and curation reshape the sell side.

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?

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.

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.

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

AdMonsters joins its sister brand AdExchanger, strengthening its position as the leading platform for the ad tech, publisher and ad ops community.

Consumers don’t experience media in silos. They might stream a live game on their TV, scroll social feeds during halftime and research products on their mobile device later that night.

From a $637 million PE acquisition of healthcare of a DSP to acquisitions of freshly minted startups, there’s been a flurry of ad tech deals this month. And they have one thing in common: AI.

Today’s developers face mounting challenges: heavier workloads, complex tech stacks and an increasingly fragmented advertising landscape demanding automation at scale. This complexity limits their ability to adopt new products and innovate.

Television advertising has undergone a remarkable transformation in recent years, with connected TV (CTV) emerging as a powerful channel for marketers seeking the impact of traditional television with the precision of digital targeting.

Although there are tens of thousands of vendors across the Lumascape, helpfully bucketed by dozens of three-letter acronyms (CDPs, DMPs, SSPs, etc.) ) – nobody has any idea what anybody does. And it’s not like press releases help.

Curated deals were once seen as a smart way to bring structure to programmatic chaos. Today, they’ve become table stakes.

In an omnichannel environment, managing and selling ads is becoming too complex for humans to handle alone. That’s why many are turning to AI tools to maximize ad inventory

Index Exchange CEO Andrew Casale, fresh off the witness stand for US v. Google, and AdExchanger’s courtroom reporter, Allison Schiff, join us to analyze the ad tech trial of the century.

Just two weeks before Google’s antitrust trial, we discuss revelations from a cache of documents released in advance of the trial – plus, a primer on what’s ahead as header bidding goes to the stand.

Ad tech M&A has had a case of the Mondays since … late 2021. After the blistering pace of M&A during the height of the pandemic, deal activity in the ad tech sector slowed to a trickle in 2022 and has remained sluggish this year.

When you combine ad tech integrations, in all their messy complexity, with data privacy laws like GDPR, the stakes for mistakes are high. Last week, our managing editor, Allison Schiff, broke one such story. PubMatic had set the default timer to get consent in its own identity management solution so low – between 1 millisecond […]

Programmatic veterans are pivoting to become founders of privacy tech companies. Plus: Nielsen ONE and the currency battle continues leading up for the TV upfronts.

Netflix plans to introduce ads … and ad tech vet (and mayor of ad tech Twitter) Ari Paparo is rolling out an SVOD service of sorts. Weird world. On Monday, Paparo, who sold his last company, Beeswax, to Comcast in early 2020, launched Marketecture.tv, a startup to help prospective technology buyers understand and evaluate the technology they buy before they buy it.

The Trade Desk’s OpenPath demonstrates supply path optimization (SPO) is moving from concept to reality. But what does it practically mean for publishers or yield teams tasked with driving business KPIs? The question is to whom SPO is important, writes Emry DowningHall, SVP of programmatic revenue and strategy at Unwind Media.

2021 brought both bounty (IPOs) and challenges (targeting). As ad tech surfed the wave of IPOs, it also weathered attacks on targeting and measurement, as online privacy increasingly became a priority for governments, platforms and people.

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Oz Etzioni, CEO at Clinch. 2021 is shaping up to be a breakthrough year for advertising technology. After several fallow years for ad tech companies and a necessary period of […]

The landscape for IP-delivered TV ads is a heck of a lot different from digital advertising. For one, consolidation is happening extremely slowly, if at all. The number of scaled platforms with big audiences is crowded and diverse and includes Roku, Amazon, Google/YouTube, Disney, NBCU/Peacock, AT&T and Comcast among many others. This week on AdExchanger […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. They See Me Rollin’ Uber tapped former Sizmek CEO and Amazon ad exec Mark Grether to lead its advertising business, Business Insider reports. Poaching Grether is a big deal for Uber as it stands up a global advertising strategy. Though Uber’s ad revenue isn’t […]

The field of public ad tech and digital media companies is growing large – both in number of companies and their market value. To help us untangle all of the M&A, IPOs and SPACs, Progress Partners Chief Operating Officer Domenic Venuto explains how investors approach the digital media and advertising sector. One important tell for […]

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

Wall Street can’t get enough of ad tech – creating a hot market for stocks and making quarterly earnings a who’s who of ad tech companies. Not so long ago, the ad tech bellwethers were The Trade Desk and Magnite, but earnings season now features a parade of companies young and old: PubMatic, DoubleVerify, Viant, […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. IPOs Popping The ad tech party is raging after a slew of companies went public in recent weeks. AcuityAds, Taboola and Integral Ad Science went public in June. Not to be outdone, content recommendation company Outbrain announced plans to IPO a day before rival […]