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Data intelligence platform Tracer selected Obele Brown-West to be its first president on Wednesday on the brink of closing its Series A round of funding.

After years of courting lower-funnel performance budgets – and charging on a cost-per-click basis – Outbrain foresees further growth in attracting upper-funnel spend. It’s doing so by giving brands a way to measure their return on investment in awareness campaigns by tracking whether people are actually paying attention to their ads.

To survive and stay relevant, publishers like Ziff Davis and Black Enterprise are creating commerce-related content.

MadHive, the CTV ad buying platform, announced a $300 million investment from Goldman Sachs. Now, the company is turning its attention to measurement and attribution companies that might make lucrative acquisition targets.

New startups are starting to use generative AI to flip the script on in-video product placement, including Rembrand, a new venture launched by ad tech vet Omar Tawakol in February.

The cost of customer acquisition is about more than what a brand pays to get someone to visit a website or download an app. Advertisers also need to bake engagement and retention into their CAC, says Braze CEO Bill Magnuson.

Tatari is launching a new sister company called Vault, whose first product is a data clean room. The idea is to provide cross-channel measurement for advertisers and programmers using data other than IP addresses.

With a feared recession yet to materialize, GroupM is feeling somewhat optimistic. The holding company predicts in its midyear forecast, released on Monday, that global advertising is on track to grow 5.9% in 2023, in line with its projection from December.

Privacy Sandbox APIs will be generally available starting in July. That means publishers have roughly one year to get acclimated … and to raise any red flags to regulators.

There are certain privacy-related phrases companies use when they’re talking about their products that should make your antennae twitch. If you hear them, it’s a signal to ask questions.

Netflix is serious about getting rid of account sharing. But the backlash from subscribers might be more than Netflix bargained for.

Legal drama alert: The Federal Trade Commission refiled its privacy complaint against Kochava earlier this week. The case is under a temporary seal, so details are thin on the ground (for now).

Despite their perilous position, some companies still aren’t preparing for the end of third-party cookies. But the lack of testing isn’t because they aren’t concerned.

Around nine months ago, European department store chain El Corte Inglés started using a customer data platform to do more – and better – with its first-party data.

MikMak rolled out an “apples-to-apples comparison” tool across social, search, programmatic, streaming video and retail media Wednesday, dubbed MikMak Commerce for Retail Media.

The Kokai upgrade is the culmination of multiyear investments in AI-driven campaign optimization, measurement, reporting and data-sharing partnerships with publishers, CTV platforms and retail media networks.

Charter’s full linear footprint is going programmatic, the result of a partnership between Spectrum Reach, the ad sales division of Charter, and supply-side platform Beachfront.

Who needs friends when you can converse with your data clean room, chat with your ad platform and, uh, talk to your marketing cloud?

Microsoft’s purchase of Xandr from AT&T in late 2021 might have looked like an embrace of third-party ad tech. But while parts of the Xandr tech are considered valuable by Microsoft, the future of Xandr as an SSP integrated with thousands of outside publishers is in doubt.

There’s a prevailing narrative that supply-side platforms are releasing tools to cut out demand-side platforms in a desperate attempt to differentiate. But “it’s much more nuanced than that,” says Magnite CRO Sean Buckley.

Dotdash Meredith bet on contextual with its launch of D/Cipher, but it remains to be seen whether it can turn its revenue numbers around.

Apple has a knack for making privacy-related product announcements that cast aspersions on the data practices of any company whose name isn’t “Apple,” and there were a handful of those.

The vast majority (72%) of people say they would choose brands that use humor effectively over their competitors. The challenge is helping brands “find their funny” while also standing out from the deluge of branded content, says Stephen Loguidice, SVP and head advertising at Hartbeat, a media venture owned by actor and comedian Kevin Hart.

In honor of National Streaming Day – an informal holiday cooked up by Roku in 2014 that takes place every May 20 – several streaming services celebrated by slashing the price of their subscriptions.

Cars.com is trying to resonate with younger and first-time car buyers in hopes that they become lifelong customers.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a test case for how ad tech can be used as an instrument of psychological warfare. But some ad tech companies are fighting back with their own AI-powered tools.

Dish is making its linear TV inventory addressable. Advertisers will be able to buy addressable TV programmatically on Dish alongside buys on Sling TV, Dish’s streaming service.

Amazon accounts for more than 40% of retail media’s multibillion-dollar total addressable market. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a big opportunity to scale retailer audiences across the open internet, says Criteo CEO Megan Clarken.

YouTube creators like Smosh are embracing livestreaming to bring in bigger bucks with appointment viewing through brand sponsorships and ticket sales.

Host-read ads are a staple of podcasting, but they have a different – and compelling – flavor when converted into video form for podcasts that also have a video component.