The media brands that remain locked in the traditional marketing funnel are the ones AI content farms will maul first. But if they create a trust-driven marketing flywheel, publishers can keep their businesses alive.
Bold, accountable leaders who publicly embrace conflict and challenge industry fraud are essential to spark innovation in digital advertising and ad tech, writes Alessandro De Zanche.
AI agents and so-called “super signal aggregators” are being framed as the saviors of premium publishers and advertisers who prioritize high-quality media. But these technologies could perpetuate programmatic’s worst practices.
If we’re to leave behind the third-party cookie era, the rest of the ecosystem must reassert the role it plays in setting the agenda.
The programmatic open marketplace is designed to sustain the business models of ad tech, agencies and consultancies, rather than serving the interests of advertisers, audiences and media owners. It cannot be fixed. It must be rebuilt.
Google is keeping third-party cookies in Chrome, and here’s what ad tech Twitter (X, whatever), has to say about it.
Many in the digital advertising industry truly want to do better. But there are imminent obstacles that need to be tackled if we want to move from words to deeds.
If advertisers feel like they need to go out of their way to support journalism, that is proof the programmatic open marketplace is broken. Yet we can’t place all the responsibility on the buy-side; media owners need to develop effective strategies to support themselves.
For both premium publishers and MFA, monetization boils down to an endless quest for scale and shallow insights into their audiences that can be turned into ad revenue.
How retailers and ad tech interact will determine whether retail media can avoid the same predatory practices that have led to traditional media becoming commoditized.
Rather than allowing an ecosystem in which all media is interchangeable to remain the default, media owners must differentiate themselves to maximize their value to readers and advertisers.
Yahoo pulling the plug on its SSP demonstrates how difficult it’s become for supply-side platforms to prove their value in a commoditized marketplace.
Success in the first-party web is based first and foremost on relationships, quality and trust, neither of which are improved by most content currently provided by recommendation engines, writes audience and data strategy consultant Alessandro De Zanche.
Apple is disrupting old business models that refuse to evolve or die. And the entities affected are fighting back with what is left: weak narratives and conspiracy theories, writes audience and data strategy consultant Alessandro De Zanche.
One of the most overlooked caveats around the shift to first-party assets is that no successful monetization strategy can be built in isolation. A future-facing media monetization strategy must work in two concentrical contexts: within the media owner’s environment itself and within the advertising environment, writes Alessandro De Zanche, audience and data strategy consultant.
Google may have a solution to the antitrust regulatory pressure it’s facing from governments around the world: a proactive spinoff. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is exploring splitting Google’s digital ad business into a separate entity under the Alphabet umbrella. The question is whether Google’s proposed solution will pass muster with regulators, and if it does, who stands to win – and who stands to lose?
The market is not being kind to digital media companies. The nearly 40% drop in BuzzFeed’s stock price on Monday and the decline of its valuation from $1.5 billion when it went public in December to roughly $300 million now is no doubt causing other digital-native publishers to rethink their IPO plans. But any doom and gloom about the long-term viability of digital publishers in public markets is likely overblown.
The debate following Netflix’s recently released Q1 results illustrates the need for a less binary perspective on advertising vs. subscription models, writes audience and data strategy consultant Alessandro De Zanche.
Over the years, publishers have accused advertisers of prioritizing the wrong metrics. But that’s only one side of the story – as gatekeepers of quality media environments, publishers and media owners have a massive responsibility to focus on quality, too, writes Alessandro De Zanche, audience and data strategy consultant.
Last week, a federal judge unsealed previously redacted portions of an antitrust lawsuit poking into Google’s allegedly monopolistic ad practices. Will these revelations actually change the way publishers and advertisers spend with Google, or is Google too entrenched? And how much ammunition do these disclosures give regulators in their quest to rein in Google? We asked the experts.
Media owners today risk losing control of one of their most precious assets. The parasitic nature of certain ad tech is back, as some players try to pull control of resources and assets away from media brands. This time, they’re threatening the very essence of intellectual property: content, writes audience and data strategy consultant Alessandro De Zanche.
Mergers and acquisitions, the industry’s slow-motion pivot away from third-party data and the expansion of commerce-based business dominated the headlines for media and sell-side ad tech in 2021. What does the industry predict for 2022? More of the same as these trends continue to play out in the year ahead. First-party first In 2022 and […]
The Vox Media/Group Nine deal is only the most recent example of the consolidation trend in digital media. Publishers have been turning to M&A as a method to grow their audiences and increase their ad revenue, in addition to boosting their valuation for further deals down the road.
“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Alessandro de Zanche, an audience and data strategy consultant. Ad tech stocks are soaring even as regulators clamp down on ad tech, especially in Europe. How can we understand this irrational behavior? Let’s backtrack. […]
“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Alessandro De Zanche, an audience and data strategy consultant. Progress is not a straight line or a smooth path, as many in history have reminded us. It seems to be the case for data […]
“The Sell Sider” is written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Alessandro De Zanche, an audience and data strategy consultant. Like an oil corporation opposing the rise of renewables or a tobacco company lobbying for its own cause, a reactionary wing of digital advertising is struggling to accept the […]
“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Alessandro De Zanche, an audience and data strategy consultant. The most serious threat to publishers’ business models is coming from within. I’m talking about email-based universal IDs. In the last couple of years, media […]
“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Alessandro De Zanche, an audience and data strategy consultant. Fixing your own strategy and business model when the industry is a whirlwind of moving parts takes time, courage, vision and above all the ability to […]
“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Alessandro De Zanche, an audience and data strategy consultant. Are we witnessing a renaissance in media owners’ data and audience strategies? It feels like yesterday when many media brands believed having a data strategy meant […]
“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Alessandro De Zanche, an audience and data strategy consultant. I recently had the opportunity to dive deeply into how media owners approach the diversification and the coexistence of business models built on audience, data and […]
