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Nathan Thomas is the Principal & Founder of Thomas Media Consulting, an advisory firm…
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Nathan Thomas 🔜 Possible shared thisI'm excited to attend POSSIBLE next month, one of my favortite events and also on my sunny home turf. If you're going, let's connect in Miami. → https://lnkd.in/erP_-2XV #MeetMeAtPOSSIBLE2026 I am representing great opportunities for brands. From large web gaming platforms, digital out of home, sports audiences to 1P data vendors and more. Also happy to chat to any sell-side businesses on how I can help you grow! #POSSIBLE2026
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Nathan Thomas 🔜 Possible shared thisReturned from Spring Break with the family yesterday (bonus Switzerland pics below) and finally had some time to jot down a few takeaways from both #RampUp and #MarketectureLive and post them today. Special shot out to the Marketecture Media team & AdTechGod ®️ for an amazing 3rd one! Both conferences were excellent in their own distinct ways, with meaningful overlap across themes. Of course, you couldn’t throw a stone without hitting AI. The transformation AI will bring is astonishing, and it’s an (even more) exciting time work in AdTech because of it, but I wanted to focus on a few more immediate, tangible takeaways. A few observations, not exhaustive and in no particular order: 1. Proprietary vs. Public Data Proprietary first-party data will become one of the most valuable assets in the ecosystem. Public data is already commoditized, and LLM-driven insights risk heading in the same direction without differentiated inputs. But data owners must avoid disintermediation as has happened in the past. Ownership, access, and usage of 1P Data must be tightly controlled. 2. Standards & Interoperability Emerging standards and protocols like AdCP, ARTF and more will be critical for enabling interoperable, composable ad stacks. Collaboration and standardization are prerequisites for agentic workflows to operate at scale. 3. Measure What Actually Matters The various proxy metrics of the last two decades like impressions, clicks, etc., need to evolve. We need to be measuring actual business outcomes, whatever success looks like for each advertiser, and optimizing toward those goals. 4. Inventory & Data Discovery For me personally, this is where the biggest near-term opportunity lies, particularly with protocols and standards like AdCP. High-frequency trading has largely been mastered by OpenRTB and today’s programmatic ecosystem. Are things broken? Yes. But it mostly works when implemented well. Where we still struggle is discovery, uncovering unique inventory, differentiated data, curated packages, and non-standard formats, and transacting on them "programmatically". That is where new frameworks can shine. 5. Privacy Policy & Data Regulation This remains a mess. The lack of a national privacy law, combined with a patchwork of state regulations ranging from manageable to operationally unworkable, continues to create friction. Opt-outs often fail, companies remain underprepared, and user experiences suffer. And if COPPA 2.0 is not handled properly, we risk recreating the worst parts of the GDPR-style web experience. 6. Gaming Still one of the most exciting spaces in media. Attention and time spent are massive, ad spend still lags, and it is largely insulated from AI-driven traffic volatility. The industry needs to finally give gaming the attention and budgets it deserves. It is remarkable that after decades, perception still has not caught up with reality. Energized from Spring Break and ready to build! Hit me up if you're at POSSIBLE next month!
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Nathan Thomas 🔜 Possible shared thisA few days late to post, but #COPPA 2.0 just passed the senate. Still needs to go through the house. But if this does get enacted, it would move prohibited targeted advertising from under 13 to under 17. This would be a massive change with huge implications for the AdTech industry and publishers. Using the content crutch of “this looks like it’s for kids, hence COPPA” won’t work anymore.Senate Passes Bill Prohibiting Ads Targeting Minors Under 17Senate Passes Bill Prohibiting Ads Targeting Minors Under 17
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Nathan Thomas 🔜 Possible shared this#marketecturelive is in session. Loving the stylish venue, great content & even better NYC weather. Looking forward to these two full days! Marketecture Media AdTechGod ®️
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Nathan Thomas 🔜 Possible shared thisNo rest for the weary! I just got back this morning with the redeye from #RampUp (but I need a fresh brain to process & write up my takeaways) and now getting ready to fly out to #MarketectureLive on Monday. As an AdTech nerd I am super excited for my 3rd one, less about meetings but actually learning new things and deep-diving into the content of the sessions. Of course, seeing the many colleagues and partners (again) is the cherry on top. Hit me up to chat before, during and after conference! AdTechGod ®️ ADWEEK TVREV Marketecture Media
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Nathan Thomas 🔜 Possible shared thisIt’s #RampUp time! Was great kicking it off yesterday and seeing so many friends and partners. Let the sessions begin today! One year ago RampUp marked the start of my consulting journey. Could not be more grateful for what has transpired since! LiveRamp Thomas Media Consulting
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Nathan Thomas 🔜 Possible shared thisLooking forward to connecting with all clients & partners! #rampupNathan Thomas 🔜 Possible shared thisI will be at RampUp this week in SF with Stacey Girt and Kevin Stagno from Think Data Group. Also there with us are Todd Greer, who is on our Board of Advisors and Nathan Thomas, who works with us on all things digital. Let any of us know if you are interested in meeting during the conference.
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Nathan Thomas 🔜 Possible shared thisI feel like the weeks have been flying in 2026. I can't believe the annual data pilgrimage called #RampUp is next week. Hit me up if you're in town and want to talk all things "data" until we can't stomach to hear the word "data" anymore! I'm working with some great publishers and data providers across the spectrum, would love to chat! I hope I have time for a Tiki drink at the Tonga Room in between. See you in San Francisco @ LiveRamp
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Nathan Thomas 🔜 Possible shared thisIt's conference time again! Took a "break" in February after CES but it's going to be a busy beginning of March where I will be attending LiveRamp's #RampUp in SF March 3rd-5th as well as Marketecture Media's #MarketectureLive in NYC March 10th-11th back to back. I'm eager to learn and attend the sessions, but also to meet my current & future clients, colleagues and all other AdTech addicts. Let me know how I can help your business with 1P Data Strategy & Monetization, Curation, Ad & Yield Ops etc. It's a rewarding feeling to connect the dots in AdTech and help publishers and advertisers alike. I will of course also be representing some amazing clients in areas like DOOH, 1P Data across various verticals, European Demand for US publishers, US based publishers in Gaming/Youth/Sports and more. Let's chat! Shout out to AdTechGod ®️ ADWEEK TVREV
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Amit Goel this is a phenomenal recap and deep dive. I’m glad I stumbled across this on LinkedIn comments. Unrelated to the agency/TTD drama but more in regards to where TTD (who I immensely respect) could’ve done better: the incessant focus on “big bad Google” and “we’re the champion of open web” often felt very different to the supply side. There were many times where it was hard to discern who was the worse frenemy to a publisher- Google or TTD.
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Nathan Thomas 🔜 Possible liked thisNathan Thomas 🔜 Possible liked thisLLMs are increasingly being used in RecSys for personalization and ranking tasks, where semantic and contextual knowledge can be brought to bear to rank pieces of candidate content using sequences of a user's behavioral history. Netflix has a new paper out that explains how they've utilized LLMs to predict which artwork is most likely to resonate with a user when recommending a title to them. In the paper, the authors query a large LLM (Qwen 32B) with user-title interaction snapshots constructed from users' recent engagement histories: - user watch history up to that point - a new title that the user engaged with - the set of candidate artwork available for that title - the ground truth artwork the user engaged with In these queries, the prompt requests that the LLM provide a post-hoc justification for why the ground-truth engaged artwork might have outperformed (resonated more than) the others. With this data, the authors LoRA fine-tune a smaller LLM (LLaMA 3.1 3B and 8B variants) with the synthetic reasoning traces generated by the teacher model, using SFT, SFT + Reasoning, and DPO as fine-tuning regimes. They find that the 8B student model fine-tuned with SFT + Reasoning outperformed their production RecSys infrastructure by ~5% on inverse propensity score, which corrects for selection bias given differing sizes of candidate artwork sets across titles. What's fascinating about the use of LLMs for RecSys is how effectively open-weight models can be adapted to production RecSys tasks. The authors specifically avoided RL, opting instead for LoRA SFT and DPO, which is vastly cheaper to implement given the training data sizes used in the paper (10k and 110k samples). Paper linked below.
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Nathan Thomas 🔜 Possible liked thisNathan Thomas 🔜 Possible liked thisIt's really hard to keep track of who is going to Possible when LinkedIn keeps showing me Marketecture announcements from weeks ago.
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Nathan Thomas 🔜 Possible liked thisThe momentum around the IAB Tech Lab’s Agentic Initiative is incredible. In just 90 days, the Agentic Initiative has gone from launch to real industry development and usage, powered by #AAMP. The energy, collaboration, and caliber of companies stepping in to help shape this work has been incredible to see. We are thrilled to be working with such an outstanding and growing group of companies to help build an open, interoperable foundation for agentic advertising. The response has been so strong, in fact, that we had to split the recognition into two LinkedIn posts because one simply was not enough. So when you see this post twice, it’s not a hallucination, we hit our context window limit! 🤣Nathan Thomas 🔜 Possible liked thisJust 90 days after launching our Agentic initiative (now AAMP), we’re proud to be working alongside an amazing group of companies in the Agentic Task Force: NBCUniversal, Netflix, NextRoll, Nexxen, Nielsen, Ogury, Omnicom, OpenX, Optable, Paramount, People Inc., Postindustria, Publicis Media, PubMatic, Raptive, RTB House, Siprocal, SoundCloud, Spectrum Reach, Ströer SE & Co. KGaA, Supertab, Teads, TeqBlaze, The Trade Desk, TransUnion, Usercentrics, Verve, Veylan, Walmart, WPP Media, and Yahoo! (check out part 1 of this post with the rest of the companies we couldn't fit in this one!) We are so happy to be collaborating with you all. Thank you for all the contributions so far. We’re looking forward doing many more great things for Agentic Advertising together. Learn more about the Agentic Task Force here: https://okt.to/78nrsL #AgenticAdvertising #Standards #IABTechLab
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Nathan Thomas 🔜 Possible liked thisNathan Thomas 🔜 Possible liked thisThis TTD/Publicis BS is about something so much bigger. Opacity is winning and that's dangerous as hell. How we got here, and how to get out: 1️⃣ The world's largest agencies now essentially work for free and have to make a profit from hidden fees. 2️⃣ Marketers reward this behavior by choosing/re-choosing to work with the agencies that are the biggest offenders. 3️⃣ Having to make money under the table forces increasingly complex schemes and systems (which just detracts from what the agency was theoretically hired to do in the first place - drive brand growth.) 4️⃣ When schemes win, an entire ecosystem of vendors pop up to enable those schemes. 5️⃣ Now, hundreds of vendors and the world's largest agencies actively depend and rely on each other to keep the gig going. Transparency is an active threat to a lot of the ecosystem. 6️⃣ TTD creates OpenPath - a cheaper, more direct way to buy inventory. TTD offers a free ID. TTD allows you to choose the things you pay for. The world turns on TTD - and we're surprised? TTD is not perfect - not at all. Their fees are transparent but confusing. They've been obstinate on Kokai interface. Clients should be able to more easily access the data on the impressions they bought (more bureaucracy/hoops than needed.) But, if you want to pile on, pile on opacity. Pile on marketers refusing to pay for work. Pile on vendors who make a living enabling schemes and who introduce complexity for the sake of making things less efficient for brands. We get to choose the winners. We're the ones too often missing the plot.
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Nathan Thomas 🔜 Possible liked thisNathan Thomas 🔜 Possible liked thisSuper excited to share the launch of Fanta's partnership with Xbox! 🧡🕹️🧡🕹️🧡 In celebration of the Xbox 25th Anniversary, we’re leveling up our Fanta product line with a special collaboration that features characters from some of the most iconic Xbox and Activision Blizzard franchises, including Call of Duty, Halo, World of Warcraft, Diablo IV and Forza Horizon 6. Launch dates and experiences will vary by market, but fans will have the opportunity to get their hands on our special-edition collection that features characters from these legendary Xbox titles, along with a delicious new special edition flavor, Fanta Crimson. The experience doesn’t stop there! The Fanta x Xbox special packs will unlock access to a series of unforgettable challenges, iconic in-game rewards, cool merch and exciting experiences. How far will fans go for the irresistible taste of Fanta? Stay tuned for more! WantaFanta #Xbox25 #FANTA #CallofDuty, #Halo, #WorldofWarcraft, #DiabloIV, #ForzaHorizon6 Big kudos to everyone involved from Xbox The Coca-Cola Company and WPP as well as a special thank you to Vanessa C. Rebeca Estevez Ibrahim Khan Santiago Iturralde Mickael Vinet Marcos Waltenberg Jennifer Miller Jack Harari Scott Rouse Stephan B. Samantha J. Gilham Osita Abana Timothy MacLehose Stephanie Rickards Laurent Ezekiel for the partnership !
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Thomas Media Consulting LLC
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Werbung im internationalen Vergleich: Zustand und Entwicklung
Verlag Reinhard Fischer
Welche Werbeformen und formate werden im internationalen Vergleich am häufigsten eingesetzt? Wie unterscheidet sich in ausgesuchten Ländern die Gesamtsituation der Werbung und wie wird sie sich entwickeln? Ist personalisierte Online-Werbung die Werbung der Zukunft oder werden die Werbegelder auch künftig noch in klassische Medien investiert?
Das Buch untersucht die aktuelle Situation und die Entwicklung der Werbung in ausgewählten Ländern auf Basis der I/P-Matrix sowie anhand von…Welche Werbeformen und formate werden im internationalen Vergleich am häufigsten eingesetzt? Wie unterscheidet sich in ausgesuchten Ländern die Gesamtsituation der Werbung und wie wird sie sich entwickeln? Ist personalisierte Online-Werbung die Werbung der Zukunft oder werden die Werbegelder auch künftig noch in klassische Medien investiert?
Das Buch untersucht die aktuelle Situation und die Entwicklung der Werbung in ausgewählten Ländern auf Basis der I/P-Matrix sowie anhand von Strukturdaten und explorativen Experteninterviews. Daraus entsteht ein Gesamteindruck davon, wie sich Werbung in Australien, China, Deutschland, Indien, Italien, Österreich, Russland, Schweden, der Schweiz, Thailand, den USA und UK aktuell präsentiert und welche Entwicklungslinien sich für die Werbung in diesen Ländern abzeichnen.Other authors -
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The Future of TV Commercials: Not as Bleak as Proclaimed
Journal of Media Business Studies
Changes in the TV industry and usage patterns create the necessity to reevaluate the production and insertion of commercials into the program. The authors analyze how industry professionals value the effectiveness of traditional TV commercials and examine if increasingly hybrid advertising formats integrating the commercial message into editorial content are chosen. Contrary to the common assumption that the classical TV commercial is about to disappear, the authors' structured interviews…
Changes in the TV industry and usage patterns create the necessity to reevaluate the production and insertion of commercials into the program. The authors analyze how industry professionals value the effectiveness of traditional TV commercials and examine if increasingly hybrid advertising formats integrating the commercial message into editorial content are chosen. Contrary to the common assumption that the classical TV commercial is about to disappear, the authors' structured interviews reveal that it is still considered the most important advertising format and cannot be substituted. The future is seen in integrated intra- and inter-medial campaigns using both traditional and hybrid advertising
formats.Other authors -
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