Technology

Why is programmatic media buying so dang complicated? That question was an ever-present topic at the 2025 ANA Media Conference in Orlando, Florida this week.

Roblox is making major additions to its still-nascent ad offering, including new integrations to make its ad formats available through Google Ad Manager.

2025 will be the first year YouTube wins at ad revenue. Plus, d’ya hear that? It’s the sound of the mobile ad tech ecosystem saying, “We told you so.”

Industry experts agree that the bot activity analyzed in the latest Adalytics report is among the easiest type of invalid traffic to spot.

The wave of CDP consolidation is riding strong. Plus, AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi responded to reports that short sellers are targeting the company.

An Adalytics report released Friday details numerous instances of brands serving ads to known bots that appear on the IAB Tech Lab’s International Spiders and Bots list and TAG’s Data Center IP List.

The IAB Tech Lab is proposing that ad auctions move to a Trusted Server from the browser. Why its prototype attracted controversy. Plus, should data privacy be viewed as a badge of honor, or a baseline standard?

The biggest cloud tech companies, – namely AWS, Snowflake, Databricks and the Google Cloud Platform – are investing heavily in their own ad tech and marketing verticals. But, funnily enough, ad tech vendors themselves tend to avoid the big public clouds.

Daily Mail’s ad-light subscription soars; YouTube Shorts takes another cue from TikTok; and MAGNA predicts an ad spend slump due to tariff-induced uncertainty.

The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office has three strategic priorities in 2025, and, you guessed it, online tracking is one of them.

It’s difficult for advertisers to enter into contracts with every company to which they disclose personal information. However, difficulty is no longer an acceptable excuse.

Warner Bros. Discovery officially launched OpenPath last week, with the goal of driving demand for its news sites’ display inventory. But for now, CTV is not part of the integration.

As the newly appointed president of Horizon Media Holdings, Bob Lord is dubious that megamergers between holding companies are actually good for the client. “Bigger is not always better,” Lord says.

The need for addressability has been a rallying cry among advertisers for the past five years. But clinging to outdated notions of addressability means overlooking the broader needs of today’s modern media landscape.

Why should establishing consumer trust be a differentiator – and wouldn’t it be great if that was just every company’s MO?

Many in the industry see Google’s fingerprinting reversal as an irresponsible move due to privacy concerns, particularly in regions with strict data regulations.

Alphonso shareholders won their lawsuit against LG Ads, clearing the way for an IPO. Then, as TikTok counts down the days until its stay of execution expires, Oracle might buy a minority stake.

Why should browsers get to control publisher monetization? That’s the question the Tech Lab is aiming to answer with the release of an open-source framework for server-side ad management.

The Trade Desk’s weak Q4 emboldened the company’s critics; DOGE’s cuts to federal agencies are hurting ad agencies; and President Trump fires the two remaining Democratic FTC commissioners.

It took two bitter lawsuits and the airing of a lot of dirty laundry, but LG Ads is finally on track to go public by the end of Q2.

Microsoft ad sales vet Rob Wilk joined Yahoo last year to lead revenue for the company’s advertising business with one main goal in mind: to evangelize Yahoo’s owned-and-operated properties. Most advertisers just aren’t aware of the inventory Yahoo has to offer – and that’s on Yahoo.

Oracle’s TikTok bid is a warmed-over Project Texas; Amazon’s ads biz has its sights set on Google; and gen AI search is a good traffic source for retailers, but bad for news pubs.

Uber ended 2024 with its strongest quarter ever, posting 20% year-over-year revenue growth of $12 billion in Q4 – due in no small part to Uber Advertising.

Omnicom and IPG have both received additional information requests from the FTC about their merger. Plus, publishers don’t know how AI overviews fit into their referral traffic.

Sonos’s woes ding The Trade Desk; WPP’s AI investments may not keep Coke from switching to Publicis; and feminized Swedish tobacco products find an audience in the US manosphere.

AI-equipped consumer products keep failing; why the newsletter boom might be nothing but spam; and retaliatory tariffs hit America where it hurts.

Just because curated PMPs and direct-to-DSP deals are trendy doesn’t mean they should be the focus of every publisher’s tech stack.

Based on the way advertisers deal with publishers, you’d think they were sworn enemies. Our failure to prioritize collaboration on the open web and build a positive value chain has been our collective downfall.

Canadian tech investment firm Redbrick has acquired Paved, a programmatic newsletter platform for publishers that specializes in native ad formats.

Now that Teads and Outbrain are one, the vision, explained CEO David Kostman when the deal was first announced, is to become an “end-to-end, full-funnel platform for the open internet.” But what does that mean in plain English?