pubmatic

On Monday, PubMatic became the second sell-side platform to file a follow-on antitrust lawsuit against Google.

Google’s SSP tries to cut out its DSP ahead of a possible ad tech breakup; Perplexity’s head of ads skips town; and Amazon’s search ad pause flooded the market with big spenders.

The IAB Tech Lab video classification updates introduced much-needed clarity. But valuable inventory, now categorized differently, is being deprioritized or rejected, even though its performance hasn’t changed.

The Trade Desk has won the battle for supremacy on the open internet, says Needham & Company’s Laura Martin. But it might just be losing the war for the future of the web to walled gardens and AI search.

Over the past few years, sell-side curation has gained popularity as a way for advertisers to target high-quality publishers. Companies like OpenX are expanding their toolkits to support advertisers as well as publishers.

Classify is entering a crowded space of AI-powered contextual curation offerings. But the company is already teasing some high-profile integrations thanks to its network of well-connected advisors.

PubMatic’s new AI curation features are helping it forge closer relationships with ad agencies like GroupM that are ramping up their use of AI.

The era of fragmented, adversarial ad tech is winding down. A new paradigm is emerging defined by AI-first, end-to-end platforms and collaboration among buyers and sellers.

While some Privacy Sandbox testers lamented their seemingly wasted effort, they remain committed to post-cookie targeting and measurement – even if Google eventually abandons the Sandbox entirely.

More competition between SSPs and ad servers should be a boon for publishers in the long term. But publishers will feel some growing pains if there is a sudden disruption in Google’s ad payouts or if their ad server fees increase.