Technology

The Trade Desk makes the S&P 500, triggering a stock price rebound; Estée Lauder is the latest big legacy brand to embrace influencers; and CMOs are trying to measure their return on AI, but it’s tricky.

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.

The return of in-banner video has resulted in a deluge of cheap video supply flooding the open web, driving down CPM rates for dedicated video inventory and creating user experience and ad quality concerns.

Nextdoor isn’t ruling out AI data licensing, but it has concerns; NBCU touts sports and streaming as drivers of its record Upfronts; and Scholastic follows kids and parents to YouTube.

Linkby, which connects brands with publisher content that advertisers pay for based on reader engagement, announced its $15 million Series B on Tuesday.

The IAB Tech Lab’s new initiative suggests regulations for how AI bots can access content, ensuring that publishers are fairly compensated.

Hearst has seen improvements in addressability between 30% and 200% since introducing AURA, its AI-powered ad targeting solution, last year.

The layoffs at TripleLift come roughly four months after the company hired Dave Helmreich as its new CEO.

Curated deals were once seen as a smart way to bring structure to programmatic chaos. Today, they’ve become table stakes.

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

Amazon locked in two more publishers for its AI shopping engine; AI companies are working on web browsers now; and platforms have a hard time telling AI from reality.

With Amazon Prime Day in full force, marketers are navigating one of the biggest retail events of the summer. But this Prime Day isn’t just a moment to drive sales; it’s a critical opportunity to test and learn.

AI Overviews are even dinging Google Search ads’ traffic; WPP downgrades its earnings forecast; and Google’s AI competitors launch their own web browsers.

Advertising restrictions on social platforms often flag keywords and images used in women’s health care ads, preventing those ads from reaching their target audience. There is a “gag order around women’s health care,” Caruso said.

AI Overviews makes dodgy product recommendations because it scrapes marketing copy; discrepancies in TV ratings hamper upfronts negotiations; and why mar tech companies are building software fortresses.

There’s no way around using an assortment of measurement methodologies, says Owen Bickford, the paid performance media director at Alaska Airlines. “I don’t think they can work in a vacuum.”

Ron Jacobson took the classic programmatic startup route. Which is to say, he pivoted randomly from a software job at a bank (well, the New York Fed), landed at an ad tech company and later founded his own ad tech startup before getting acquired by yet another ad tech company.

Two key players in the consent management space are merging: French CMP Didomi is buying Sourcepoint for an undisclosed sum.

Google challenges Cloudflare’s anti-scraping tech; are dupes plagiarism?; and web traffic is careening off a cliff.

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.

Microsoft is deprioritizing ad tech; Google wants to get back into publishers’ good graces; and Meta has been quietly developing proactive chatbots.

How Amazon uses the threat of knockoffs to win brand business; YouTube introduces new creator video metrics; and Substack is the latest platform to pivot to video.

On Wednesday, AI-powered audio intelligence platform Sounder launched a new version of its brand suitability and contextual targeting tool for podcasts that can understand the nuances of Spanish-language audio content.

Have agency holdcos put too many eggs in the AI basket?; Temu has come back to us now at the turn of the tariff tide; and Cloudflare wants to help sites from getting scraped.

Alliant will integrate AnalyticsIQ’s audience modeling platform, which is based on user surveys and studies of health, wellness and cognitive psychology.

The demise in recent years of legacy DSPs is not a glitch in the matrix; it’s a business model failure, leaving SSPs and publishers to pick up the pieces. 

A recent Google DV360 Help Center update had some advertisers panicking that invalid impressions served through Google’s ad platform would soon double. But now Google says that’s not really the case.

In an omnichannel environment, managing and selling ads is becoming too complex for humans to handle alone. That’s why many are turning to AI tools to maximize ad inventory

Scammers have figured out about Reddit and Google Search’s licensing deal; Is affiliate marketing still a thing?; and AI companies consider creator micropayments.

Pub tech SaaS startup Swivel wants to make ad ops much less manual and time-consuming with an AI-driven yield optimization tool designed by people who used to build ad servers.