Marketing tech
fromExchangewire
15 hours agoYear in Review 2025: Consolidation, Chaos, and Cookies
Major 2025 ad tech consolidation, regulatory scrutiny, and Google's policy reversals reshaped agencies, publishers, and industry data strategies.
One week last autumn, I hit my customer feedback limit. I had seen my doctor and done some online shopping. Then I went on a vacation to Europe that involved three airlines and three hotel stays. At every turn, I was bombarded with dozens of requests for feedback, often multiple times from the same company, for two or more aspects of the same interaction.
Google has been publishing these videos from advertisers on the number one Google Ads launches of the year 2025. Bug Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, was asked and she picked PMax channel performance reporting as her number one feature release for Google Ads in 2025. Ginny Marvin wrote on X, "I'd have to give it to PMax channel performance reporting." But she also listed some runner ups and they include:
Navah Hopkins posted a nice video explaining this and wrote: If you're running a PMax and Search campaign they might also have overlap. An exact match keyword in a Search campaign will always win over PMax. Beyond that, it goes to Ad Rank. We do not block exact match from causing an ad to serve in Copilot, it's just that the odds of a conversation exactly matching the exact match keyword are very low. Broad match and PMax have a higher probability of serving.
A report from The Information outlined a number of avenues OpenAI is looking at for ad formats in ChatGPT. The main one that is reportedly being thrown around at the AI company is to show sponsored content within the AI responses given by ChatGPT. The Information wrote that OpenAI's 'AI models could prioritize sponsored content to ensure it shows up in ChatGPT responses.' ChatGPT could give 'sponsored information preferential treatment in responses to users' ChatGPT queries.'
In the age of attention, it has become clear that viewability as a primary metric is no longer enough to gauge the true success of advertising. While viewability can still tell advertisers that their ads were in view of a consumer, it doesn't show how engaged they were or how they interacted with the ad. Attention metrics go beyond the impression to provide a more precise method in assessing the quality and effectiveness of media.
Thrad, the AI-native advertising infrastructure provider, has announced the launch of the USD$500,000 (£370,000) Thrad Monetisation Fund. The initiative aims to solve a critical bottleneck in the current market: the lack of scalable revenue models for conversational AI products. As AI adoption reaches record levels, many developers with chat-based interfaces face significant challenges in achieving sustainable yield. Thrad's new fund provides a dual solution by offering direct financial support alongside the technical infrastructure required to deploy native, in-chat advertising.
For years, digital advertising centered on the "who." Neuro-contextual flips that lens toward the "what" and the "how." The focus is on what someone is experiencing and how that moment feels. At the center of Seedtag's approach is AI that goes beyond keywords to understand tone, emotion, and environment across web and CTV. And that distinction matters. A Nike ad doesn't land the same way in a car chase story as it does in a story about someone training for a marathon.
Customer experience technology has a habit of reappearing on leadership agendas every few years. Not because it suddenly feels exciting again, but because something quietly stops working. Customers complain more. Staff spend too much time chasing information. Decisions get made on partial data. What has changed recently is the pressure coming from multiple directions at once. Expectations are higher, patience is lower, and automation has moved from back office efficiency to front line interaction.
AI startups are a bit like podcasts. Which is to say, everyone seems to have one. So how does an AI startup stand out amid so much noise? There's no simple formula for standing out. But, for many founders, the key is a personal connection to the problem their startup aims to solve. That and a belief that humans should stay at the steering wheel, even when the systems run agentically.
Personal messaging is part of a strategy used by advertisers to build a more intense relationship with consumers. It often consists of pop-up adverts or follow-up emails reminding us of all the products we have looked at but not yet purchased. This is a result of AI's rapidly developing ability to automate the advertising content we are presented with. And that technology is only going to get more sophisticated.
While it doesn't say "explainer" on my resume, maybe it should. Over twenty-ish years, I've held many roles in digital advertising, media, and marketing, but I always wear the same explainer hat. Whenever something new and complex arrives on the scene-these days, that's clean rooms, identity, CTV, and increasingly, AI, I'm one of those people that colleagues turn to for clarification. If you're one of those people, you know what I'm talking about.
Less than a month before Netflix was set to debut its in-house ad server, VP Nicolle Pangis chatted with our own executive editor, Sarah Sluis, at CTV Connect in March. (Since then, both have taken on new titles: Sluis as editorial director of ad tech and emergent media, and the event as Convergent TV World for 2026.) In addition to finally revealing a name - Netflix Ad Suite, or NAS for short - Pangis also teased what buyers could expect once they were able to buy Netflix ads through the new product.
marketers face a growing question: How do you make sure your brand shows up in the answers? Semrush thinks it's found an answer - and it's launched an award program to highlight the brands leading the way. The newly announced AI Visibility Awards recognize the companies most cited, recommended, and surfaced in AI-generated responses, drawing from Semrush's AI Visibility Index - a dataset built on over 2,500 real prompts run through ChatGPT and Google's AI Mode.
This offer, which will be available initially in eight markets worldwide including France, the USA, Spain, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Singapore and Mexico, will allow advertisers to buy drive-to-store campaigns both on JCDecaux's OOH network, and on mobile using S4M's platform. By using both mediums, brands can target catchment areas around their stores, reaching more prospects than they would with one channel alone. S4M's drive-to-store capabilities also allow advertisers to easily measure the footfall delivered by their OOH and mobile campaigns.
Over the past year, Roblox has become harder for brands to ignore - not because it has resolved the challenges of digital commerce, but because of the scale at which younger consumers already use it. The platform now reaches 151 million daily active users who spend close to three hours a day inside its experiences, which will equate to more than 88 billion hours of engagement in 2025.
Before applying for a position, job seekers often want to know factors beyond the role's responsibilities, like a company's values, employee experience, and growth opportunities. Like many areas of the workforce, artificial intelligence can help with this. Brand image "sets the tone for how people view your company long before they ever interact with you," she adds. It gives job candidates "clarity, confidence, and a sense of direction" about whether an organization is a good fit.
AI has reimagined the whole advertising ecosystem, a big part of that being creative. As AI develops, more options present themselves: we've now reached a point where it's possible to let AI execute the majority of the processes involved in carrying out an ad campaign, with just minimal human intervention here and there. And the requirement for any human interaction is diminishing.