When AI is a bubble, and talking about AI being a bubble is a bubble ... what do you do? Right, you start talking about AI agents. And AI... agentic... what does it matter? Once you put out a new message, you quickly find a small group of people most likely to respond. You harvest that group fast, performance drops, you change the message, find a new cohort, repeat.
The latest flashpoint bubbled to the surface this summer when Prebid issued a change that rendered TID non-unique across exchanges, effectively undermining its primary purpose of helping buyers detect duplicate bid requests. The change was initially rolled out with little public notice, but concerns about governance and influence in open-source standards were soon raised - it's fair to say that since the August update, there's been much (public) spirited debate on the matter.
A healthy marketplace is a transparent marketplace Lack of transparency has been part of programmatic advertising nearly from the beginning. To understand this struggle, it's important to understand the early days of real-time bidding. Back in 2007-2008, I was an SVP and GM at MySpace (aka the Fox Audience Network, or FAN), which, at the time, had over 275 million global users and 60+ billion ad impressions a month.
Brands and media agencies rely on Google's Ad Exchange (AdX) unit to buy programmatic ads from a wide range of publishers. But they've never had much luck negotiating the rates on that ad inventory. Given AdX's dominant position in the marketplace, they might as well have been talking to a brick wall. Earlier this year, AdX execs opened a gap in that wall for the first time.
Many marketers are curious about omnichannel advertising, but often settle for multichannel, where multiple channels are activated but not orchestrated into a cohesive strategy. In reality, most campaigns are still a patchwork of siloed tactics, but in a fragmented media landscape, simply showing up across channels isn't enough. Access is no longer the challenge. Coordination is. As identity signals fade and consumer journeys become increasingly challenging to track, marketers must shift their approach.
With the protocols that AdCP has in mind, an advertiser might be able to begin an agentic campaign with the prompt like, "I want to find women who are interested in rock climbing in the UK," Coghlan told reporters. That request would go to publisher and platform agents (the agents of sales agents), which could respond with the types of inventory packages and audiences that fit the bill.
What we've learned about retail signals is that they tell us so much more about a consumer around their interests and their lifestyle than any other signal can," says Molly Ryan, agency partnership director, Kroger Precision Marketing. Retail data has become a key ingredient in building precise, performant audiences - but for many brands, the complexity of programmatic activation has been a barrier. KPM's new managed-service offering is designed to make programmatic channels like CTV and streaming audio more accessible, particularly for mid-tier advertisers.
Feo is joining Unity from Experian, where he spent nearly five years as SVP of global sales and later as chief business officer. Before that, he held executive roles for almost 11 years at cross-device company Tapad, which was acquired by Telenor in 2016 and later sold to Experian in 2020. For those keeping score, that's over a decade and a half under the same umbrella.
The definition of TV has never been broader. From video on demand to subscription services to platforms like YouTube on connected TVs, audiences are watching more and in more places than ever - but with shifting viewership behaviors, achieving your brand's reach goals requires a new approach to planning and measuring media effectiveness. Instead of treating each streaming service as a silo, a unified CTV
In January, Index Exchange CEO Andrew Casale forecasted a "tsunami of supply" heading for programmatic ad market as more major sports and other live events become available to stream. That raised the question: How would the programmatic supply chain handle this inventory influx? That's a big question. And like many big questions, the best way to tackle it is to break it down into smaller problems and address those in turn.
"Index Marketplaces has truly revolutionised the industry by enabling startups like inPowered AI to innovate directly on the sell side," said Pirouz Nilforoush, co-founder and president, inPowered AI. "With the launch of the Data Vendor Ecosystem, startups will be able to take that innovation even further, creating faster, smarter solutions that deliver real outcomes for advertisers and publishers. We're proud to be a part of this movement with Index Exchange."
So much of the recent shift from curating deals via DSP data markets to curating via SSPs instead has hinged on SSPs' proximity to publisher data. SSPs are betting that their close relationships with publishers make them a more appealing place to conduct data sales, rather than upstream marketplace operators like The Trade Desk and LiveRamp. Which is why SSPs are building their own DSP-like data marketplaces with data from third-party brokers.
BRAVE, the radically human SSP built for precision, performance, and transparency, today (6th October, 2025) announced a wave of new direct integrations with leading global app publishers across lifestyle, weather, sports, utilities, and news. This move reflects BRAVE's strategic shift toward simplified, partner-first infrastructure that empowers publishers to scale revenue faster and with less friction. Newly integrated publishers include WeatherBug, Cleverside, Refinery89, Way2News, and more, collectively reaching hundreds of millions of daily users across North America, Europe, LATAM, and India.
Meet Rewarded Interest, a company launched last year by Scott Spencer and Thede Loder. Spencer was a long-time Google ad tech product leader who joined with the DoubleClick acquisition and Loder was most recently an engineering leader at Microsoft via the acquisition of RiskIQ. Spencer and Loder are attempting an idea that has been tested many times, but never brought to life successfully - although there's a new twist this time. Rewarded Interest has a Chrome browser extension that promises users a cut of the revenue they generate from online tracking data.
Every marketing budget should have waste in it. If there's zero waste, the company isn't trying anything new - not experimenting with new channels, formats, measurement, tech or audiences. The team isn't creating the conditions where something new and valuable can emerge. The kind of growth that only shows up once outside of comfort zones, where things feel unfamiliar, risky, even a little scary.
Pixalate, the leading global platform for ad fraud protection, privacy, and compliance analytics, today (16th September, 2025) released the United Kingdom August 2025 Top Mobile Gaming Apps Rankings for Programmatic Advertising Traffic Quality on the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. The report ranks mobile apps in the 'Video Gaming' IAB app category based on their programmatic advertising traffic quality, as measured by Pixalate's Publisher Trust Index (PTI). Pixalate has also released a United States ( US) version of the report.
TTD's stock entered 2025 with shares above $120. After a catastrophic Q4 earnings report in February, shares dropped like a stone to as low as $46 before bouncing into the $70 to $80 range. The company picked up a much-needed attaboy in July when it was promoted to the . The Trade Desk is insulated, though. Tons of different industries compete head-on with Amazon - from electronics and apparel to CPG and entertainment - whereas TTD operates in a distinct space.
Transaction IDs (TIDs) have been the topic du jour on LinkedIn and Twitter - and for good reason. These OpenRTB identifiers let buyers deduplicate the cluttered bidstream. The entire TID debate has a clear subtitle: "Duplication is waste." However, legitimate auction duplication provides benefits for publishers. And the use of TIDs drives publishers' fears around data leakage and buy-side power aggregation.
Such alliances may help as Madison Avenue grapples with a glut of broadband-TV inventory on the market, much of the supply growing due to the entrance of both Amazon and Netflix into ad-supported streaming. This partnership will deal primarily with so-called "programmatic" advertising, or digital inventory that gets bought based on algorithms that define qualities of the specific consumers being sought by a marketer.
