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Recent podcasts
From the last 5 days
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Podcast episode
Episode 187: Jack Raines Trolls LinkedIn and Ends Up with a Book Deal
Blocalhost, a podcast Ari Paparo and Paul Knegten run on ad-tech news, spent most of episode 187 on a Google-sponsored DigiDay piece that deserves more scrutiny than it got. The piece describes Google wiring REST APIs and an MCP server (a connector that lets AI agents talk directly to Google Ad Manager, its dominant ad server) into its stack, which would let buyers and sellers transact without an independent DSP or SSP (the middlemen who currently match ads to inventory) in the loop. Paparo's antitrust read is the one to take seriously: if buying migrates to agent-to-agent deals inside GAM, the government's remedy targeting AdX, Google's ad exchange, hits a chokepoint that's already becoming less relevant.
Aug 24, 2026
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Podcast episode
Commerce Without Checkouts: Bryan House on AI, Composable Commerce, and Why Digital Commerce Is Becoming Intelligent
Bryan House, CEO of composable commerce platform Elastic Path, joined Signal & Noise hosts Brett House and Rio Longacre to talk about AI and product discovery. The thread worth pulling: if buyers start their shopping inside ChatGPT instead of a retailer's search bar, the sponsored-listing business that funds retail media networks loses its foundation. House's headline claim is that 30% of LLM answers wouldn't appear on Google's first page.
Aug 24, 2026
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Podcast episode
Havas Media Network's Amy Banks on SEO, GEO, and Zero Click Search
Amy Banks, Head of SEO and GEO at Havas Media Network, joined ExchangeWire's Lindsay Rowntree to talk about what happens to search when AI gives you the answer before you click anything. The short version: the informational query is gone, and the question is whether brands can influence what the model says. Banks argues for "Generative Engine Optimization" (GEO), which means restructuring content into digestible chunks, earning placements on high-authority publisher sites the models tend to cite, and tracking share-of-voice in AI answers instead of keyword rankings.
Aug 24, 2026
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Podcast episode
Bridging The World Of TV And Ad Tech
AdExchanger: The Big Story
Victoria McNally and Alyssa Boyle dig into a genuinely underreported shift: the TV home screen, the interface you scroll through before picking something to watch, is turning into a programmatic ad surface, and the supply chain is scrambling to standardize it before anyone has blessed a spec. The practical news is Nexxen's creative tool, which lets an advertiser upload one asset and auto-resize it across TiVo, Vizio, and other device makers. That's a real workflow win; the alternative is hand-cutting specs for every OEM.
Aug 21, 2026
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Podcast episode
Signal & Noise Live at AI Con: Lucas Longacre Talks with Ken Johnston, Founder of AI GovOps Foundation
Signal & Noise
Signal & Noise recorded live at AI Con, where Lucas Longacre sat down with Ken Johnston, co-founder of the AI Governance Operations Foundation. The conversation is a mix of enterprise AI hygiene and one genuinely interesting ad-tech thread buried near the end. Johnston's core argument: companies are shipping AI features the way they'd never ship any other production system, no observability, no rollback, no circuit breakers.
Aug 20, 2026
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Podcast episode
The CMO's AI Change Management Problem
Aperiam
Brian Wiener built 360i (sold to Dentsu) and Profitero (sold to Publicis), and his new consultancy 37Arc does one thing: map a marketing department's workflows before anyone deploys AI. The episode has Wiener, joined by Corey Ferengul, Joe Zawadzki, and Adam Breutman, making the case that enterprise AI pilots fail because companies can't describe their own processes, not because the models are weak. The specific claim is that 30 to 60% of marketing work is pure manual coordination, and that CMOs who skipped the mapping step are now holding AI seat licenses with no measurable return.
Aug 20, 2026
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Podcast episode
Warner Bros. Discovery’s Marisa Crocker: 'It's an attention economy' and live sports is the last great gathering place
The Big Impression
Marisa Crocker, VP of Partnerships and Strategy at Warner Bros. Discovery, joined The Current's Damian Fowler and Ilyse Liffryn to make the case that live sports is the last place mass audiences watch the same thing at the same time, and that programmatic buyers are barely there yet. The substance worth noting: WBD's fastest-growing segment is upfront money (the big guaranteed ad commitments brands make every spring) being routed through biddable private marketplaces rather than fixed-price direct deals.
Aug 20, 2026
Recent news
From the last 5 days
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Industry story
S4 Capital Sued by Executives Over Withheld Acquisition Payouts
S4 Capital, the digital-first agency holding company founded by Sir Martin Sorrell, is being sued by three executives who sold their agencies to the company and allege that their agreed-upon payouts are being withheld. The lawsuit adds to a broader pattern of legal and financial pressure on holding companies and represents a potential org-signal regarding S4 Capital's financial commitments to acquired founders.
Aug 24, 2026
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Industry story
IAB Developing Framework to Measure Ads Served to AI Agents
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is building a measurement and attribution framework — due November 12 — to address a growing gap: ads are increasingly being served to AI agents (software that browses, evaluates, and purchases on behalf of users) rather than directly to humans, and the industry has no agreed method for crediting or valuing those exposures. The framework, being drafted by IAB VP of AI Caroline Giegerich with input from a working group of tech companies, publishers, agencies, measurement vendors, and brands, will likely separate AI's role into two layers: when AI surfaces content to a user (awareness/intent) versus when AI actually drives a purchase decision. A core challenge is that traditional attribution signals — like UTM tracking parameters and referral data — often don't survive the AI-mediated customer journey, leaving no evidence trail to prove an ad contributed to a conversion.
Aug 24, 2026
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Industry story
OpenAI Targets Enterprise Ad Teams With New Hires and Platform Features
OpenAI is actively building out an enterprise advertising business, evidenced by a job posting for a San Francisco-based Head of Ads Enterprise Marketing with a compensation package of $374,000–$415,000 plus equity. The role is specifically tasked with positioning OpenAI as a 'premium advertising platform for the world's marketers' and driving enterprise advertising pipeline. Recent product updates to OpenAI's ads manager — including custom audiences with a minimum size of 25,000, campaign budget notifications, account-health indicators, and automated ad-copy optimization — are all geared toward sophisticated, large-scale advertisers rather than small businesses.
Aug 24, 2026
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Industry story
Omnicom Transfers 468+ Omni Platform Engineers to Contractor Endava
Omnicom sold the IPG acquisition on the strength of Omni, its proprietary AI data-and-audience platform, and then transferred at least 468 of the engineers who built and run it to Endava, a public IT contractor. You can keep the IP and the product roadmap and still lose the plot: the people who know which undocumented pipeline feeds which client's audience segment now answer to Endava's SLAs, not Omnicom's. The move converts fixed headcount to vendor spend, which helps hit the $750M synergy target John Wren promised the Street.
Aug 24, 2026
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Industry story
Apple in Talks With Publishers on AI Siri Content Licensing Deals
Apple is reportedly in talks with news publishers about multiyear deals that would compensate them when their content is used to power responses from its AI-enhanced Siri assistant. The proposed model would be usage-based — publishers would be paid based on how often their content is actually drawn upon — potentially creating a new licensing paradigm distinct from traditional syndication or traffic-referral deals. The Wall Street Journal reported the talks.
Aug 24, 2026
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Industry story
VideoAmp's $6B 'Currency' Claim Cannot Be Verified by Reporters
VideoAmp has publicly claimed its platform processed $6 billion in 'currency and measurement' deals last year, a figure cited in investor materials, trade press, and leadership statements. After two weeks of reporting and 13 written questions to VideoAmp and named buy-side/sell-side partners, adotat could not find anyone who could explain how the number was calculated or what share reflects money actually spent. VideoAmp did not respond to any of the questions.
Aug 24, 2026
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Industry story
Tuple Launches DSP Challenging Legacy Programmatic Trust Model
A new demand-side platform (DSP — software used by advertisers to buy digital ad inventory automatically) called Tuple launched in March, founded by Doug Lauretano, a veteran of OpenX and Media.net. Tuple's core thesis is that the standard DSP model is broken by opacity and distrust: legacy DSPs connect to hundreds of supply-side platforms (SSPs — the sell-side counterpart that auctions ad impressions), resulting in duplicated inventory, throttled bid requests, and AI optimization tools that ignore advertiser intent. Tuple's counter-approach is radical supply-path minimalism — currently integrated with just one SSP (Media.net) and aiming for a maximum of three — combined with 'containerized' bidding, which embeds the buyer's algorithm directly inside the SSP to see every available impression rather than a rationed subset.
Aug 24, 2026
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Industry story
Target Profits Rebound, Boosted by Retail Media Network Roundel
Target's profit rebound is the retail media story in miniature: Roundel helped hold up the P&L in a soft retail quarter because ad margin beats grocery margin, full stop. Target doesn't break out Roundel's numbers, so you can't audit the claim, but the margin structure tells you enough. The part that matters for operators is what happens next in the planning cycle: CPG brand budgets see another clean retail-media print and rotate more Q3/Q4 line-items into closed-loop buys, which means fewer dollars bidding on open exchanges.
Aug 21, 2026
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Industry story
NBC News Taps Taboola as Exclusive Programmatic Display Reseller
NBC News just handed its web banner business to Taboola, making the former chumbox network the exclusive programmatic reseller for all display inventory on the site. The operational case is real: one reconciliation pipeline beats a dozen SSP seat negotiations. But the strategic concession is just as real.
Aug 21, 2026
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Industry story
OpenAI Expands ChatGPT Ad Pilot to 31 European Markets
OpenAI is rolling ads into ChatGPT across 31 European markets and citing 25% revenue growth since early August, but that growth figure is arithmetic on an undisclosed base. The actual risk for operators is the intent data, not the media buy: every commercial query OpenAI captures in Germany, France, and Spain is first-party purchase intent that The Trade Desk and LiveRamp cannot touch. The ad product has no self-serve auction, no third-party verification, and GDPR breathing down the targeting stack, so near-term revenue is brand-awareness IOs sold on faith.
Aug 21, 2026
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Industry story
Nielsen-DoubleVerify Combo Sparks Mediaocean Tie-Up Speculation
Nielsen and DoubleVerify already merged their measurement businesses. The new whisper is that Mediaocean, the software agencies use to place and reconcile their buys, gets folded in too. One entity generating the audience numbers, verifying them, and running the checkout counter agencies transact through is a self-dealing structure that makes the Google ad-tech case look subtle.
Aug 21, 2026
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Industry story
OpenAI Expands ChatGPT Ads to Europe Using Consent-First Model
OpenAI is rolling out advertising in Europe later in August 2025, building its ad business on user consent from the outset — a requirement under GDPR (Europe's General Data Protection Regulation, which sets strict rules on how companies can use personal data). Under its newly published EU privacy policy, OpenAI will ask free and lower-tier 'Go' subscribers for permission before serving personalized ads; users who decline will still see ads, but those will be contextual only — targeted based on the live conversation and rough location, not personal history. The move is notable because it contrasts sharply with Meta's years-long regulatory battle: Meta tried multiple legal justifications to avoid seeking explicit consent for behavioral ads, was fined €390 million by EU regulators in 2023, and was ultimately forced into a consent model.
Aug 21, 2026
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Industry story
YouTube Changes View-Count Methodology, Rewarding Unengaged Views
YouTube changed how it counts video views, shifting toward crediting cheap, unengaged views rather than measuring whether viewers actually watch through content. The move drew criticism because it degrades the quality signal of a view metric that advertisers and creators rely on. This follows a broader pattern, also seen with X's engagement signals, of platforms making it harder for advertisers to distinguish genuine audience attention from low-quality or incidental activity.
Aug 21, 2026
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Industry story
Nielsen Admits Its Demographic Model Was Skewing Older, Rolls Out Seven Fixes
Nielsen announced on August 19 that it will roll out seven simultaneous enhancements to its Big Data + Panel measurement methodology on August 31, just before the new fall broadcast season. The most significant change is an update to its Household Demographic Assignment Model (HDAM) — the machine-learning tool that converts device-level viewing data into the age and sex breakdowns advertisers buy and sell against — with Nielsen explicitly stating the prior model was causing data to 'artificially skew toward older residents.' This is a direct acknowledgment that for an unspecified period, younger-skewing audiences were understated, with direct implications for how CPMs (cost per thousand impressions, the standard ad pricing unit) were set and how delivery against younger-demo guarantees was evaluated, particularly in streaming and connected-TV inventory. Nielsen has not disclosed how long the flawed HDAM was in use, which demographic categories were most affected, or what commercial impact the skew may have had on pricing or guarantee fulfillment.
Aug 21, 2026