Earlier this year, I wrote in AdExchanger about the 20% to 30% of programmatic video spend that gets lost in the gap between what inventory labels promise and what the actual viewing experience delivers.
We must reject the fantasy of infinite creative variations tailored to individuals – not just because it is technically impossible but because it fundamentally misunderstands how advertising works for the vast majority of brands.
An upcoming paper from CIMM doesn’t just demonstrate that differences in media quality can be measured. It also argues that tying media value to short-term outcomes has perpetuated longstanding industry challenges.
The generative AI trend generated endless hot takes this year, but the ad industry also had plenty to say about growing competition between DSPs and SSPs. Here are AdExchanger’s top 10 most popular guest columns of 2025 and why they resonated.
Remedies in the federal search antitrust case against Google landed with a thud earlier this week. Most publishers and ad industry pundits were sorely disappointed.
Measuring media quality is just the first step. A bigger challenge looms: assessing media quality against a marketer’s short-term and long-term goals.
Talking about outcomes is practically a mandate, especially in the CTV space, where ad buyers and vendors alike are heavily invested in streaming television’s potential as a lower-funnel, performance-driving channel.
Erez Levin, a former Googler and current outspoken consultant, on why the digital ad industry should transact on media quality signals like attention instead of optimizing to outcomes and other flawed attribution models.
Where principal media has gone wrong is that buyers have commoditized it due to an overreliance on vanity metrics in contractual agreements.
The industry’s sharpest minds claim we are entering the Outcomes Era of digital advertising. But we have been in the Outcomes Era for over a decade. It is high time to embrace the Quality Era, instead.
Publishers and SSPs aren’t incentivized to accurately label their video inventory. But increased pressure from the buy side could correct the skewed pricing dynamics that result from outstream being sold as instream.
