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On Tuesday, digital out-of-home (DOOH) ad tech startup Place Exchange was acquired by Broadsign, another out-of-home SSP.

For the uninitiated, “Glitchmas” is our name for what’s become an annual tradition when, from between roughly late October through November, Meta’s ad platform just seems to go bonkers.

The publisher-focused DOJ v. Google ad tech antitrust trial is finished. A judge will now decide the fate of Google’s sell-side ad tech business.

Competitive tensions and ad tech drama have flared all year. And this drama has rippled out into the investor circle, as evident from a slew of recent ad tech company earnings reports.

Two sources at ad tech platforms that observe programmatic bidding patterns said they’ve seen Omnicom agencies shifting spend from The Trade Desk to Amazon DSP in Q3. The Trade Desk denies any such shift.

With its latest funding, Agentio plans to expand its team and to establish creator marketing as part of every advertiser’s media plan.

Google on Wednesday announced the full availability of its new agentic AI tools, called Ads Advisor and Analytics Advisor.

“We just constantly hear how complex it is right now,” Kelly MacLean, Amazon Ads VP of engineering, science and product, tells AdExchanger. “So that’s really where we we’ve anchored a lot on hearing their feedback, [and] figuring out how we can drive even more simplicity.”

In July, PubMatic saw a temporary drop in ad spend from a “large” unnamed DSP partner, which contributed to Q3 revenue of $68 million, a 5% YOY decline.

Paramount Skydance, which officially turns 100 days old this week, released its first post-merger quarterly earnings report on Monday.

AI is bringing accountability to ad tech’s murky middle, helping brands like EssilorLuxottica cut out bots, bad bids and wasted spend before a single impression runs.

Traffic-starved publishers are hopeful that their long-undervalued audience data will fuel advertising’s automated future – if only they can finally wrest control of the industry narrative away from ad tech middlemen.

The Trade Desk posted solid Q3 results on Thursday, with $739 million in revenue, up 18% year over year. But the main narrative for TTD this year is less about the numbers and more about optics and competitive dynamics.

According to a new report, IP-to-email matches are accurate just 16% of the time on average, while IP-to-postal matches are accurate only 13% of the time. (Oof.)

The phrase “caution is key” has become a totem of the new age in US antitrust regulation. It was cited this week by both the DOJ and Google in support of opposing views on a possible divestiture of Google’s sell-side ad exchange.

ID5 bought TrueData mainly to tackle what ID5 CEO Mathieu Roche calls the “massive fragmentation” of digital identity, which is a problem on the user side and the provider side.

The IAB Tech Lab’s new device attestation feature for its Open Measurement SDK provides a scaled way for original device manufacturers to confirm that ad impressions are associated with real devices.

The Trade Desk and PubMatic announced a new API-based integration for managing deal ID campaigns built atop TTD’s Price Discovery and Provisioning (PDP) API, which was announced earlier this year.

On Monday, Brand Networks announced that Universal Ads would now be buyable through the company’s agentic ad buying platform, Aimy Ads.

Uber Advertising, in partnership with Adelaide and Kantar, launched a first-of-its-type custom attention metric score for its platform advertisers.

Alphabet reported on Wednesday that its total Q3 revenue was $102.3 billion, up 16% year over year, while net profit increased by a third to $35 billion.

Meta says “trust the machine” – but marketers are finding out that automated ad platforms, including Advantage+, don’t always know best.

Prebid’s future is up for grabs as the open-source project grows apart from the IAB Tech Lab, the industry’s self-appointed standards authority.

Last week, after nearly six years of development and delays, Google officially retired its Privacy Sandbox.
Which means it’s time for a memorial service.

AWS RTB Fabric offers ad tech platforms more streamlined integrations with ecosystem and infrastructure partners, allegedly lower latency compared to the public internet and discounts on data transfers.

In a livestreamed presentation to investors on Tuesday, co-CEO Greg Peters shared that Netflix had its “best ad sales quarter ever” in Q3, and more than doubled its upfront commitments for this year.

Google’s aborted cookie crackdown ends with a quiet CMA sign-off and a sweeping phaseout of Privacy Sandbox technologies, from the Topics API to PAAPI.

TTD shared new details about OpenAds features that let publishers see for themselves whether it’s running a fair auction. But tension between TTD and Prebid hung over the event.

The remedies phase of the Google antitrust trial concluded last week. And after 11 days in the courtroom, there is a clearer sense of where Judge Leonie Brinkema is focused on, and how that might influence what remedies she put in place.

The AI advertising agents will need their own trade group eventually. For now though, a bunch of companies are forming the Ad Context Protocol, or AdCP.