AdTech with Analysis
For operators — publishers, agencies, DSPs, SSPs, identity, measurement — who'd rather read an opinionated newsletter than six bland ones. Free. 5 days a week.
Sign up
Create your free account. We'll email you a link to verify — then you can comment on any analysis or prediction.
Recent podcasts
From the last 5 days
-
Podcast episode
BBDO ‘client-whisperer’ Daale Carter: Brands need a challenger mindset — even the iconic M&M’s
The Big Impression
Damian Fowler and Ilyse Liffreing interview Daale Carter, BBDO's Chief Client Experience Officer, about where brand strategy is heading in 2026. Almost nothing in the conversation touches programmatic plumbing, but two things in it move real money. Carter names Reddit as the starting point for brand intelligence, citing a Mars/M&M's case where a subreddit surfaced a real peanut-farming problem that became a seven-minute documentary.
Sep 4, 2026
-
Podcast episode
The Homepage Is No Longer the Front Door: Leah Nurik on AI Visibility, GEO, and the Future of Brand Discovery
Signal & Noise
Signal & Noise hosts Rio Longacre and Brett House brought in Leah Nurik, CEO of Brandi AI, to talk about what happens when AI systems like ChatGPT and Perplexity start answering search queries directly, skipping the link to your website entirely. The new discipline she's selling is called GEO, Generative Engine Optimization, which is essentially getting AI answers to cite your brand rather than a competitor's. Nurik's referral traffic decline numbers are directionally real: roughly 30% drops showing up across many independent publisher reports is credible.
Sep 4, 2026
-
Podcast episode
Google Had Its Day In Court. Now, It's Amazon's Turn
AdExchanger: The Big Story
AdExchanger's Alyssa Boyle, Anthony Vargas, Joanna Gerber, and Sarah Caputo walk through two antitrust cases landing in the same week: Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled Google monopolized the ad-tech pipes connecting publishers to advertisers, and the FTC plus 22 states sued Amazon for allegedly rigging its retail media auctions so winners pay near their full bid rather than just a penny over the runner-up. The Google ruling is the one that moves money. Brinkema's remedy forces Google to share bid data and kills unified pricing rules (the mechanism that prevented publishers from favoring rival exchanges), but leaves Google's 20% take rate intact and AdX unsold.
Sep 4, 2026
-
Podcast episode
A Trillion Impressions and Two Hundred Billion Dollars
Aperiam
Iván Markman, Mediaocean's newly appointed President and COO, joins Corey Fernandez and Joe Zawadzki to explain the strategic rationale behind his hire and how Mediaocean is positioning its two core businesses — financial workflow infrastructure and ad serving — as the deterministic data backbone for agentic advertising. The episode is more strategic vision-setting than breaking news, but offers useful texture on how a major agency infrastructure platform is thinking about AI-era differentiation.
Sep 3, 2026
-
Podcast episode
Episode 188: Rich Greenfield on the Meta Settlement and TTD's Stock Woes
Rich Greenfield joins Ari Paparo and Paul Knegten to debate where value sits in the ad chain once AI does the optimizing. Four stories anchor the conversation: Meta's settlement restricting teen usage, Fox acquiring Roku, Walmart building an Amazon-style ad stack, and The Trade Desk's stock sliding. Greenfield's central argument on The Trade Desk (a demand-side platform, or software buyers use to purchase ads across the open web) is worth taking seriously.
Sep 2, 2026
-
Podcast episode
Adtech’s Financing Tax
Corey Ferengul and Joe Zawadzki host Matt Byrne of OAREX to put a name on something every ad-tech CFO already feels: the money sits still for 90 days while the bills come due in 30, and somebody has to finance that gap. Byrne's pitch is that specialty debt is the right tool, and that the industry is finally mature enough to use it. Byrne claims the inefficiency costs the industry somewhere around 10 to 12% of value, and sizes the total opportunity at $100 billion.
Sep 2, 2026
-
Podcast episode
Cracking The In-Store Attribution Code In Influencer Marketing
Guest host Joanna Gerber (Ad Exchanger Associate Editor) interviews Emily Steele, CEO and co-founder of Hummingbirds, a creator-marketing platform focused on hyper-local, nano-scale influencers. The episode centers on Hummingbirds' new receipt-based attribution solution that ties in-store CPG (consumer packaged goods) purchases back to creator content — a niche but real gap in the measurement stack. Ad-tech operators will find limited strategic lift here; this is primarily a creator-economy product story with thin programmatic relevance.
Sep 2, 2026
-
Podcast episode
S2E13: Thinking about Consulting? | Round table with James Deaker aka The Yield Doctor
A career-focused roundtable on independent consulting between hosts Geoff Wolinetz and Greg MacDonald and guest James Deaker (founder, Kurokea Media; "The Yield Doctor"), all active ad-tech consultants. The episode is primarily professional-development content — pros/cons of going independent, AI's encroachment on consulting work, and how to structure client engagements — with light but real relevance to ad-tech operators thinking about talent and vendor strategy.
Sep 2, 2026
Recent news
From the last 5 days
-
Industry story
The Trade Desk Launches Kokai Zuma AI Tools; Stock Remains Down 65%
The Trade Desk (TTD) — a demand-side platform (DSP) that allows advertisers to buy digital ad inventory programmatically — launched Kokai Zuma this week, a suite of AI-powered tools including a conversational interface called Ask Koa, one-click campaign lift studies that return results in 48 hours instead of five to seven days, and an opening of its AI layer to third-party tools. The company cited a 32% average cost-per-acquisition (CPA) gain in early testing. Despite the announcement, TTD stock remains down roughly 65% year to date, and the article notes the company has quietly stopped reporting the platform adoption metric it previously highlighted every earnings call — characterizing that omission as itself a meaningful disclosure.
Sep 6, 2026
-
Industry story
Nielsen Closes $2.15 Billion DoubleVerify Acquisition
The article briefly notes that Nielsen — a major audience measurement company — is closing its $2.15 billion acquisition of DoubleVerify, an ad verification firm, this quarter. The timing coincides with Nielsen rolling out significant currency changes to its Big Data + Panel measurement product just five days before the NFL season kickoff, changes the NFL's own data executive described as 'really negative' for football. The convergence of a major acquisition close and a contentious product change during the most-watched sports programming period of the year adds pressure to Nielsen's position as the industry's primary measurement currency.
Sep 6, 2026
-
Industry story
Meta settles children's social media addiction lawsuits for $18 billion
Meta has agreed to pay $18 billion to settle U.S. lawsuits alleging its platforms contributed to children's social media addiction. The figure is one of the largest consumer protection settlements in the tech industry.
Sep 6, 2026
-
Industry story
Kenneth Rona of JWX Featured in Upcoming Podcast Episode
The Leadership In podcast recorded a conversation with Ken Rona of JWX, with no release date and no disclosed content. That's the whole story. Queue it for when it drops; independent CTV monetization players don't put leadership on the record often, so 40 minutes of listening is cheap insurance.
Sep 4, 2026
-
Industry story
FreeWheel Launches Series-Level CTV Transparency Report July 2026
FreeWheel, Comcast's ad-tech platform for premium video (software that manages the buying and selling of ads on professional streaming and broadcast content), launched its Video Content Report in July 2026. The report gives buyers of connected-TV (CTV) advertising — ads delivered via internet-connected televisions — series-level visibility into exactly which programs carried their ads. Hopkins framed the launch as a direct response to advertiser demand for proof that premium video inventory justifies its higher price, distinguishing quality content from the flood of lower-value video inventory now available programmatically.
Sep 4, 2026
-
Industry story
Pause Ads Deliver 2x Attention vs. Standard 60-Second Streaming Spots
Wunderkind Ads released TVision-measured study findings showing that pause ads — overlay advertisements that appear when a viewer pauses a streaming video — generate two times higher attention and three times more "presence" than standard 60-second in-stream ad breaks. The study covered 40 advertisers across 15 verticals on streaming platforms including Plex, Philo, and DISH, establishing the first formal attention benchmarks for the format. Automotive saw the highest lift (3x–4x), but every vertical in the study outperformed expectations, suggesting the attention advantage is inherent to the format rather than category-specific.
Sep 4, 2026
-
Industry story
Independent ad tech consolidation wave accelerates in summer 2026
A cluster of major deals this summer is raising questions about whether independent ad tech companies can survive as standalone public entities. Publicis announced it will acquire LiveRamp, Nielsen announced it will acquire DoubleVerify, and Criteo is reportedly in talks to be taken private by Vista Equity Partners — following Integral Ad Science going private last year. Even The Trade Desk and AppLovin, whose businesses are growing, have seen poor stock market performance, intensifying doubts about the long-term viability of independent ad tech on public markets.
Sep 4, 2026
-
Industry story
Publicis Wins PepsiCo Global Media Without a Pitch
Publicis just took PepsiCo's global media account without a competitive pitch, displacing OMD after more than twenty years across the US and UK, and the no-pitch process is the whole story. Arthur Sadoun didn't win a beauty contest; PepsiCo skipped one entirely, which means either the integrated Epsilon data stack made the decision obvious or Publicis cut price deeply enough to make a review unnecessary. Either way, every programmatic vendor, identity partner, and clean-room contract wired into OMD's PepsiCo stack is now watching a migration that will re-examine each of those relationships.
Sep 3, 2026
-
Industry story
Judge Rules Google Ad Tech Avoids Breakup, Faces Behavioral Fixes
Judge Brinkema handed Google a win it will spend the next decade defending. She kept Google Ad Manager intact, rejecting DOJ's push to force a divestiture of AdX and DFP, and ordered behavioral fixes instead: real-time bid data sharing with rival ad servers, an end to Unified Pricing Rules, and per-bidder floor controls for publishers. Those changes have teeth on paper, but behavioral remedies in ad tech have a near-zero enforcement record, Google's lawyers will define "real-time" as loosely as they can, and the demand-side constraint nobody touched is that Google Ads and DV360 dollars still flow preferentially through AdX.
Sep 3, 2026
-
Industry story
Roku Pitches Data Quality Over Quantity to Win CTV Performance Ad Dollars
Roku is repositioning itself as a data infrastructure partner for agencies, arguing that connected TV (CTV) advertising—ads served on internet-connected television screens—needs fewer but higher-quality data signals rather than more of them. Speaking at Cannes Lions 2026, Roku VP Sal Candela said the company's advantage stems from sitting at the TV operating system (OS) layer, which lets it observe viewer behavior across all apps and services on a device, not just within one streaming service. Roku is translating this into concrete integrations: a June 2026 partnership with campaign platform Smartly for social-style speed in CTV buying, and an April 2026 product called Roku Curate that bundles Roku data with retail purchase signals from Best Buy Ads, Criteo, Instacart, and Kroger for closed-loop measurement.
Sep 3, 2026
-
Industry story
ACR's Structural Blind Spot: Streaming Content Remains Largely Unmeasurable
ACR can only measure what it can match against a known schedule, which means the on-demand, ad-supported streaming that pulled audiences off linear TV is exactly the content ACR sees worst. That is a problem, because ACR has been sold for a decade as the measurement backbone of CTV. Any "streaming reach" number built on ACR is partly a guess, and the exposed dollars grow every year as more viewing migrates off the schedule.
Sep 2, 2026
-
Industry story
Only 30% of Consumers Are Addressable, Reshaping Ad Targeting
Fewer than 30% of consumers carry a persistent digital ID, and Joe Root of Permutive is arguing that number is a floor, not a dip. That means advertisers are fighting over a shrinking, expensive minority while 70% of impressions get priced like leftovers. The catch in Root's pitch: the first-party data play most teams greenlit as the fix mostly fails at the join, because you can't match your CRM against inventory that carries no ID and still hit the scale you budgeted.
Sep 2, 2026
-
Industry story
DoubleVerify Acquired by Nielsen; Vibe TV Acquired by Walmart
Two deals got name-dropped on a podcast with no terms and no sourcing, so treat them accordingly. But the direction they point is real: if Nielsen buys DoubleVerify, the referee is on the payroll of one of the teams, and if Walmart swallows Vibe TV, the same company sells you the CTV inventory, holds the purchase data, and scores the attribution. Buyers already know that's a problem.
Sep 2, 2026
-
Industry story
The Trade Desk's Sincera Now Controls Open Supply Auditing
The Trade Desk just bought the company that decides what "clean supply" means on the open web, and that is a structural problem whether or not Jeff Green ever touches a single scoring weight. Mike O'Sullivan's Sincera grades publisher bid requests; TTD is the largest independent buyer of those same bid requests. OpenSincera releases some data publicly, but a published dataset is not an auditable methodology, and nobody outside the building can see when a weight shifts and billions in spend reroute accordingly.
Sep 2, 2026
-
Industry story
Comcast Announces Full NBCUniversal Spin-Off; Media M&A Wave Uncertain
Comcast spinning off all of NBCUniversal is not a bold strategic bet; it's a balance sheet repair. Broadband multiples are better without a declining linear business dragging them down, and the spin makes that arithmetic cleaner. The interesting knock-on for ad-tech is FreeWheel, which sits inside NBCU's walls and now has an uncertain owner, an uncertain P&L, and a CTV ad-server market that will reprice around that ambiguity.
Sep 2, 2026