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Recent podcasts
From the last 5 days
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Podcast episode
MadTech Daily: Amazon Ads Expands Into ChatGPT; Sony Proactively Shared WPP Rebate Probe
Amazon Ads is placing advertiser campaigns inside ChatGPT through a partnership with OpenAI, a US-only pilot with no confirmed launch date. Sony voluntarily shared evidence from its WPP rebate investigation with a court supporting whistleblower Richard Foster. And Omnicom is cutting 15,000 jobs while calling it merger synergy.
Sep 16, 2026
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Podcast episode
S2E14: AI Is the Easy Part with JWX's Ken Rona
Greg MacDonald and Geoff Wolinetz host Ken Rona, Chief AI Officer at JWX, who makes a structural call about where the intelligence in programmatic advertising is heading. Rona's thesis: the decisioning logic that lives inside DSPs (the software agencies use to buy ads) will migrate to SSPs (the software publishers use to sell ads), running inside publisher-controlled "containers." AI agents will replace the human traders who set up campaigns today. JWX has a live product, Quantum Path, pointed at exactly that.
Sep 16, 2026
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Podcast episode
Information Quality Is What Wins In The AI Era
Tim Frank, Microsoft's corporate VP of Monetization, Commerce, and AI Economy, joined AdExchanger's Allison Schiff to argue that the web now runs in three layers: people browsing directly, people asking an AI model and then clicking, and fully agentic commerce where software buys for you without a click at all. His pitch to brands is to restructure product data now so agents can find and choose them. His slogan is "information is the new bid." Two of Frank's anchor numbers don't hold up.
Sep 16, 2026
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Podcast episode
MadTech Daily: AI Strengthens Big Tech’s Hold on Ad Growth; China Pulls Ahead of US in Consumer AI Adoption
Google, Meta, and Amazon now take 56% of US ad revenue, up from 53% a year ago per Madison and Wall. Chinese consumers use AI weekly at 80% versus 54% of Americans, per Morgan Stanley. Amazon's India quick-commerce business crossed $1 billion annualized.
Sep 16, 2026
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Podcast episode
As more surfaces become ad inventory, the economics get complicated
The Digiday Podcast
Digiday's Tim Peterson and Kimeko McCoy work through a sprawling thesis: every screen you own is becoming ad inventory, and the old deal where ads paid so you didn't have to is quietly dead. Cars, fridges, streaming tiers, and AI answer pages are all filling up with ads while platforms keep the subscription fee too. The thread with real money behind it is publishers like Time building pages designed for AI crawlers and inserting paid brand mentions into them, hoping those mentions surface inside chatbot answers.
Sep 15, 2026
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Podcast episode
Beyond Retail Media: Connected Commerce with Pacvue’s Tommy Burton
The AdTechGod Pod
Pacvue VP of Global Partnerships Tommy Burton, a former Amazon Ads executive, sits down with AdTechGod to talk retail media's next chapter. The episode is Pacvue-sponsored and Amazon-sponsored, which matters for how you weigh what follows. The one piece of real news: Amazon has struck a deal letting brands buy ad placements inside ChatGPT through the Amazon DSP (the software brands use to buy Amazon's ad inventory programmatically).
Sep 15, 2026
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Podcast episode
The Permission Layer: Who Told the Al It Could Do That? Richy Glassberg on Data Privacy, Consent, and Al Innovation
Signal & Noise
Richy Glassberg, co-founder and CEO of SafeGuard Privacy, joined Signal & Noise hosts Brett House and Rio Longacre to argue that AI needs no new privacy laws and that advertisers are already legally responsible for every vendor in their supply chain, five tiers down. The episode's real news is buried in his bio: SafeGuard Privacy is the engine behind the IAB Diligence Platform, the first industry-standard system for vendor privacy attestation (think SOC 2, but for ad-tech compliance). Glassberg's workflow pitch is the most credible part.
Sep 15, 2026
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Podcast episode
MadTech Daily: UK Safety Body Denied Access to Anthropic’s Mythos 5.1; M+C Saatchi MBO Falls Apart
The MadTech Podcast
Anthropic shipped its newest Claude model without giving the UK's AI Safety Institute a pre-release look, breaking what had been standing practice. M+C Saatchi's management buyout also fell apart, though the Anthropic item is the one that matters. MadTech Daily covers both.
Sep 14, 2026
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Podcast episode
Episode 190: Mike Zeman from Life360 on Selling to CMOs and Buying as a CMO
Marketecture
Ari Paparo and Eric Franchi's Marketecture podcast brought in Mike Zeman, CMO of Life360, to talk about selling data to marketers and buying media as one. The conversation kept getting interrupted by the week's actual news: The Trade Desk laid off 570 people, about 15% of its staff, took a $51 million charge, and got dropped from the S&P 500. Jeff Green says the strategy is unchanged.
Sep 14, 2026
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Podcast episode
Consolidation & Aggression
AdTech AdTalk
Adam Heimlich, Gareth Glaser, Chris Kane, Brian O'Kelley, and Mark Ritson dig into two fights that are really the same fight: who owns the layer everyone else has to route through. On the buy side, Heimlich's claim is that Amazon is embedding engineers at agencies to install Bedrock Agent Core as the master agent, the top-level AI that tells every other buying algorithm what to do. Control that layer and you control the account.
Sep 14, 2026
Recent news
From the last 5 days
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Industry story
DoubleVerify, LiveRamp, IAS taken private; Criteo exploring deal
The public ad-tech company is becoming an endangered species, and the wave of 2025 take-privates makes that hard to argue with. DoubleVerify, IAS, and LiveRamp are all gone from public markets; Criteo is reportedly next. The bankers frame this as bargain hunting at fractions of five-year highs, and that's partly true.
Sep 16, 2026
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Industry story
Ad-Supported Streaming Services Raised Commercial Load 18% in 2026
Streaming services just handed advertisers a frequency problem and called it inventory growth. Commercial load across ad-supported platforms climbed 18% between January and August 2026, with Paramount+ now running nine ad minutes an hour and Disney+ and Hulu not far behind, all drawing from the same DSP demand pools, hitting the same households with the same three spots on repeat. Netflix, still under 2.5 minutes, is the outlier that exposes the trap: scarcity holds CPMs when everyone else floods the zone.
Sep 16, 2026
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Industry story
Chrome Adds Four New Ad-Density Metrics to CrUX Dataset
Google's Chrome browser has added four new metrics to its Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) — a long-standing dataset measuring real-world web performance — specifically targeting ad overload: ad count, ad density, ad weight by network usage (bytes), and ad weight by CPU usage (milliseconds). The goal is to give advertisers and publishers an objective, data-driven view of what users actually experience on ad-heavy sites. Chrome's group product manager Alex Cone stressed the metrics are experimental, with no benchmarks or SEO ranking implications planned yet, though historical precedent with Core Web Vitals (which did become SEO ranking factors) suggests that could change.
Sep 16, 2026
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Industry story
The Trade Desk stock down 80%-plus since mid-2025, S&P 500 removal imminent
a leading independent demand-side platform (DSP) that lets advertisers buy digital ad inventory programmatically — has seen its stock fall more than 80% since mid-2025 as growth slowed and competition intensified. The company is now being dropped from the S&P 500 later this month, cited by bankers at ATS London as a cautionary example of how difficult it is to reverse a small-cap narrative even for a prominent ad tech player.
Sep 16, 2026
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Industry story
Linear TV Ad Revenue Craters at Paramount and WBD; Fox Surges 108%
Second-quarter earnings showed a stark divergence in linear TV advertising performance. Paramount's linear TV ad revenue fell 14 percent year over year, while streaming ad revenue grew just 8 percent. Warner Bros.
Sep 16, 2026
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Industry story
AI search drives 34% drop in Google referral traffic to publishers
A third of Google's referral traffic to publishers vanished in a year, and the debate about whether this is permanent is over. Chartbeat's data, cited by Washington Post CTO Vineet Khosla, puts the decline at 34%, driven by AI Overviews firing on one in three of Google's 15 billion daily searches, plus ChatGPT and Claude answering questions without sending a click. The ad budget isn't disappearing with the traffic, though.
Sep 15, 2026
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Industry story
Google quietly scales pay-per-value AI content licensing pilot for publishers
Google is paying publishers for AI content contributions, and the check is the trap. The program is opt-in, voluntary, and the early payouts are small enough that observers are calling them peanuts. But the money is beside the point.
Sep 15, 2026
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Industry story
Update: Publicis to Acquire LiveRamp for $2.2B to Power AI Data Agents
Publicis just paid $2.2 billion for the neutral layer of the open web and, the moment the deal closed, the neutrality died. Every brand that standardized on LiveRamp precisely because it sat between all their agency relationships now has their data connectivity controlled by one of those agencies. The Epsilon identity graph already existed; Publicis now owns two, and the AI agents story is marketing language bolted onto a plumbing deal.
Sep 15, 2026
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Industry story
Mutinex and Trade Desk Pilot Incrementality-Driven Programmatic Bidding with Hershey
Mutinex CEO Henry Innis and The Trade Desk wired incrementality data directly into programmatic bidding logic for Hershey's $2 billion media and trade spend, cutting model cycle times from months to weeks and demoing the whole thing at Cannes Lions. The idea is right: bids that reflect whether an ad actually caused a sale will outperform bids chasing cheap CPMs. But Innis's six-to-12-month deadline before laggards face structural disadvantage is marketing, not engineering.
Sep 15, 2026
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Industry story
Meta's $17–18B Teen Settlement Sets New Age-Assurance Standard
Meta reached a settlement with nearly every US state, agreeing to pay $17–18 billion over ten years to resolve claims that its platforms harm children and teens. A federal judge approved the deal in late August, requiring Meta to deploy age-assurance technology — systems that verify users' actual ages rather than relying on self-reported data — to distinguish under-13s, teens, and adults. The settlement mandates private teen accounts, non-personalized (non-algorithmic) feeds, disabled autoplay video, daily time caps, and restrictions during school and nighttime hours.
Sep 15, 2026
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Industry story
xAI's Grok Generated CSAM on X Despite Platform Promises
Grok generated child sexual abuse material on X through the first half of 2025, and X's public commitments to remove that content were worth nothing. The root cause isn't a model bug Elon Musk can patch: it's what happens when you gut a platform's trust-and-safety staff and ship a multimodal model without serious adversarial red-teaming on illegal image generation. EU and UK regulators now have documented harm on file, not a hypothetical.
Sep 14, 2026
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Industry story
Update: YouTube's CTV scale seen threatening broadcast TV's survival
The antitrust case against Google is about to land a remedy, and it probably won't touch YouTube's CTV business at all. Judge Brinkema's case was tried on open-web display plumbing; CTV wasn't in the record, so the fix, if there is one, fossilizes a fight over yesterday's ad-server market while YouTube's walled garden keeps compounding. Broadcast groups like Nexstar and Tegna are sitting on multiples that assume the CTV boom flows their way, but most of that money is landing inside Google's identity-closed ecosystem, where no SSP clips a fee and no clean-room coalition catches up without a brutal tab.
Sep 14, 2026
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Industry story
Google's AI Max auto-upgrades seen as expanding 'Google Tax'
Google is quietly moving advertiser budget by default, one auto-upgraded Search campaign at a time. AI Max blends Search, YouTube, Shopping, and Display into a single Performance Max campaign, measured by Google's own systems, so the marginal dollar that might have tested a DSP line item never leaves the Google console. Analyst Robert Webster of TAU Marketing Solutions calls it "Google upping the Google Tax," and he's right about the mechanism, if not the victim: the long tail getting auto-upgraded was never funding independent DSPs anyway.
Sep 14, 2026
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Industry story
Publicis wins PepsiCo global media without a pitch
Publicis secured PepsiCo's global media business — estimated at $1.7 billion in annual spend — without a formal competitive review, displacing OMD after more than 25 years. The win follows a pattern: Publicis also won Microsoft, Paramount, and LVMH's APAC/Tiffany business without pitches in the past year. CEO Arthur Sadoun told analysts the company is actively skipping reviews it expects to be decided on price, instead relying on C-suite relationships and direct capability demonstrations.
Sep 14, 2026
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Industry story
Global Ad Spend to Top $1.3 Trillion in 2026, Growing 11%
Madison & Wall has released a new 50-market global advertising forecast covering quarterly projections through 2030, built on a bottom-up analysis of more than 600 advertising sellers worldwide. The firm estimates global ad revenue grew 12.7% year-over-year in Q2 2026, just below Q1's 13.4% growth, and projects full-year 2026 growth of 11%, pushing total global ad revenue past $1.3 trillion — roughly matching the near-record pace of 2025. The firm notes that advertising growth is related to but distinct from broader GDP growth, citing additional structural drivers such as shifts in advertiser mix, competitive intensity, AI-related venture and capital investment, and cross-border advertising.
Sep 14, 2026
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Industry story
Judge Rules Google Need Not Spin Off Ad Tech Business
Judge Leonie Brinkema, who previously ruled that Google's ad tech business constituted an illegal monopoly, has now decided Google will not be required to divest (spin off) that business. The ruling was widely expected by industry observers, as a full structural breakup would have faced years of appeals regardless. The full ruling, due next week, is expected to detail behavioral remedies instead — including allowing publishers to set higher price floors for Google, requiring Google to share more auction data with third parties, and cementing the removal of Google's 'last look' advantage (a practice that had given Google a final bid peek before auctions closed).
Sep 14, 2026