Rob Rasko

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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Today marks a significant milestone for the IAB Tech Lab and for the future of digital advertising. https://lnkd.in/eBSWqrVD We are proud to announce the IAB Tech Lab Agentic Initiative, a pragmatic blueprint for how agentic AI can advance our industry responsibly without reinventing the foundations that already power it. Our position is deliberate. Agentic systems represent a new phase of automation and decisioning, but progress does not require starting from scratch. Protocols such as Model Context Protocol and Agent2Agent already provide native agentic capabilities, extensibility, and registry mechanisms, and they are seeing rapid adoption in highly regulated and performance-sensitive verticals, including fintech. History shows the risk of forking away from native protocols. When the core evolves, derivatives are often left isolated, increasing fragmentation and long-term maintenance costs. Fork early, and you create islands that rarely reconnect. Unix, anyone? That is why the Tech Lab is building open-source agentic frameworks on top of long-established industry standards. We are using MCP and Agent2Agent at the application layer, with gRPC at the transport layer, to enable an efficient and secure agentic control plane that preserves interoperability while unlocking machine speed execution. Critically, this initiative extends the standards the industry already relies on. OpenRTB, AdCOM, OpenDirect, VAST, GPP, TCF, the new Deals API, and others are not being replaced. They are being augmented to support agentic execution, governance, trust, and measurement, aligned with how digital advertising actually operates. Several standards will continue to evolve based on direct industry feedback. This work is possible because of strong industry collaboration. We are grateful for the leadership of NBCUniversal, Experian, Index Exchange, PubMatic, and many others helping shape this effort. We invite the entire industry to participate. We are moving quickly, backed by a dedicated engineering investment approved by the Tech Lab Board of Directors. Code contributions are welcome, and so are concrete real-world use cases that can immediately benefit from agentic approaches. Join us on January 28, 2026, at 11:00 a.m. ET for a public webinar where we will walk through the Agentic Roadmap and demo active prototypes. This will move beyond theory into practical execution. GitHub access will open later this month. Register here: https://lnkd.in/e7TsjHRn At the Tech Lab, our role has always been to provide the shared technical language that allows innovation to scale responsibly. Agentic systems are no different. This is just the beginning.

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Performance advertisers have been trained to accept a bad trade. If you want scale and efficiency, you give up visibility. If you want outcomes, you don’t get to ask how they happened. Over time, that tradeoff has been normalized, and black boxes became the default. In this week’s newsletter, I dig into why that bargain is starting to break down, and why opacity is becoming one of the biggest structural risks in performance marketing. Performance should compound understanding, but black boxes obstruct learning.  If you care about accountability, control, and where performance advertising is actually headed, check it out at the link in comments.

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CMOs demand guaranteed delivery, lowest CPMs, strategic flexibility, and outcome-based pricing. Physics says you can't have all four simultaneously. Principal media delivers three of them. The question is which three matter most. Forrester's new principal media report from the inimitable Jay Pattisall is very much worth a read, and it's going to trigger the predictable debate. Critics will argue agencies are creating conflicts. Evangelists will tout cost savings. Both will miss the strategic reality: CMOs facing compression don't have the luxury of perfect markets. I've watched boards push CMOs for guaranteed outcomes while slashing budgets. In that environment, academic arguments about strategic flexibility mean nothing. The anti-principal media argument assumes unlimited client patience, perfect information, and rational markets. Reality looks different. Reality is: your board wants cost certainty so they can model P&L without media volatility. Reality is: your CFO wants guaranteed delivery so you're not scrambling for Super Bowl inventory in scatter markets. Reality is: your CEO wants outcome-based pricing that ties media spend to business results. Principal media trades strategic flexibility for the three things boards actually care about: cost certainty, delivery guarantee, and outcome alignment. The Forrester report shows 80% of marketers are interested in principal media advantages. That's not because CMOs are naive about conflicts of interest. It's because they're making rational trade-offs under real constraints. The criticism of principal media comes from people who've never faced the impossible triangle. They can afford to optimize for strategic flexibility because they're not accountable for the P&L impact when media costs spike or inventory disappears. Yes, principal media requires transparency. Yes, it needs contractual controls and performance accountability. Yes, clients should cap how much spend flows through principal arrangements. But the mechanism itself? It's agencies finally building inventory positions that enable the outcome-based pricing we've demanded for years. I'm a big supporter as, for two decades, I've watched CMOs demand that agencies move from billing hours to pricing on outcomes. "Put skin in the game," they said. "Share the risk." Now agencies are doing exactly that with principal media, and the industry is calling it a conflict of interest. We can't have it both ways. Forrester predicts principal media will grow to one-third of billings by 2026. Read their report, then decide which three variables matter most for your business. https://lnkd.in/eKHg5qmk #PrincipalMedia #MediaBuying #CMO #MarketingLeadership #MarketingStrategy

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Instacart's off-site platform is a pure play verticalized retail media ad revenues opportunity at scale. This isn't just an expansion; it's a calculated move to become the ad network for CPGs, leveraging fragmented retail data to commoditise individual retailer networks. The core strategy is to aggregate CPG spend by offering a unified view across their 1800 retailer dataset. By providing CPGs with consolidated first party purchase data and a reported $5.25 grocery ROAS, Instacart is positioning itself as the indispensable media partner. This is a tendance I see in the retail industry, moving beyond on-site platform monetisation to actively target off-site platform budgets. Advertisers and agencies are looking for simplified and unified buys solutions and Instacart to now offering it. Instacart’s suggests they want to grab a much largest slice of the $10.13 billion to $10.28 billion GTV they facilitate. This move shows us how retailers view their own media network strategy. Relying solely on on-site inventory risks becoming a commoditised data provider to a larger aggregator. Retailers must now consider how to build defensible value beyond their owned properties, or risk seeing their ad revenue siphoned off by platforms like Instacart. If Instacart successfully aggregates CPG spend off platform, what defensible value remains for individual retailer media networks beyond their owned properties? Comment below if this topic is interesting to you of DM me. Anyway, well done Instacart, that's a good move. #RetailMedia #AdTech #CPG #Instacart

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Platform ROAS looks great on dashboards but doesn't show true P&L impact. Mallory Wilberding from fusepoint explains why brands need measurement that ties to actual business outcomes, not vanity metrics. #MarketingMeasurement, #MarketingROI, #DigitalMarketing, #MarketingStrategy

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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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Simple thought exercise for CPG leaders: If you have 1,000 products (and most legacy brands have more) and sell through Amazon, Walmart, Target, and Kroger, that’s roughly 4,000 product pages that need regular updating. Even if you only refreshed them once a year, a lifetime considering Amazon changed requirements 200+ times last year, could your teams really handle 4,000 PDP optimizations annually?

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Interesting to see the gaps in priorities between brands and agencies. It seems that brands choose to retain the core work of their brand marketing in-house while tasking agencies to handle performance related activities.

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