Amazon is following the same playbook Google and Meta have refined for years: automate more of the planning and buying that agencies once handled. But this isn't an overt bid to push them aside. It's to capture the long tail - the thousands of advertisers who were never going to hire a shop in the first place. That's the way Amazon ad execs are pitching a major overhaul to the way its ads business works this week: the DSP and Sponsored Ads console are being unified into a single Campaign Manager.
Rajeev Goel, PubMatic's CEO and co-founder, demurred like a champ. He dismissed the "reseller" label as "noise" and pointed to PubMatic's recent collaboration with The Trade Desk on an API that helps publishers and advertisers share deal metadata between platforms in real time. "PubMatic is a platform for direct inventory monetization - reselling is not our business," Goel said. "We are a direct connection to publishers ... and I think it's pretty clear we provide value in ways that DSPs do not."
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.
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.
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.
Newly added partners include Samsung, LG Ads, Hallmark Digital, Vevo, Allen Media Group's Local Now, Future Today's FawesomeTV, MediaCo's Estrella and Canela, along with Yahoo DSP; FreeWheel and PubMatic; Screenvision; and Nexstar Media Group, Scripps Networks, Reelz and Audyns.
