first-party data

Triton Digital’s new tool lets publishers see how their audience size compares to other podcasts at the show and episode level.

AudienceMix, a new curation startup, aims to make it more cost effective to mix and match different audience segments using only the data brands need to execute their campaigns.

Every conversation about addressability eventually lands on the same word: fragmentation. But the real symptom of that fragmentation isn’t just operational complexity; it’s also declining match rates. That single number explains why marketers are struggling to make their data work.

As the digital advertising industry enters a new phase of maturity, so does its relationship with data. Going into 2026, marketers’ long-standing obsession with scale is giving way to something more grounded: a push for smarter, actionable, owned data.

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.

A new integration between Amazon and Clinch allows advertisers to access Amazon custom audiences via a third-party platform.

On Tuesday, game engine Unity, which has a growing advertising business, announced the appointment of Chris Feo as its new SVP of programmatic.

In June, Marriott launched a new media network designed to connect its customers to relevant brands throughout the travel journey.

Publishers like News Corp are walking a fine line—suing AI companies for scraping their work while cutting multimillion‑dollar licensing deals with others.

Hearst has seen improvements in addressability between 30% and 200% since introducing AURA, its AI-powered ad targeting solution, last year.

Curated deals were once seen as a smart way to bring structure to programmatic chaos. Today, they’ve become table stakes.

In a world where privacy regulations are tightening and third-party cookies are increasingly unreliable, first-party data has emerged as a cornerstone of modern marketing strategy.

With a growing array of platforms and channels competing for consumer attention, advertisers have been increasingly looking for ways to understand which ads and placements drive engagement and sales – not just engagement and sales that would have happened anyway but true incrementality.

Ad spending across RMNs and CMNs is still hindered by incomplete data access and connectivity. Here’s how to bridge that gap.

OMD’s Emily Proctor outlined the criteria the ad agency uses to evaluate alt IDs. She also shared which five IDs OMD uses most often and why.

Political advertisers, by necessity, have built precise, privacy-conscious targeting strategies that work without relying exclusively on third-party data like cookies.

CTV advertising has made great strides, but it still lags behind social platforms in one critical area: optimizing campaigns based on outcome data. Here’s how standardized conversion API integrations for CTV can help.

The hunger for first-party data is driving companies to demand our information more aggressively than ever. It’s hard to buy a coffee, magazine or sweater these days without someone demanding your name, number, email or home address.

Curation is a reaction to programmatic’s worsening queries-per-second problem, says Permutive’s Joe Root. DSPs are biased toward impressions that have an identifier attached, so SSPs are using curated deal IDs as a stand-in for third-party cookies.

Before first-party data can save us all from signal loss, advertisers need tools that make first-party data more accessible and easier to use, said fullthrottle.ai CPO Amol Waishampayan.

Western Union – which, fun fact, sent its first telegrams across the American frontier in the early 1850s – launched a media network last month that reaches 150 million people.

Forrester released its first SSP wave since 2014 last week, and there’s a surprise. The research firm ranked Google – whose sell-side ad tech platform is facing federal antitrust charges – as a mere challenger.

To court new programmatic buyers, SoundCloud is now selling its display and video ads via open auction and private marketplace deals that combine multiple types of inventory.

Historically, media buying has been all about scale, even if it meant outrageously false population counts on audience segments. 

During a Covid-induced two-day binge watch of a recent streaming hit, advertisers consistently failed to serve the right ad. Where’s the accountability?

Competing agendas are limiting the tools publishers have at their disposal in ways that aren’t always primarily motivated by user privacy. Here are five things about privacy in digital media that should keep publishers up at night.

Oracle’s advertising and third-party data businesses are officially kaput; political pollsters are abandoning misleading online data; and AI-generated slop is already overtaking the internet.

As we lean heavily on AI tools to enhance content efficiency, we may have reached a tipping point where we are creating more content in service of media algorithms, rather than for the benefit of consumers and brands.

VIA Rail and The Globe and Mail are combining their first-party data sets to create bespoke ad targeting audiences in partnership with data clean room provider Optable.

The publication still makes most of its on-site digital revenue from programmatic. But it’s doubling down on direct-sold custom content, especially when it comes to video and social media.