Opinion

Retroactive reinforcement won’t be enough to ensure a fairer and more innovative ad market going forward. The advertising industry needs proactive antitrust enforcement.

2025 promises a proliferation of US state laws regulating the processing of children’s data, with new rules either already in effect or coming into force later this year.

Marketers having to justify their budgets is nothing new, but macroeconomic anxiety is making the stakes feel higher.

In the next two years, linear TV will be deprioritized so much that holding companies will begin outsourcing their linear buying.

Marketing has evolved dramatically – from one-size-fits-all tactics to today’s hyper-personalized, data-driven strategies. But now we’re reaching another inflection point. For years, marketing teams have invested in turning data into insights. Yet a persistent problem remains: The path from insight to action remains too long and fragmented.

Audio platforms that solve identity challenges are gaining an edge, winning new advertisers and driving stronger returns. As digital audio matures, the ability to understand who’s listening is becoming just as important as what they’re listening to. Digital audio is evolving fast. What was once a niche channel of host-read sponsorships and direct buys has […]

Can the IAB Tech Lab’s Trusted Server initiative really help restore publishers’ ownership of monetization and wrestle back control from Big Tech and walled gardens?

Programmatic promised clarity: automation, efficiency and measurable outcomes. What we got instead is complexity dressed up as optimization: a stack of acronyms performing trust theater.

As AI agents begin to mediate everything from search to purchase, marketers are being forced to confront the reality that they must treat machines as customers.

Ad spending across RMNs and CMNs is still hindered by incomplete data access and connectivity. Here’s how to bridge that gap.

The modern marketing landscape is being rewritten in near real time. While economic uncertainty may tempt brands to retreat into the comfort of walled gardens, the truth is more nuanced, especially regarding data and identity solutions.

Even with the amazing storylines, this NBA season brought a steep decline in local TV viewership. While it’s tempting to frame this as waning fan interest, these drops are symptoms of a media ecosystem in transition.

No one needs reminding that a recession sharpens the knife on every budget line. Yet the 2025 slowdown is arriving just as media trading itself is mutating.

We’re seeing the worst possible outcomes with the CPM-based buying approach. And Google’s recent decision to hang on to cookies indefinitely risks perpetuating the worst parts of the digital ad business.

The era of fragmented, adversarial ad tech is winding down. A new paradigm is emerging defined by AI-first, end-to-end platforms and collaboration among buyers and sellers.

Frequency capping has long relied on a static “set it and forget it” mindset: once every 24 hours, three times every seven days and so on. This passive approach to avoiding consumer ad overexposure relies on the presence of ad identifiers, which continue to deteriorate.

Political advertisers, by necessity, have built precise, privacy-conscious targeting strategies that work without relying exclusively on third-party data like cookies.

Health care marketers are playing what feels like a constant game of digital Whac-A-Mole, from dealing with ongoing signal loss and ever-changing privacy regulations to the challenge of reaching the right audiences at the right time.

Short-form video, infinite scrolling and hyper-targeted algorithms aren’t neutral mediums. They shape, and often compromise, the attention they harvest, creating compulsive habits that warrant serious reflection.

Transparency has become the currency of credibility in advertising. Larger holding companies and black box AI platforms must recognize that their opaque practices are no longer sustainable.

AI is being embedded in tools, tagged in decks and tossed into internal sprints. But for agencies, publishers, brands and platforms, there’s still no shared definition of success.

Agency leaders cite inefficient processes as the biggest challenge currently facing their organizations, ahead of all other pain points, according to a recent survey. Clunky planning workflows, scattered data sources, bloated tech stacks and siloed platforms are just a few of the symptoms.

When platforms choose to label any significant portion of an ad buy as “other,” it’s a deliberate decision to withhold information for the seller’s benefit and the buyer’s detriment.

Managing first-party data – and, by extension, your identity strategy – has never been more critical in today’s evolving digital landscape. The landscape has also never been more challenging to navigate.

If the court ultimately orders Google to spin off AdX or DFP, the result would be a fundamental rebalancing of power across the digital advertising supply chain. For marketers, the implications are just as significant.

The wave of ad tech headlines in recent weeks represents a long overdue moment of reckoning for companies who (still) hold disproportionate control over publishers’ website traffic and revenue potential.

It’s important to have frank discussions with clients, explaining the need and value of brand safety. That way, marketers can make an educated decision on whether they truly need to pay for it.

Many well-intentioned advertising standards efforts gather digital dust thanks to industry politics and competing interests. Here’s how the industry can stop sabotaging its own progress.

Every organization that has installed a marketing mix modeling solution today wants to be more data-driven.

Modern CMOs, marketing analytics leaders and media leaders know marketing is an investment, which must have demonstrable ROI. And they know using data to figure out what’s working and what isn’t is crucial to ensuring waste is controlled.

Here are three areas that marketing technology professionals must handle successfully to get the most out of their AI applications.