Brian Berner

Excited to share that Aperiam has invested in Bedrock Platform. Obvious statement of the century: programmatic advertising has a complexity problem. The infrastructure that was built to give media buyers control has, over time, done the opposite. Burying teams under layers of operational overhead, legacy tooling, and opaque supply chains. Bedrock is built on a simple but powerful thesis: what if you stripped away the bloat and rebuilt the stack around what actually matters... precision, transparency, and speed to execution. Their platform combines AI-driven campaign automation with curated, premium inventory across video, CTV, DOOH, and audio, and aims to be flexible and get smarter over time. Plus, the team (Shane, Austin, Ryan, James) has deep roots in the infrastructure layer of ad tech and understands the plumbing better than almost anyone. We believe the next generation of programmatic will be leaner, faster and AI-first. Bedrock is building that.

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🖥️✅ Mike Shields / Substack (10/21): “Roku is one of the companies that is bullish on this would-be sector, rolling out a self-serve platform called Roku Ads Manager about a year ago. The company says it’s seeing real growth here - with one key caveat. We’re seeing a new advertiser category emerging,” said a Roku executive on the Next in Media podcast this week. “We’ve got lots of different parts that make up our total platform revenue, and this area is the fastest growing. I think the misnomer for a lot of these platforms is that they think there’s just going to be this onslaught of SMBs that is going to make up some really fast revenue opportunity. And the reality is that onboarding SMBs is challenging. You need to onboard thousands, if not tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands for that revenue to make up anything meaningful.” What Roku is seeing is that performance advertisers, including many of those direct-to-consumer brands, are coming to TV quickly. That’s great, but it’s not the wave of mom-and-pop shops that make up huge chunks of the millions of advertisers drawn to Meta and Google. “Those mom-and-pop shops, they advertise in the newspaper,” Roku said. “They advertise with local radio. Sure, they advertise on social and in search for sure. But they don’t have a sophisticated marketing team. They don’t have a very large marketing budget. Whereas the digital performance buyer is very sophisticated in its methods and its measurement, and is doing its own analysis on revenue impact, total ROAS, their lift and regression analysis. They might be doing incrementality analysis and geo-holdout lift studies and all of these kinds of things. That group is the one that we’re seeing move more heavily into CTV.” ⬇️ #streaming #ctv #ott #avod #programmatic #smb #dtc https://lnkd.in/ewCxfptQ

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Big news in the audio advertising space, Amazon has just expanded its partnership with iHeartMedia, unlocking programmatic access to streaming music, radio, and soon podcasts and broadcast stations via Amazon DSP. That means advertisers can now reach listeners across 870+ stations in 160 markets with precision targeting and omnichannel measurement. This isn’t just about scale....it’s about performance. With Amazon’s clean-room tech and iHeart’s deep listener engagement, we’re seeing audio evolve into a fully addressable, measurable channel. That’s a game-changer for marketers who want to connect with audiences where they are .... and when they’re most engaged. 📈 For those of us leading large sales & marketing organizations, this is a reminder: the future of media is frictionless, data-driven, and everywhere. If your strategy doesn’t include audio, it’s time to rethink. 🔗 Read the full story here: https://lnkd.in/gU8g5fhA iHeartRadioiHeartMedia

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I agree with David Nyurenberg, CTV is definitely copying display’s bad habits, but the nostalgia for show-level transparency is its own kind of rerun. Sorta stale, like an ad-network site list. To be fair, the call for more visibility is right — it just doesn’t go quite far enough. “Everything is audience first and content last.” But display was never audience-first — it was event-first: clicks, visits, and other behavioral jetsam dressed up as “people.” Linear TV has always been about actual humans. Demographic cohorts measured by someone other than the seller. Individual shows only mattered if they delivered scale or prestige — the Super Bowl, Friends, Seinfeld. Content is how they do it but TV real magic is delivering people. Yes, more content transparency is important—no one wants a twenty-teens pre-roll redux. But context is only part of the story. It’s an imperfect proxy for audience, especially when every platform runs its own taxonomy. You can list every show in a buy and still have no idea who you reached. And when you don’t know who you reached, you’re just stacking proxies on top of proxies. I'd say the argument just needs one more turn of the dial. Transparency doesn’t start with content. Content is what you fall back on when you can’t measure people. Transparency starts with an audience layer that tells you *who* you’re reaching, not just *what* you’re next to. most important - read the article 👇 https://lnkd.in/dRzrGmwY

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The Platforms That Win Will Compress Question → Decision → Action An overarching observation from #CES2026 for AdTech / MarTech Winning platforms won't be defined by "more features." They’ll be defined by how quickly they compress the time from Question → Decision → Action, with trust and transparency built in. Multi-modal agents are quietly ushering in the next generation of MarTech and AdTech. For years, the industry focused on optimizing interfaces: Dashboards, filters, and manual reports. Now, we’re optimizing intent. The next wave of platforms won’t just show data—they’ll reason, plan, and act on your behalf. What’s actually changing? - Multi-modal inputs: Text, voice, visuals, and raw data become first-class citizens. - Agentic workflows: Planner Agents analyze and strategize; Executor Agents execute and optimize. - Outcome-driven systems: Moving from manual steps to autonomous optimization across audience segments and live campaigns. - Natural language control: You don’t just query data; you direct a live ecosystem. - Voice and chat aren't the innovation—they are just the entry point. The real shift is moving from tools you operate to collaborators you direct. This isn't just "better software." It’s the dawn of autonomous marketing. #MarTech #AdTech #AgenticAI #MultiModalAI #FutureOfWork #AIStrategy

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Retail media's Wild West chapter is officially closing. The industry must align on incrementality and measurement. Now. That is David Cohen's message as IAB CEO. April 14. The IAB launches "Building a More Competitive Commerce Media Ecosystem." The shift: from growth mode to maturity mode. The agenda: in-store media, cross-channel activation, new org structures, and AI-driven commerce. The goal: alignment on measurement and impact.   Is operational discipline the real driver of retail media's next phase, or just a polite way of saying growth is stalling? Full article in the first comment

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