Tony Stubblebine became CEO of Medium in 2022 and turned the struggling, loss-making platform profitable by cutting costs, improving content quality and refusing to rely on advertising.
AI agents and so-called “super signal aggregators” are being framed as the saviors of premium publishers and advertisers who prioritize high-quality media. But these technologies could perpetuate programmatic’s worst practices.
Measuring media quality is just the first step. A bigger challenge looms: assessing media quality against a marketer’s short-term and long-term goals.
After a reenergizing week at the Cannes Lions festival, here are six observations on how our industry is changing to meet its new challenges.
Where principal media has gone wrong is that buyers have commoditized it due to an overreliance on vanity metrics in contractual agreements.
To solve ad tech’s intractable problems, there’s a solution that the advertising industry could borrow from the hacker world: bug bounties.
The industry’s sharpest minds claim we are entering the Outcomes Era of digital advertising. But we have been in the Outcomes Era for over a decade. It is high time to embrace the Quality Era, instead.
Brands’ relentless drive for efficiency in media spending has far-reaching consequences that have significantly reshaped the industry and perpetuated longstanding issues with media quality.
Instead of erasing the idea of brand safety, we should be developing smarter, more nuanced solutions that protect both news publishers and advertisers.
What does programmatic media have in common with toilet paper? A lot more than you might think, says Sherine Ebadi, managing director of forensic investigations at Kroll. It’s a question of quality (or the lack thereof).
