David Simon

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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we've posted a couple of reports in the past - but I think that this one is the BEST and most interesting one we published (...so far...) this is a true comparison of "attribution" vs. incrementality - comparing the actual aggregated, weighted, and indexed results based for the clients who share attribution data with INCRMNTAL Super interesting - get it below!

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With principle-based buying returning to the forefront, Brian Chap's recipe for agency accountability takes me back to Jon Mandel's explosive rebate disclosures back in March 2015. Jon's kimono-opening moment was undoubtedly the catalyst that woke us all up to the billions leaking from media budgets by way of non-transparent kickbacks and fees. The can of worms has yet to be closed. That's why principle-based buying doesn't sit well with me. It feels like we're rewinding the tape after making so much progress over the last decade. BUT ... if you're a client-side media buyer that chooses to engage with a principle-based agency, there are three of Brian's "BENCH" framework activities that I think should be prioritized to the top. These three are relatively simple to do and can dramatically increase transparency and accountability. 1 - Secure platform access to your ad server, your DSP and the major SSPs through whom you are buying. Ensure you know how to compare media costs at each step in the supply-chain. 2 - Conduct audits. Whether as Brian recommends or simply by contacting a handful of publishers where you buy media, you should be able to reconcile your cost input to your media value output. And while you're at it, you'll be strengthening your direct publisher relationships, which has many longer-term benefits both in terms of media cost and priority. 3 - Most definitely hold your agency accountable. This applies also to every adtech vendor in your media supply-chain. I am not a fan of principle-based media buying. But if you're going to try it out, you need to remember that this is far from a set-it-and-forget-it approach to advertising. https://lnkd.in/eDw-Z3w8

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If you are a Performance/Growth Marketer testing or looking to test CTV, this article is a must read. CTV inventory is primarily non-clickable so the industry relies on Cross Device to connect the device visiting the website to the TV in which the ad was served (and vice versa). Here's the problem - most CTV vendors use IP Address (Wifi) as the sole source of truth for cross device tracking. This is both antiquated and heavily flawed, but they do it anyway and hey, it certainly doesn't hurt in-platform performance. Data validation provider Truthset conducted this study on behalf of CIMM (Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement) and Go Addressable to definitively understand the accuracy of IP Address for Cross Device tracking applications (CTV). "Truthset analyzed records from six major data vendors, including 1 billion email addresses, nearly 250 million IP addresses and 164 million postal addresses." Here are some key findings: > IP-to-Email matches: 16% accurate >IP-to-Postal matches: 13% accurate If you are a brand allocating ad dollars to a CTV campaign leveraging IP Address for cross device tracking/targeting, is this accuracy acceptable? “There’s this promise in the industry of completely accurate, deterministic data that matches sophisticated and vast advertising targets and attributes onto individuals and households,” Jon Watts, Managjng Director of Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) said. “This leads marketers to believe that when they buy against a particular target, they’re reaching that target – and, unsurprisingly, the truth is much more complicated than that.” IP Address Match Rates Are a Joke – And It’s No Laughing Matter https://lnkd.in/gwGa_iBt Keynes Digital #crossdevice #CTV #connectedtv

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CTV is a driving force for digital ad spend growth, but those of us who have been around since the days of "Ad Network 1.0" know that non-transparent "ad bundles" and fuzzy PMPs with fancy logos and no accountability will burn out the minute that the supply - demand imbalance come into play. With the rise of Amazon Prime Video and the growth of FAST channels reaching saturation overload, we are just about there. Program level transparency and full impression-level accountability across all CTV sources is only a matter of time.

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We keep calling AdCP vs programmatic a standards conversation. I don’t think that’s the real fight. Agentic changes where leverage lives: workflow, orchestration, optimization, and measurement. With IAB Leadership coming up at the end of the week, it got me thinking. I believe when new ideas get “standardized,” institutional gravity usually pulls them into the shape of the current ecosystem — often reinforcing existing rails and disproportionately benefiting closed-loop platforms, aka walled gardens. I connected this moment to a lesson from TiVo in 2001: we had the right idea (second-by-second viewing), but we were too early — adoption and incentives weren’t aligned, and the market wasn’t ready to re-engineer its currency. This moment is crucial; let's make sure we're having the right conversation. Full piece (with an incentive map for agencies, DSPs, SSPs, publishers, and walled gardens): 👉 link in comments If you’re a DSP/SSP/agency leader: what’s the shippable path to agentic interoperability?

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Excited to announce our direct integration and partnership with Stack Adapt DSP to make Infolinks Curated Propriety Placement inventory accessible to StackAdapt advertisers. “Partnering with Infolinks gives our advertisers a unique edge,” said Gregory Joseph, VP of Inventory Development at StackAdapt. “We’re able to offer not only their premium proprietary placements but most importantly true curation at its core without any added fees being absorbed by our advertisers.” Read our press release: https://lnkd.in/euKEWUSC

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AI Unlocks a $100B Affiliate & Partnership Market. Introducing VantagePoint™ to Capture Value Beyond the Click. The Machine-Mediated Market is here. AI is fundamentally restructuring digital commerce—and with it, the economics of influence. Traditional content discovery is rapidly giving way to AI-mediated experiences. From search and social to the rise of conversational AI, these journeys are reshaping how consumers make decisions and how value flows through the ecosystem. The core challenge? Capturing the conversion value that happens beyond the click. This transformation is expanding the addressable market for Affiliate and Partnership Marketing dramatically. What is currently a $20B category now has the structural tailwinds to reach $100B over the next three years, driven by the essential shift from direct-response mechanics to comprehensive, influence-based attribution. At Partnerize, we’ve successfully navigated and built for technology transitions before: search, social, mobile. Each wave expanded the addressable market for partnership marketing. AI represents the largest opportunity yet. Today's launch of VantagePoint™ positions us firmly at the center of that shift. It is the first solution designed to measure influence across the full spectrum of AI-mediated journeys, allowing brands to capture value that extends well beyond the traditional click. As attribution continues to evolve, the opportunity is now to also fundamentally reconsider our measurement infrastructure. The companies that can prove value across both click-driven and clickless influence (the core of Answer Engine Optimization) will capture the expanding $100B TAM. That's the market we've built VantagePoint™ to own. A huge congratulations to Erez Nahom, Andy Crossen, and the entire team on the incredible work to make today possible. #VantagePoint #AI #PartnershipMarketing #AffiliateMarketing #Attribution #Partnerize #MachineMediatedMarket

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Most would agree with the perspective on the programmatic ecosystem shared by PubMatic's CEO, stating that it is “multifaceted, certainly complex.” Unfortunately for marketers, this is dramatically compounded by the lack of transparency, which allows intermediaries to siphon media dollars into fees, direct advertiser investment to “owned” solutions, and compounds the failure to constrain non-human traffic.

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Ravi Patel's point in AdExchanger is spot on: we’ve been treating programmatic quality as a domain problem. But domains are just containers. The real signal lives in the bid request. Performance variance is often within a domain, not across them, which means domain lists alone can only take you so far. The shift is toward bid-level intelligence, selecting better opportunities, not just better publishers. That’s exactly what SWYM.ai is built for, applying intelligence directly in the bidstream before the auction, ensuring advertisers only compete on impressions most likely to drive results. Take a read…let us know your thoughts. #SWYM #StopWastingYourMoney #BidLevelIntelligence #Adexchanger https://lnkd.in/eptEbTev

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Retail Media Networks + Non-endemic? I'm *very* short (esp in US.) I've met with dozens of retailers who dream of monetizing their data to non-endemic only to abandon those plans within 12 months because the cost, time, and level of effort doesn't produce a return above other uses of that time and money. I've met with dozens of brands who recoil at the thought of buying a patchwork of retail media networks when Google, Meta, and TTD/Open Internet already have excellent data, collected in a known privacy-safe way, across the majority of the U.S. population.

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Advanced measurement is moving from a “nice to have” to a requirement for brands that want to prove how marketing drives real business outcomes.✅ Nowhere is this more visible than in Retail Media Networks. RMNs like Instacart give brands access to closed-loop performance data tied to actual purchases. That data is powerful, but it also raises an important question for marketing leaders: How do we validate results beyond platform-reported metrics and understand true incremental impact? This is why third-party measurement is becoming a critical part of the RMN conversation. Circana has emerged as a leading independent measurement partner for retail media performance, including Instacart. By combining retailer point-of-sale data with broader market and category intelligence, Circana helps brands understand not just what sold, but what actually changed because of advertising. https://lnkd.in/gp4CghWf For food and beverage brands, this matters because RMN performance rarely exists in isolation. Retail media influences household penetration, repeat rates, brand switching, and category growth, not just attributed sales within a single platform. Third-party measurement helps separate signal from noise by providing a consistent view across retailers, channels, and time. The broader industry trend is clear. As RMN budgets grow, marketers are being asked to answer harder questions around incrementality, brand impact, and long-term growth. Platform dashboards alone are no longer enough. At Effective, we see advanced media performance reporting as a layered system. Platform data shows what happened. Third-party measurement helps explain why it happened and whether it was truly incremental. Together, they create a clearer connection between media investment and business results. This is how performance reporting evolves from tracking activity to proving impact. Jeff O'Shaughnessy Joelle Kaplan #MarketingMeasurement #RetailMedia #MediaPerformance #Incrementality #F&B #MarketingEffectiveness

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Another AdExchanger article on CAPIs as they become table stakes - CAPIs unlock performance in a privacy-first world. Adoption lags not necessarily from lack of demand, but because integrations are hard... "...while CAPI adoption may have plateaued," Michael Nicolosi said, "recent advancements in interoperability with data platforms and server-to-server integrations could spur more advertiser interest." MadConnect solves integrations challenges with one integration into all major CAPIs (TikTok, Meta, The Trade Desk, Yahoo DSP , Snap Inc. and more...). Let us know if you need help! Bob Walczak Laura McElhinney https://lnkd.in/e8_QTeGH

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For years, digital advertising has claimed to be “contextual,” but most solutions have relied on keywords, not a true understanding. That approach overlooks nuance, culture, and emotion, particularly in non-English-speaking markets. AI is finally changing that. By reading meaning, tone, and context, AI-powered tools allow brands to engage audiences with relevance and respect, not just data points. This is how we move from talking at people to speaking with them and why OOH and premium media can lead the way in human-centered advertising.

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✅🖥️ Mike Shields / Substack (3/3): “How does this jibe with what everyone was telling me last week, about how 50, 60, or 70% of their deals are now ‘programmatic?” Well, it sort of comes down to hair-splitting ad tech definitions (as it often does) - or what counts as programmatic or not. The more you push buyers and sellers, the more you realize that the CTV ad market is far from open and dynamic (like say the display or social worlds). Most TV business is still through direct deals (with many negotiated during - yes - the upfronts). These deals may be booked using ad technology, and may employ tactics such as private marketplaces or programmatic guaranteed - but they are ‘programmatic’ with lots of guardrails. And they are still only available to the high-paying few. “Unlike other media, say display, the concentration of supply in CTV is phenomenal,” said Tatari’s CEO. “90 percent of all of our streaming impressions placed for brands or agencies come from the same top 10 publishers. It is what you and I watch. There is no long tail. It’s a big head with even a very small torso.” It may explain why connected TV ad growth has been somewhat stagnant, despite all the recent hype. By Tatari’s estimation, the CTV market in the US is $30B per year (it should be noted, he is not counting YouTube - which is highly debatable). He’s not far off from eMarketer’s latest forecast. “About half of that today is direct transactions,” the CEO said. “The other half is through programmatic biddable, $15B. And probably half of it is fraud or low-quality inventory. It’s really only $7B or $8B of premium inventory. This is kind of, again, what we talk about in the press every day…it’s where we see a lot of other companies truly hanging their hat on. But they’re ignoring the other $15B.” Why are there so many ad tech middlemen chasing after whatever percentage is available? Well, that’s because they can’t get access to the top stuff, but they still want the high CPMs and premium associations that TV offers - at least that’s Tatari’s take.” ⬇️ #ctv #ott #shoppable #programmatic #avod #vmvpd https://lnkd.in/e7GeNb_d

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We're continuing to increase Ora's COGs in order to prioritize the most recent and relevant data to facilitate hyper-personalized emails. Ora combines data from numerous third party vendors, including the most recent news and events, with your first-party CRM data and Lavender 💜🔮 www.ora.im's email intelligence derived from analyzing billions of sales emails. The result? Dynamic emails and sequences that are specifically crafted for the individual, not just the company or the persona. No templates, no fluff, but all based on best practices from top performers. We closed self-service signups to focus on onboarding new users, but will reopen the waitlist soon. www.ora.im

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Really interesting piece. We’ve spent years in ad tech chasing sophistication, whether that's smarter targeting, deeper insights, or more automation. Sophistication without connection, however, isn't really progress. In my experience, it's closer to paralysis. The truth is, most teams don’t need more data. They need usable data. They need systems that connect, not compete. When we get that right, marketing becomes less about simply managing platforms and more about making decisions that actually move the business forward. That's the kind of infrastructure that changes everything. It's not the shiny new tech, but the connective tissue underneath it.

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CMO’s and agencies are so enamored with bottom-funnel targeting tactics that they totally lost the ability to move people effectively—their judgement is out of balance with real needs today. The targeting down funnel ‘disease’ gives marketers a feeling that they aren’t being wasteful but so much is showing they aren’t being effective either. “This ….reveals …a fundamental mismatch. Respondents are applying bottom-of-funnel tactics to what they've identified as top-of-funnel brand building objectives.”

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When APIs first came on the scene, they promised simplicity. Connect, integrate, innovate. Over time, we’ve seen the opposite. Version mismatches, endless updates, and a patchwork of integrations that often consume more resources than they free up. Unified, domain-driven APIs make a real difference. Reducing friction gives developers back the one thing that truly drives innovation...time. Investing in developer experience cultivates trust and loyalty with the very people shaping adoption decisions. #APIs #AdTech #DeveloperExperience

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