Data + Privacy

Principal-based buying is on the rise, and it’s causing conflict between agencies and ad tech partners. Plus: What are sell-side agents, and how could they help publishers?

For years, “inventory cleanup” (or “rationalization”) meant one thing: curating the domain list. Whitelists, blacklists, inclusion lists, MFA lists, premium lists, “approved publisher” lists. The industry uses them to reduce risk, improve quality and create a sense of control in an open marketplace that often feels chaotic. That era is ending.  It’s not because domain […]

For senior leaders, marketing performance has rarely looked more measurable. Dashboards are cleaner, efficiency metrics are stable and optimization systems promise continuous improvement at scale. Yet many organizations are encountering a paradox: Performance appears strong, while durable growth remains elusive. Today, there’s a widening gap between what modern marketing systems are designed to optimize and […]

2026 is the year CTV will bridge the gap between branding and performance. Fresh off the Convergent TV World event, our team discusses the rise of performance TV, shifting live sports rights and the impact of M&A on the streaming experience in this future-facing episode.

The advertising industry is full of noise about AI making buy-side and sell-side processes more efficient. That framing is convenient, but it misses a broader point. Speed and effectiveness are easy to celebrate. Power dynamics are harder to talk about. Most conversations about AI in ad tech focus on fewer manual steps, more dynamic creative, […]

I’ve been saying for years that addressable advertising was a strategic mistake. Not because targeting shouldn’t exist, but because building an ecosystem dependent on granular identity, location trails and behavioral signals was always going to create exposure we couldn’t fully control.  And if we’re being honest, the precision targeting story was oversold anyway. The industry […]

Fees, fees, fees. The Trade Desk is facing market pressure in all directions: from rival DSPs offering lower fee structures, SSPs and agencies clashing over its OpenPath product and bearish investors disappointed with growth. Guest Sarah Caputo, founder of consultancy Fraction Method, tells us why The Trade Desk should reduce its margin and make its fees more transparent.

CTV advertising is booming, with the channel growing by 13% in 2025 to $26.6 billion and projected to hit $51 billion by 2029. In this environment, you’d expect to see sustained overperformance from The Trade Desk, a CTV aggregator with video representing a high-40s percentage of its business. But for some time now, TTD has […]

Every era of advertising has been defined by the moment its infrastructure became the bottleneck. In the late 1990s, the bottleneck was the fax machine. Media buyers negotiated insertion orders over phone calls, signed paper contracts and waited days to confirm a campaign was live. The industry did not abandon that process because it was […]

AI has the power to operationalize and scale weaknesses within marketing organizations. So if marketing leaders want to plan intelligently, they’ll have to make a series of structural repairs. Here are five that separate marketing organizations that pass the AI audit from those that fail it.