AdExchanger Daily Roundup

Walmart has big plans to foray into the TV ad market. Plus: Amazon knows the shape of your butt.

Food and beverage brands have gone off the rails with choosing trendy social marketing terms over truthfulness. Plus: Horizon Global, the joint venture between Horizon Media and Havas, is not gaining too much traction.

Inside Google’s pay-per-value pilot program. And: Twitch’s latest AI offering is new technology that can contribute to an old problem.

Prompt Partners There’s a well-worn playbook for big media owners entering programmatic. First, they pick one exclusive or preferred platform partner. Think Walmart and The Trade Desk or Netflix and Microsoft Advertising (née AppNexus). Then, they branch out and add partners, sometimes whole partner programs for creative, measurement, media buying and analytics. Once they’re sophisticated […]

Perplexity and other LLMs are mounting massive social influencer marketing campaigns. Also: Xbox is not giving up on its advertising ambitions.

Why prebiotic soda brand Poppi describes its marketing strategy as “community first.” Plus: Apple’s transformation into a Google-grade advertising machine continues apace.

Walmart is providing negative keyword exclusion for its search advertising. Plus: As FIFA and broadcasters divvy up sports rights, there may be temptation to shift revenue models to emulate the “hydration-break” ad monetization seen in this year’s World Cup.

Big agencies wrestle with offsetting the rising cost of token consumption. Plus: OpenAI shared policies on how brands can apply ad credit to campaigns.

Serves You Right The ad industry has found a new audience to bombard with ads: AI bots. Time recently began serving ads to bots in an attempt to monetize its growing bot traffic. The ads are formatted as FAQ-style brand content and labeled as sponsored. Influencing agents may eventually become even more important than influencing […]

Eyewear company Blacksheep claims that Google replaced its site with a lookalike domain that led to an error page, causing the brand to lose its position in organic search.

Since Publicis Groupe is acquiring LiveRamp, many brands will likely find themselves in the market for a new independent vendor for audience and identity data. Plus: FIFA’s controversial ad-filled hydration breaks twice per every World Cup game.

Not On My Dime Marketers are increasingly using AI, but mostly for low-stakes tasks, not media-buying decisions.  A Digiday survey of more than 100 marketers names data analysis and content creation as the most popular AI use cases. Advertisers surveyed also prefer AI for social and retail media compared to other channels. One could argue […]

Search and web traffic is getting replaced by AI, so earned media placements don’t quite look the same. Plus: More scrutiny on principal media.

Ring In The New Year The “everything is an ad network” trend will live forever.  There are always new advertising canvases and data sources to be plumbed. For instance, consumer wearables are primed to go off in 2026, Bloomberg reports, especially accessories and rings. That said, smart watches remain the top wearables choice by far, […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Black Boxes All The Way Down Unsurprisingly, Google’s first AI-generated creative, which forms custom imagery and copywriting by prompt, was built into Performance Max, Google’s AI-operated advertising product. In a way, creative generation is the black box inside the black box of campaign optimization, […]