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Recent podcasts
From the last 5 days
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Podcast episode
How Amazon Ads Plans To Make Programmatic Simple Without Taking Control From Marketers
AdExchanger's Allison Schiff interviews Amazon Ads VP Kelly MacLean about the company's rebranded DSP (demand-side ad-buying platform), now called DVA, which adds a conversational AI layer that lets advertisers set a goal, upload creative, enter a budget, and launch in four clicks. The AI handles bidding, targeting, and supply path automatically, with manual controls tucked into a separate advanced tier. MacLean's core claim is the closed loop: Amazon can see both the ad impression and the actual purchase on Amazon.com, so it grades its own campaigns against real sales.
Oct 21, 2026
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Podcast episode
S2E17: Making Data Work, with Narrative's Nick Jordan
Nick Jordan, founder of Narrative.io, joined host Geoff Wolinetz on the Chelsea Strategies podcast to talk career, management, and his company's bet that data licensing is where programmatic advertising was twenty years ago: slow, bespoke, and ripe for automation. The useful part is what Jordan said about AI: it's driving demand for platforms that make data interoperable (easy to share and combine across companies), but it could also make those same platforms irrelevant by doing the plumbing work itself. Jordan waved that contradiction away by saying Narrative is strongest under pressure.
Oct 21, 2026
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Podcast episode
Episode 154: CTV Meets the Creator Economy with Nicole Scaglione of PubMatic
The AdTechGod Pod
AdTechGod's podcast brought on Nicole Scaglione, PubMatic's VP of CTV, to walk through three bets the company is making: building tools that face buyers directly (not just publishers), an "agentic" layer (software that automates campaign setup where a human or a DSP used to sit), and a marketplace to pull creator video off YouTube and TikTok and onto connected TVs at higher prices. Each claim expands PubMatic's addressable market, and none of them come with named advertisers, verified scale, or third-party numbers. Scaglione's evidence for the agentic layer is that an unnamed buyer said it got them live faster.
Oct 20, 2026
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Podcast episode
What Frogs And Socks Can Teach Us About AI Implementation
AdExchanger Talks
AdExchanger Talks host Allison Schiff spent an hour with Rebecca Sykes, a partner at The Brandtech Group, on why AI implementation keeps failing. The short answer: the model is fine; the workflow around it is broken. Sykes makes two claims worth taking seriously.
Oct 20, 2026
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Podcast episode
Hill To Die On
AdTech AdTalk
"Hill To Die On" is a podcast hosted by Adam Heimlich and Gareth Glaser covering ad-tech mechanics. This episode is about two ways publishers are quietly getting cheated: one in how user identities are packaged and sold, and one in how the proposed Google antitrust fix may already have a hole in it. On identity: Glaser argues that probabilistic IDs (statistical guesses about who a user is) are being passed into the bid stream as deterministic matches (confirmed identities), inflating what advertisers pay for audiences.
Oct 19, 2026
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Podcast episode
Episode 195: Scott Messer Answers the Question, Is There Crying in Ad Tech?
Marketecture
Marketecture's Ari Paparo and Eric Franchi hosted Scott Messer, a media consultant, to make the case that AI agents placing reservation buys directly with publishers could be the biggest structural shift in programmatic advertising since real-time bidding (the automated, millisecond auction system that runs most digital ads today). The same episode touched on open-web traffic collapsing, Apple's Safari ad blocklist, and OpenAI wiring behavioral retargeting into what users treat as a search product. Messer's pitch centers on 30% of every media dollar disappearing into DSP and SSP fees (the buy-side and sell-side tech layers in the middle of every programmatic transaction).
Oct 19, 2026
Recent news
From the last 5 days
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Industry story
Netflix Programmatic Expansion Opens All Major DSPs
Netflix opening pause ads and live event inventory to every major DSP, including DV360, Amazon, Yahoo, and The Trade Desk, looks like confidence. It is closer to inventory management. Viewing grew only 2%, and Netflix cannot sell through at direct-deal volume, so programmatic fills the gap at $8 to $12 CPMs against a $30 to $60 direct floor.
Oct 21, 2026
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Industry story
Apple iOS 27 to Block Third-Party Identity Resolution and Ad Tracking
Apple named names. Starting with iOS 27, WebKit will block third-party identity resolution at the domain level, and the kill list includes The Trade Desk, LiveRamp, Experian's Audigent, ID5, and Permutive. The first-party workaround isn't one: Apple's position is that if the central matching happens at a third party, it's cross-site tracking, full stop.
Oct 21, 2026
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Industry story
FTC Approves Publicis Acquisition of LiveRamp with Neutrality Conditions
Publicis just bought the pipes. The FTC cleared the LiveRamp acquisition with five years of neutrality conditions, firewalls, and on-demand audits, which sounds protective until you notice that audits catch data transfers, not roadmap priorities or sales alignment. Every GroupM, Dentsu, and Omnicom planner now runs identity resolution through infrastructure their largest competitor owns, and the renewals they sign in 2027 run straight into year six, when the handcuffs come off.
Oct 21, 2026
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Industry story
Netflix Ad Revenue Doubles But Viewing Grows Only 2%
Netflix's ad revenue is on track to double to $3 billion in 2026, with upfront commitments nearly doubled and 4,000 advertisers (up 70%), yet global viewing hours grew only 2% in the first half of the year. This divergence reveals a yield problem: Netflix is extracting more money from each hour watched rather than growing the total audience. The article argues that four of the five levers driving ad revenue growth — tier migration, filling unsold ad slots, raising prices, and adding more ad load per hour — are pure monetization tactics with ceilings, not genuine audience expansion.
Oct 21, 2026
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Industry story
Netflix Cuts Engagement Reporting to Once a Year
Netflix announced its 'What We Watched' engagement report will shift from twice-yearly to once-yearly publication starting in Q1 2027. Simultaneously, co-CEO Greg Peters dismissed Nielsen's Gauge — an independent TV measurement service that tracks viewing share across platforms — as 'not the currency for the video marketplace.' The article frames this combination — downplaying external metrics, reducing transparency on internal data, and shifting the conversation from measurable hours to Netflix-defined 'value' per hour — as a structural opacity problem for advertisers who are being sold on 'the most engaged audiences.'
Oct 21, 2026
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Industry story
Netflix Fires Content Chief Bajaria, Hires Peter Rice for $20B Slate
Netflix pushed out Bela Bajaria, its content chief of nearly a decade, and handed a $20 billion content budget to Peter Rice, who starts October 26. Ted Sarandos's internal memo stated the slate needs to improve 'especially in UCAN' (U.S. and Canada) — the region where Netflix's advertising revenue is concentrated.
Oct 21, 2026
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Industry story
Brandtech Partner: AI Fails at Scale Due to Legacy Operating Models
Rebecca Sykes at Brandtech has a clean diagnosis: companies cut one workflow step by 70% with AI, and the task still takes four days, because the data crawls through five disconnected systems with a human copy-pasting between them. The model was never the bottleneck. The plumbing was.
Oct 20, 2026
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Industry story
Thrad launches first supply-side platform for LLM ad inventory
Thrad, co-founded by Andrea Tortella and Marco Visentin, is calling itself the world's first SSP for LLM inventory, placing sponsored suggestions inside AI chat conversations and pitching token-cost offsets to AI developers. Brian O'Kelley's name is on the cap table, which buys attention. It does not buy a signed publisher contract, and no top-five LLM has agreed to let an outside ad-tech layer anywhere near its chat surface.
Oct 20, 2026
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Industry story
PayPal Ads Pitches Transaction Data as Cookie-Free Audience Signal
PayPal has real data: 293 million U.S. users, Venmo, Honey browsing signals, actual purchase confirmation rather than category inference. Asaf Davidov's pitch at Advertising Week is credible on the signal and shaky on everything else.
Oct 20, 2026
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Industry story
Discover-Tech Spyware Ads Reached Australian Nuclear Agency via Programmatic
Ads served by Discover-Tech — a company flagged by researchers for delivering Candiru spyware — reached networks belonging to the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) and its Australian Synchrotron research campus, according to ABC News Australia and Citizen Lab's own report. Researchers found over 10 million Discover-Tech bids for impressions geolocated to Australia, including networks tied to grid and power companies and nuclear research entities. ANSTO said it observed no impact on its systems, but Citizen Lab's assessment is that at minimum the devices that loaded those ads were profiled — their ad IDs and IP addresses sent to a company the researchers say sold exactly that pairing to spyware vendors.
Oct 20, 2026
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Industry story
Axios lets subscribers query content via AI chatbots directly
Axios has launched a subscriber-first AI integration that allows paying subscribers to connect their subscription to AI tools (such as ChatGPT or similar large language model chatbots) and query Axios content through those tools rather than visiting the Axios website. The move was shared by Axios CRO Jacquelyn Cameron at the Digiday Publishing Summit in September. Digiday's Jessica Davies described it as the most detailed example publishers have offered so far of how to monetize 'agentic audiences' — users who increasingly interact with content through AI agents rather than direct site visits.
Oct 20, 2026
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Industry story
Amazon Ads AI Platform Claims 18% Lower CPMs in Beta Tests
Amazon Ads VP Kelly MacLean detailed the company's new AI-powered ad platform, unveiled at Amazon unBoxed, which merges its ad console and DSP (demand-side platform — software used by advertisers to buy digital ad inventory programmatically) so advertisers can launch a programmatic campaign in as few as four clicks. The pitch is 'programmatic for everyone,' targeting advertisers who lack deep programmatic expertise. In early beta tests, advertisers using Amazon Ads Agent saw 18% lower CPMs (cost per thousand impressions), 16% lower CPAs (cost per acquisition), and a 65% improvement in ad delivery — described as results from real live campaigns, not projections.
Oct 20, 2026
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Industry story
Google Must Rework Search in Europe Under Digital Markets Act
Google has been ordered to rework its European search product under the Digital Markets Act, and the enforcement history says treat it as a slow negotiation, not an imminent redesign. Sundar Pichai's team has absorbed roughly €8 billion in EU fines over twelve years while holding above 90% search share in Europe; the pattern is propose the minimum, litigate the details, and let the clock run 12 to 18 months before a single results page changes. The real risk for operators isn't the formal remedy.
Oct 19, 2026
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Industry story
OpenAI Enables Advertiser Targeting by Email, Phone, or Mobile Ad ID
OpenAI has begun allowing advertisers to target users based on personally identifiable signals including email address, phone number, or mobile advertising ID, according to 404 Media. This represents a significant step toward a more conventional digital advertising model for OpenAI, which has been expanding its monetization options beyond subscriptions. The move raises privacy questions given the sensitive nature of conversations users have with ChatGPT, and signals OpenAI's intent to compete more directly with established digital ad platforms that rely on first-party identity data.
Oct 19, 2026
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Industry story
Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery Merge Under Skydance Banner
Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery have merged under the Skydance banner, according to the Madison & Wall Saturday summary. This combination creates one of the largest entertainment conglomerates, bringing together major film studios, cable networks, and streaming services, and is noted as occurring just a week before the Fox-Roku shareholder votes.
Oct 19, 2026
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Industry story
Sony Pictures Names PubMatic Preferred Programmatic Partner for PS5 Live TV
Sony Pictures has designated PubMatic as its preferred programmatic partner for Live TV streaming inventory on PlayStation 5, combining streaming ad supply with authenticated console audiences. The inventory is purchasable through existing DSPs (demand-side platforms) or directly through PubMatic. The article notes "preferred" does not mean exclusive, and flags that "authenticated audience insights" lacks a clear definition — specifically whether targeting is at the household or individual level, which data fields are used, and how outcomes are measured.
Oct 19, 2026
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Industry story
Israeli Ad Agency Used Display Ads to Deliver Spyware to Al Jazeera Devices
Israeli digital advertising agency Discover-Tech was found to have used online advertisements to spy on users and hack devices, including 45 Windows machines at Qatari media organization Al Jazeera between 2024 and 2025, according to research from The Citizen Lab and ad security firm Confiant. The ads — often for mundane household products — routed users to servers run by spyware companies including Candiru, enabling Discover-Tech to track users even without any ad engagement and, in some cases, to plant spyware on devices. Confiant co-founder Jerome Dangu told Reuters the ads also reached users at sensitive institutions including the Pentagon and the International Criminal Court.
Oct 19, 2026
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Industry story
Kawaja: AI uncertainty freezing ad-tech M&A; decisioning plus unique signal will win
Terry Kawaja of LUMA Partners, a leading investment bank focused on media and ad-tech mergers and acquisitions, told Prebid Summit attendees that uncertainty about AI's trajectory is a key reason buyers are hesitant to write checks for ad-tech companies. His argument: investors can't determine whether a company's AI capability is defensible or will simply be rendered obsolete by the next model release from labs like Anthropic. He predicted that "decisioning coupled with unique signal" — meaning AI-driven decision-making paired with proprietary ad-targeting data — will separate winners from losers, while generic workflow automation will not be a differentiator.
Oct 16, 2026
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Industry story
Contextual Advertising Becoming a Feature, Not a Standalone Business
The article argues that contextual targeting — placing ads based on the content of a page rather than who is reading it — has commoditized from a distinct business category into a bundled feature. Integral Ad Science (IAS) and DoubleVerify, the dominant ad-verification vendors, now bundle contextual segments with their core brand-safety products. Peer39, owned by Samba TV, sells contextual data into connected TV (CTV — streaming video viewed on a television).
Oct 16, 2026