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People Inc.’s referral traffic from Google search is down 70% over the past two years, and by 26% in Q3 alone. But its digital revenue is still growing, albeit slowly.

On Tuesday, Chord, a six-year-old commerce tech startup, acquired Zenlytic, an AI startup with an anthropomorphized data analyst agent named “Zoë,” for $5 million.

If you ask the executive leadership of Affle and Perion why the two companies are merging, the answer you’ll get is “synergies.”

A combo of Tubi, sports and political ads powered Fox’s growth this last quarter, even as Fox News lost viewers and the Roku deal awaits DOJ clearance.

It’s fall, and M&A is in the air. Two acquisitions happened this week: Stagwell bought Freestar, and DoorDash bought Instacart.

Starting in Q4, Reddit will test logged-in-only mode to protect its user engagement, improve ad targeting and keep AI from scraping its content.

DoorDash on Thursday confirmed the rumors and announced its intention to acquire Instacart at a $17 billion valuation.

Last week, a district court judge in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $25 billion for misleading Facebook users about how it handled their data. Does it matter?

Google earned $127.6 billion in Q3, up 25% year over year, practically all of which came from ads. Yet advertising hardly came up during its earnings call on Wednesday evening.

Meta now scores every eligible ad for every impression at more than a billion ads per second, one of three ad ranking upgrades Meta announced on Wednesday.

The agency services group Marketbridge added to its portfolio on Tuesday by announcing its acquisition of Channel99, a B2B advertising and attribution tech company.

The law-professional-to-queer-media-founder pipeline is not a particularly common one. But it’s exactly how Alia J. Daniels came to co-found Revry, a free streaming platform centering LGBTQ+ storylines.

Podcasters can open their inventory to programmatic demand to complement their direct-sold host-read ads and monetize their back catalogs.

The deal is the latest sign that media buyers are moving closer to publishers to shorten supply paths and get at the audience data they need to train AI agents.

OptimizeRx, which has software that plugs into the systems doctors use to prescribe drugs and maintain patient records, has taken its next big step into the world of programmatic through a new partnership with The Trade Desk.

If AI agents can plan and buy media, who needs a holding company? Good question. It came up during Omnicom’s Q3 earnings on Thursday.

Netflix’s revenue grew 12% YOY to $12.9 billion in Q3, which it maintains is in line with its forecast. Its ads business, however, is lagging slightly compared with expectations, causing Netflix to tweak its forecast for the rest of the year.

Apple is coming for identity resolution. WebKit’s latest tracking crackdown targets the infrastructure behind post-cookie IDs – and switching to a first-party setup won’t necessarily spare vendors.

Advertising supply chain intelligence company DecryptAds uncovered more than 2,100 AI-generated recipe sites that are monetized with programmatic ads and feature fabricated author profiles.

Most brands and businesses are trying to figure out how to improve their metrics when it comes to AI – and also what those metrics even are.

Minerva wants to turn fragmented customer data into something marketers can use, with AI agents doing the work behind the scenes.

VideoAmp is competing in the measurement space by sharpening its focus on TV audience data, ad performance and, of course, AI. The company is also making strategic hires and promoting from within.

The Prebid Summit in New York City on Tuesday exceeded the event’s reputation for liveliness.

The ad industry has become a community of people who say things like “This is going to sound relatable” and follow it up with a sentence that may as well be Martian to 99% of America.

LG home screen inventory is now available through agentic buying, opening up a premium TV placement to faster, more automated campaign setup.

Reorienting the ad auction so that ad servers bid into Prebid lets publishers access demand from Google AdX without also having to use Google’s ad server.

Starling recently launched as a connected TV SSP and wants to capitalize on the opportunity to address a major pain point facing CTV marketers: the lack of show-level data.

Apple has a new block list for data brokers and ad tech vendors that do cross-site user tracking – which could expand to include a much broader slate of ad tech and martech vendors across the entire ecosystem. Plus: a few thoughts on Advertising Week New York.

Against the backdrop of Advertising Week New York this week, the programmatic ecosystem has been buzzing madly like the inhabitants of an overturned beehive after the release of Apple’s iOS 27.

Given how much agentic AI pervades nearly every conversation these days, it’s easy to overlook how nascent the technology still is, particularly when it comes to buying ads on connected TV.