The Big Story features a roundtable discussion with the AdExchanger editorial team on the week’s top news stories. New and previously published episodes are available on this page and on your preferred podcast app.
Remember when telcos kept dropping billions on media and ad tech assets because they just couldn’t wait to activate their first-party data for advertising purposes? Didn’t pan out. This week on The Big Story, the team dives into the “why” in the wake of private equity firm Apollo Global Management’s $5 billion acquisition of Verizon […]
After months of anticipation, Apple will start enforcing ATT with the debut of iOS 14.5. Check out our infinite coverage here. Interestingly, this in-the-weeds ad tech story got picked up by the mainstream media, with Apple cast as the valiant steward of privacy. Because we live in a world where the only thing protecting us […]
This week on The Big Story, the team broadcasts LIVE from AdExchanger’s Innovation Labs: Commerce Day event. And here’s your main takeaway if you weren’t able to attend: the fragmentation in the world of commerce-related media is … insane. An emerging cluster of media networks from retailers such as Walmart, Target, Kroger and numerous others […]
Hey kids, are you trying to read the blacked-out redactions on a PDF? Simply copy and paste the text into Microsoft Word, and then read everyone’s legal secrets. It’s the digital hack to reading invisible ink. Google learned that lesson the hard way recently when, in responding to the Texas-led antitrust suit, it accidentally revealed […]
Late last year, with the end of the pandemic hopefully in sight, Luma was beginning to see investor confidence return. If anything, that cautious optimism was understated, as this Spring, Luma saw the best quarter in deals that it had ever seen. This week on The Big Story, we welcome back Conor McKenna, Luma director […]
This week, Vista Equity Partners said it would acquire a majority stake in TripleLift, reportedly investing $1.4 billion. The deal is expected to close in Q2. $1.4 billion is a big chunk of change – and a big story. In this episode, the AdExchanger team welcomes Ari Lewine, TripleLift cofounder and chief strategy officer, to […]
Will FLoCs fly in Europe or will GDPR clip its wings? And, speaking of birds (and identifiers), NBCU’s Peacock is going programmatic – and the broadcaster also recently revealed a new identifier for advertisers to use. But first back to Google, mixed messages from The GOOG this week, when engineer Michael Kleber said at a […]
This week, The Big Story records live at AdExchanger’s digital conference: Innovation Labs. While our April 20 one-day event will focus on Ecommerce, and our May 18 event will focus on CTV, our event on March 16 was all about Identity. And the big story around identity, no pun intended, is that it’s still a […]
Online identity resolution solutions. Two years ago, they were all ambition – but today, they’re undergoing tests and people are starting to figure out how they work, where they work … and where they don’t. In other words, the ad industry is finally discussing the practical challenges that these solutions must overcome. The biggest and most […]
Big news week from three heavy hitters. On Wednesday, Google sent shockwaves through the industry with its declaration that it wouldn’t use cross-site browsing data to sell ads, and that it really disapproved of the industry’s attempts to develop email-based identifiers as a substitute for third-party cookies. Arguably, this is a development the world should […]
This week on The Big Story, we present the latest in privacy protection regulations – true-false style. Because, honestly, this stuff can be pretty dry unless you make a game out of it. As you might know, Virginia’s Consumer Data Protection Act (CDPA) will likely soon become law. But how is it different from the […]
Maryland isn’t a merry land if you make most of your money off of digital advertising. This week, on The Big Story, we’ll look at the Old Line State’s new line of taxes. AdExchanger’s resident expert on all things legislative Allison Schiff drops by (Plot twist: SHE WAS ALWAYS HERE) to drop knowledge on how […]
This week’s episode of The Big Story is brought to you by the letters M and A. Because if you haven’t heard, Magnite bought SpotX for $1.17 billion, and then District M and Sharethrough merged to form a giant exchange. So what’s going on? The team takes a look at both acquisitions, and digs into […]
There are more platforms than Super Mario on this week’s The Big Story. First up, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has exited stage… right? Left? To pick a more workable metaphor, he’s passed the reigns to Andy Jassy, former Amazon Web Services chief. That decision should give you an indication of Amazon’s coming priorities. We’ll chat a […]
Google announced this week that its federated learning of cohorts sandbox proposal (FLoC) is nearly as effective as cookie-based advertising. And the rest of the ad industry collectively said, “Whaaaaaat?” Needless to say, there’s a lot to unpack behind all the hype. This week on The Big Story, the team welcomes Flashtalking CEO John Nardone […]
The transformation of the way TV advertising is transacted will be a major theme in 2021. Everyone – both buy- and sell-sides – seems to be talking about addressability these days. Traditional broadcasters have reorganized around streaming and TV-related acquisitions have accelerated – one of the most notable being Roku’s $150 million acquisition of dataxu. […]
With Facebook, Twitter, YouTube (and as of Thursday morning, Snapchat) pulling the plug on outgoing President Trump’s digital platforms – and with Google, Apple and Amazon declining to host the right wing social media app Parler – are we at a watershed in terms of the type of speech social media will allow? And should […]
When we recorded this episode of The Big Story on Wednesday to discuss what we expect the new year to bring, insurrection at the Capitol was not on the table. That soon changed. I would say we live in a different world than the one we inhabited last week, but the same could be said […]
This week, in the spirit of holiday generosity and giving, we’ll talk about the “friendship” between Google and Facebook. Although there are a few Scrooges out there – for example, the 10 state attorneys general suing Google over antitrust concerns related to its online ads business – who might call this friendship “collusion.” Because maybe it […]
Holy collusion, Batman! This week on The Big Story, we’ll consider the double whammy facing Facebook with lawsuits from both the FTC and 48 state attorneys general, led by New York’s Letitia James. Or maybe you can call it a triple whammy (is that even a thing?) when we toss in the lawsuit Google faces […]
This week, the Big Story is … well, it’s probably the double-barrel shotgun lawsuit staring down Facebook, but we recorded this podcast before that news broke. So this is a story about Big Things To Come as Nielsen revealed it will completely overhaul the currency used to transact TV advertising. The new currency, which is […]
So WPP’s media buying unit GroupM released its US ad spend figures on Tuesday and, all in all, the pandemic fallout was not as bad as many had initially anticipated. Especially if you happened to be named Google, Facebook or Amazon. Back in June, GroupM projected a 13% decline in 2020 but now, it’s anticipating […]
The first half of 2020 was pretty lean. This year is on track to be the slowest since 2015 in terms of deal activity, according to LUMA Partners. But set the table and get out the gravy boat, because strategic M&A started to pick back up in Q3 and the momentum has continued into the […]
Joe Biden won the presidential election, but it’s fair to say that voting in America has forever changed, from the massive uptick of mail-in ballots, to grassroots fundraising without the handshakes and the deluge of disinformation assailing the populace. The AdExchanger team welcomes guest Mike Schneider, a partner at Bully Pulpit Interactive, who helped with […]
This week on The Big Story, we talk about measurement. Wait, don’t go. We’re going to dive into the topic of measurement by focusing on two exciting new areas: podcasting and addressable TV. On Tuesday, Spotify bought podcast ad tech company Megaphone (once known as Panoply) for a reported $235 million. The ability to measure […]
Oh God, will this election never end? This week on The Big Story, we get into That, and how the results whatever they might be at the time of writing, might potentially impact paid media. Will a Biden win make politics boring again, causing news publications to lose audience? Of course, a peaceful transfer of […]
The quest to figure out the future of online identity continues. Between Google’s birdcage and the indie ad tech solutions under development, a lot of smart minds are coming together to try and solve the problem with their own twist. But could these solutions end up creating new privacy challenges? One underreported problem is the […]
This week the big stories are all Google, all the time. First, the Department of Justice uncorked its long-awaited antitrust lawsuit against the tech giant. As previously speculated by multiple news outlets, the DOJ’s case homes in on Google’s search business. In this episode of The Big Story, the AdExchanger team talks about why the […]
It’s time for an exciting new acronym: CDP. But what makes it exciting? Is it the promise – delivered for only the thousandth time this decade – that marketers can finally unify their customer data? No, what makes it exciting is $3.2 billion (in stock). That’s how much Twilio paid to grab the CDP Segment […]
This week on the Big Story, we look at trust in the market as cataloged by LUMA Partners, and the antitrust case against Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon, as cataloged by a House Judiciary subcommittee. LUMA VP Conor McKenna swings by to lead us through Q3 M&A activity in a wide-ranging conversation that looks at […]
