Technology

The Trade Desk gets insistent with Korai again; the EU is rethinking hashed IDS; and is the AI industry becoming a cartel?

The publisher-focused DOJ v. Google ad tech antitrust trial is finished. A judge will now decide the fate of Google’s sell-side ad tech business.

Inside Omnicom’s shift in spend from The Trade Desk DSP to Amazon DSP.

After pulling back on moderation, Instagram gets flooded with antisemites; BidSwitch builds a programmatic way for AI bots to pay to crawl websites; and nearly half of Gen Z dislikes AI content.

Adobe acquires SEO tech business Semrush; brands want to know what AI search engines think of them; and the LGBTQ community is an under-targeted audience.

Havas Health implements Vurvey’s human-trained AI model to better understand its clients by developing synthetic AI personas.

There’s no magic bullet for AI search optimization; how kids’ media monetizes outside of YouTube; and hey, whatever happened to the TikTok ban?

Competitive tensions and ad tech drama have flared all year. And this drama has rippled out into the investor circle, as evident from a slew of recent ad tech company earnings reports.

Two sources at ad tech platforms that observe programmatic bidding patterns said they’ve seen Omnicom agencies shifting spend from The Trade Desk to Amazon DSP in Q3. The Trade Desk denies any such shift.

With its latest funding, Agentio plans to expand its team and to establish creator marketing as part of every advertiser’s media plan.

Google recently settled a class-action lawsuit by agreeing to create an off-switch for data sharing in bid requests. Huge deal, right? So why isn’t anyone talking about it?

OneTrust wants to get bought; Europe wants Google to tweak its ad tech; and the DHS is spending more on ads than ever.

We break down some of the most interesting financial trends coming out of Q3 earnings reports, and what rises to the level of being worth covering in the first place.

Consumers don’t experience media in silos. They might stream a live game on their TV, scroll social feeds during halftime and research products on their mobile device later that night.

Omnicom revamps its revenue reporting; Amazon will now charge for access to its Selling Partner API; and brands seek sponsorship deals with all sorts of social creators.

The IAB Tech Lab’s latest framework proposes new standards for containerization and sets the stage for a fully agentic media buying process.

Confusion in CTV isn’t a natural byproduct of a maturing market; it’s an outcome of how distributors protect their pricing power.

A former exec sues WPP over an alleged retaliatory firing; Jolt acquires Volta Media from Shell; and AI defamation litigation is on the rise.

Google on Wednesday announced the full availability of its new agentic AI tools, called Ads Advisor and Analytics Advisor.

Lesser-known browser Brave comes out of the woodwork; agentic chatbots require new ad practices; and private equity can endanger both brands and publishers.

“We just constantly hear how complex it is right now,” Kelly MacLean, Amazon Ads VP of engineering, science and product, tells AdExchanger. “So that’s really where we we’ve anchored a lot on hearing their feedback, [and] figuring out how we can drive even more simplicity.”

In July, PubMatic saw a temporary drop in ad spend from a “large” unnamed DSP partner, which contributed to Q3 revenue of $68 million, a 5% YOY decline.

Innovid’s new open orchestration layer aims to connect data and tech throughout the advertising process, breaking down fragmentation and silos.

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.

The Daily Mail deals with AI overviews; pause ads are the new hotness; and YouTube fights back against ad blockers.

On Monday, Amazon announced the launch of location-based interactive video ad units on Prime Video, which will allow small and local businesses to reach their target customer in specific geographic areas.

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.

New APIs from Roku, Comcast and The Trade Desk are reshaping digital advertising, from self-serve campaign management to cross-platform measurement. But when it comes to identity and targeting, a new study finds that IP address matching is missing the mark.

The Trade Desk posted solid Q3 results on Thursday, with $739 million in revenue, up 18% year over year. But the main narrative for TTD this year is less about the numbers and more about optics and competitive dynamics.

Enjoy this weekly comic from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem …