Xandr

The SAIL initiative compensates publishers when AI scrapes their content and guarantees the outputs adhere to the same cultural standards they apply to their own coverage.

Most publishers have no idea that a major part of their video ad delivery will stop working on April 30, shortly after Microsoft shuts down the Xandr DSP.

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.

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.

On Wednesday, Microsoft announced that it will shut down Microsoft Invest by March next year, to be replaced by a chatbot-style ad-buying product powered by Copilot.

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.

Dotdash Meredith’s Lindsay Van Kirk says the cookie-based buying tools she helped develop in her early career at AppNexus placed too much value on unreliable third-party audiences. But contextual tools like DDM’s D/Cipher, which she now oversees, can build a better ad ecosystem for buyers and sellers.

Ad tech faces a GDPR compliance paradox. Plus, TikTok will make it harder to target teenagers and plans to give users more control.

The phaseout of third-party cookies kicked off the sell-side curation trend. But it’s also being driven by advertiser concerns about open web media quality and the need to enhance publisher contextual signals with audience data.

Curation’s shift to the sell side is giving DSPs less control over how advertisers curate audiences, which is creating new tensions in the programmatic ecosystem.

Digital media agency Hotspex Media’s emotional contextual tool, Reticle AI, analyzes the emotions an ad is trying to evoke and the context of where the ad might show up to find congruent ad placements.

Industry experts weigh in on Forbes’s MFA subdomain and why ad verification tools still regularly fail to flag some instances of alleged SIVT.

In today’s newsletter: Google’s ad strength meter could push advertisers to adopt Google’s campaign preferences; Home Depot hosts an “InFront” to show off its RMN, Orange Apron Media; and the Privacy Sandbox rollout could do serious damage to the online ad industry.

New contextual targeting tools use generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) to analyze websites and and build contextual audience segments. The companies behind them believe that GPTs can address some of the problems that plague contextual targeting.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Pod Patrol The CTV ad experience is a hot topic at CES this week. Streamers and brands are exploring interactive ad units, while platforms are still trying to determine the optimal streaming ad load. But no matter how advertisers prefer to engage viewers, […]

Given the deprecation of third-party cookies and the reemergence of contextual targeting, 2024 could be a big year for in-game ads – so long as game publishers position themselves as a source of premium inventory.

Here are the pros and cons of client-side and server-side header bidding, and some typical use cases for each.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Heads Will Roll CEO Kirk McDonald is out at GroupM North America, Insider reports. WPP’s revenue growth tumbled in the US this year, which the company blamed on tech clients curtailing their ad spend. GroupM North America has fared particularly poorly, putting GroupM, […]

Microsoft’s Xandr informed publishers in a memo sent Friday that it will not be making any further payments for MediaMath deals transacted between February and June.

SSPs including PubMatic, Magnite and Wunderkind are moving ahead with plans to recoup revenue paid to publishers from deals conducted on MediaMath’s DSP

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Inside Track How can I track you? Let me count the … hundreds of thousands of ways. The Markup analyzed a spreadsheet linked to a public page on Microsoft-owned Xandr’s website, and it was quite the trove of audience data. The spreadsheet contains […]

Microsoft’s purchase of Xandr from AT&T in late 2021 might have looked like an embrace of third-party ad tech. But while parts of the Xandr tech are considered valuable by Microsoft, the future of Xandr as an SSP integrated with thousands of outside publishers is in doubt.

Is there a correlation between high attention scores, low emissions scores and business outcomes? To find out, Mars and Nestle-owned Nespresso are testing two new private marketplace (PMP)-based products developed by attention metrics provider Adelaide.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. SP-Oh, It’s On Call it supply-path optimization, transparency or premium publisher marketplaces. Whichever you choose, Digiday writes, it “amounts to disintermediation.” In recent years, DSPs have leapfrogged SSPs to establish direct connections with media companies. The marketers are interested in media, after all, […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. A Sign Of The Times The New York Times beat expectations for Q4 2022 thanks to a strong subscription bundling push, according to its earnings report. But digital ad revenue was only up a smidge. The Times added 240,000 net digital subscribers in […]

In 2022, top players in digital advertising finally started taking gaming seriously, and the groundwork was laid for programmatic in-game advertising to grow thanks to a long overdue update to the IAB’s and MRC’s in-game ad standards. The scene is also set for in-game advertising to expand into console gaming, and we might even see the debut of the first sell-side platform dedicated to gaming.

Advertisers are starting to gravitate toward attention as a way to measure a campaign’s impact on the lower funnel, including conversion rate. Luxury car manufacturer Audi recently experimented with using attention metrics to algorithmically adjust programmatic bidding on ad inventory based on the amount of attention those ad placements are likely to draw. Audi then measured the impact high-attention placements had on post-click conversions.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Shake-Up At Nielsen Nielsen just can’t catch a break. First, Nielsen lost its MRC accreditation. Now the company is undergoing a massive reorg – and some industry folks are worried Nielsen might miss a very important deadline. Nielsen’s revamped measurement platform, Nielsen ONE, […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. A New Day, A New Apple Apple engineers are preparing to support third-party app stores on iPhones and iPads, Bloomberg reports.  But this is not a change of heart on Apple’s part. Apple is simply following the law. A new rule in the […]

Brands are starting to look at video games as an inventory source, but there’s no scaled programmatic infrastructure to help aggregate supply in video games. And so that’s where in-game ad platform Bidstack is focusing its road map.  “We’re moving toward being a gaming SSP, a pure tech play,” Bidstack Founder and CEO James Draper told AdExchanger.