When an advertiser trains a model on its full organic converter base, it can better identify patterns that distinguish a casual browser from someone close to buying.
StatSocial launched Digital Twins, which allows brands to simulate audience research using AI-generated profiles built from behavioral data. One of the earliest testers, Shepherd, an audience strategy consultancy, is using it to test news products for niche audiences.
When it comes to identity, most marketers moved past third-party cookie concerns a long time ago. Identity today is not about a single technology or solution; it is about learning how to combine different signals in ways that allow campaigns to reach real people across channels while respecting privacy and maintaining performance.
Buyers want a single, coherent view of reach and performance across programmatic. But for publishers, the operational reality is quite messy. Trusted Media Brand is using AI to clean it up.
Multicultural publishers are under pressure to grow and scale their audience to remain competitive in an increasingly selective marketplace. To adapt, some publishers are turning to tools like AdGrid’s Audience Accelerator to activate first-party audiences across channels.
Hearst is stitching together its far‑flung news properties into a single programmatic marketplace to simplify buying local news and shore up its business as the ad market shifts.
AI is only as good as the data that fuels it. In advertising, however, that foundation is often flawed.
The industry has spent years debating third-party cookies, but AI has settled the debate. First-party data isn’t just preferred; it’s structurally necessary. And the capital is already moving.
Yes/no binary logic was the right tool for programmatic. But autonomous AI agents can evaluate 10 million impressions per second, combining data from hundreds of sources, and human-defined targeting logic can no longer keep pace.
The future of retail media depends on a shift away from siloed in-store and online metrics to a full-funnel approach that reflects how customers actually shop.
For brands, this opens a new lever beyond impressions. For publishers, this is a business problem, as their first-party data and on-site inventory could become less valuable for targeting.
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.
