media quality

When it comes to managing fraud, there are four steps CTV publishers should take to remove bad actors from the supply chain.

The generative AI trend generated endless hot takes this year, but the ad industry also had plenty to say about growing competition between DSPs and SSPs. Here are AdExchanger’s top 10 most popular guest columns of 2025 and why they resonated.

For years, MFA was a mostly web-based problem. Now, generative AI has supercharged the made-for-advertising model, and it’s infecting social media feeds and vertical video platforms.

The real challenge is drawing a clear line between the AI-generated content that adds value and the kind that erodes trust and leads to significantly lower ad effectiveness.

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.

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).

Ad quality issues are widespread, even on legitimate websites. But today, advertisers have more control over what goes into programmatic’s mixed bag. 

Many in the digital advertising industry truly want to do better. But there are imminent obstacles that need to be tackled if we want to move from words to deeds.

Media governance measures advertisers can put in place to navigate the complexity of brand safety and gain better control of the quality of their media spend.

How big of a deal is The Trade Desk’s top 100 list? AdExchanger spoke to industry experts for their reactions and bounced some of their hot takes off The Trade Desk.

Google’s protestations about TrueView’s media quality aside, two questions remain: Why is any of this happening, and why is change unlikely in the short term?

Ad Fontes plans to spend its newfound capital on hiring media bias researchers, developing an AI model for assessing media quality and enhancing its rating tools for foreign-language content.