Technology

Criteo shares dropped by 20% Wednesday morning after the company reported shaky Q1 earnings and revised its guidance downward for the rest of the year.

People Inc. previewed plans to downsize by focusing mainly on its key properties. The strategy makes sense considering its publishing portfolio has lost about two-thirds of its Google traffic.

There is a clear set of capabilities that CTV OEMs and streamers can offer advertisers that the original content owner cannot. Here are the most material gaps that the buy side experiences between supply sent from the publisher and supply sent from distributors.

Programmatic enemies make better friends in the AI era; social video projected to outgrow CTV this year; and apps are integrating into chatbots, but where are the users?

Google is launching Meridian Studio, an enterprise version of its Meridian media mix modeling platform and an updated open-source version of its GeoX tool for measuring incrementality across geos. 

Amazon has packaged a handful of upgrades to its ads measurement solutions, obviously catered to TV and streaming media advertisers.

Going viral isn’t great; AI search is a nightmare; and CTV is forcing everyone to get along.

Amazon is optimistic about agentic commerce; the costs of AI may soon outweigh profits; and AMC Global Media thinks old shows deserve new ads.

Generative AI search has pushed traffic off a cliff across most of the internet, but not on social platforms. Reddit included.

Google announced new features and ad types for AI Max, its AI-based bidding product for search and shopping or sponsored product ads. The company also touted “hundreds of thousands” of advertisers using AI Max.

Agency picks can quietly determine a brand’s tech stack; Ad spend is shifting away from the open web; The CW is betting on partnerships, not its own platform.

Alphabet earned $109.9 billion in Q1 this year, up from $90.2 billion a year ago. And that’s not even the truly gobsmacking number.

With its new funding, commerce data platform Chord plans to help brands access their data more easily by unifying it within one platform.

As connected TV (CTV) matures, advertisers aren’t just raising expectations; they’re resetting them. And increasingly, transparency isn’t a value-add, it’s the cost of entry.

Omnicom is rebuilding its media machine around Acxiom and agentic AI in a bid to push more spend to publishers and sidestep the “messy middle.”

The Trade Desk announced that it will begin allowing mutual clients to use its DSP within the Pacvue or Skai platforms.

IAS pushes clearer streaming ad visibility; Meta eyes a plug-in CTV play; Too many creators, not enough ad dollars.

Dappier’s new ad format allows advertisers to insert a custom brand agent into AI chat sessions on publisher sites.

Programmatic tensions peaked last fall as LinkedIn flame wars erupted over transaction IDs. OMD Worldwide Chief Media Officer Ben Hovaness now leads a new group aimed at fostering dialogue and reducing conflict in the space.

How ad tech vendors try to market their tools as unique; Fox’s new AI-based ad platform; and AI models are getting too costly to maintain.

The Amazon advertising boycott last week wasn’t really about Amazon’s ad platform as much as it was a dispute over evolving seller economics, which raises a fundamental question: Can you even build a brand on Amazon anymore?

For the first time, Unity’s gaming audiences will be available for ad targeting outside the Unity platform, with Index Exchange using Unity’s data to curate web and CTV inventory.

The Trade Desk is getting agentic; OpenAI pivots its ads business; and the line between SSPs and DSPs keeps on blurring.

Partnerize has developed an an industry-wide standard to measure AI search performance and compensate publishers accordingly.

A new IAB Tech Lab group is working on ground rules for the very unruly $200 billion programmatic ad market. Godspeed!

In the rush to scale globally, US brands are often content with “accidental attention.” But attention isn’t a lottery; it’s a strategy that requires a deep familiarity with context in real time.

A proposed standard under discussion at W3C aims to redefine how ad effectiveness is measured across the web. This proposal would centralize measurement of ad effectiveness under the control of Google, Apple and Meta.

OpenAI has its own tracking pixel; Amazon sellers are boycotting the platform; and DirecTV hops on the CAPI bandwagon.

The IAB’s Connected Commerce event in New York City this week felt to me like the retail media industry’s first sit-down explanation to a child who is now a “big kid” and must act accordingly.

Reward Apps faces data broker allegations; Apple bolsters its advertising business; Comments are all the rage in social media marketing.