Marketing tech

Marketing tech

ABM is a proven marketing approach that has been a viable option for targeting B2B brands (and their purchasing committees) for decades. CTV is one of the newer marketing channels around and adoption, especially for B2B brands, has been modest enough to stave off the rapidly inflating engagement costs of channels like Google, Meta and LinkedIn. The intersection of the two is relatively unexplored, but I've seen it work beautifully

Despite the rise of AI-generated summaries, ranking for key search terms remains essential, and authentic video content will become even more valuable for SEO and GEO visibility. SEO won't be going anywhere, GEO will still use top ranking results as one of the parameters when looking for references, so it's still important to rank on important keywords that are relevant to business.

As each holding company and agency rushes to assemble its own version of an AI-driven platform, Horizon Media is pitching its version, Blu, as kind of the anti-black box consultancy that helps clients not only build campaigns but find pools of customers they may otherwise have missed. Overseen by Bob Lord, Horizon Media's president, and run by Domenic Venuto, Horizon's chief product and data officer, Blu is essentially a content marketing platform that uses a variety of LLMs to help the independent agency's clients determine broader business goals through the prism of media (creative inputs will come later - and more on that later), only on steroids.

Butler/Till is moving past this approach by pushing curation upstream, deciding what inventory should even be allowed into the auction rather than relying on DSP-side filters to clean things up downstream. That shift runs through SWYM.AI 's SelfCurate platform, which gives the agency's traders direct, self-serve control over supply before it reaches the DSP. Instead of bundling fixed lists they can dynamically score, filter and assemble inventory from a defined set of SSPs as campaigns run - producing a smaller, more intentional bidstream not because DSPs are being asked to "do better" but because fewer, higher-quality impressions are permitted into the marketplace to begin with.

Marketers used to wait for obvious signals, like a product page view, a cart add or a keyword search, before triggering campaigns. But in today's fractured landscape, those signals can arrive too late. Shoppers drift between screens, compare across retailers and move in and out of consideration silently, long before any intent becomes trackable. By the time a signal appears, the decision may already have been made.

"2026 will be a defining year for Australia's digital ecosystem," said Jessica Miles, country manager ANZ at IAS. "As AI accelerates the creation of content at unprecedented speed, brands are demanding sharper attention insights, stronger transparency, measurement, and optimisation that can keep pace with the complexity of emerging media. The next year will reward marketers who embrace innovation, and who invest not just in reach, but in the quality and integrity of every impression."

Let's make a deal The news marks Cadent's third acquisition and fourth M&A deal in as many as three years. In 2023, the company bought EMX's SSP technology in a bankruptcy auction, just a few months before getting itself acquired by private equity firm Novacap for $600 million. Last year, Cadent also spent $324 million acquiring AdTheorent, a performance-based DSP that represented a further push on Cadent's part to become a more omnichannel marketing company.

London's business landscape has always moved in step with global markets. Capital flows in from every direction, startups scale outward as fast as they form, and established enterprises treat the city as a gateway between continents. But this constant movement depends on the factor of ability to communicate across markets with clarity, cultural accuracy, and speed. Artificial intelligence has rewritten the rules of global communication. Nowhere is this more evident than in the translation and localization sector,

It's increasingly important for publishers to understand when, how and why their content is being used as a source inside AI tools and platforms (often without attribution or traffic). The search landscape has changed exponentially this year, as more people turn to AI tools and platforms like ChatGPT to get information. And though referral traffic from AI platforms is still minuscule, many publishers are starting to track where they are cited in AI-generated responses to users' queries.

The 2025 edition of Spotify Wrapped goes beyond just summarizing what you listened to with charts and infographics. This year, Spotify is also assigning each user a "Listening Age," which is based on the release years of their favorite tracks compared to others in the same age group. The feature quickly went rival, as users recoiled at their seemingly geriatric (or juvenile) musical tastes.

RAAS LAB is at a really exciting inflection point. The opportunity to push the boundaries of relevance using AI, while building scalable creative systems that genuinely drive performance, is hugely compelling. I'm excited to help shape the next phase of the platform's growth.

The European Union has imposed a €120m (£105m) penalty on X, marking the first sanction under the bloc's Digital Services Act for content-moderation breaches. The Commission said that X misled users with its paid "blue tick" verification, blocked researchers from accessing platform data, and failed to set up a proper advertising repository. Despite early speculation that regulators might go after Elon Musk's broader business empire, the fine was calculated without taking into account his estimated USD$467bn (£352.7bn) fortune.

Creative automation offers a fast and efficient way for brands to scale their content production without compromising on creative quality. The technology enables the generation of thousands of campaign asset versions across formats, languages, and touchpoints in a fraction of the time of traditional methods. So, with the demand for content at an all-time high, why are many brands still reluctant to embrace this technology?

ChatGPT's 800 million weekly users are worried that OpenAI, whose mission is to create artificial intelligence that benefits all of humanity, is starting to publish ads on the platform. Screenshots of the ChatGPT interface showing what looks like a Target ad have been circulating on social media. OpenAI's head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, however, dismissed those rumors in a post on X on Saturday.

A bear leans in the window of the Jeep Grand Cherokee while a woman holding a microphone asks the bear a question. The woman's mouth does not quite sync with the words she is delivering. Then, the bear starts talking. Something is amiss. The opening scene of Jeep's artificial intelligence-generated advertisement may look real to some and uncanny to others. Regardless, it has generated millions of views on social media.

Brands lose up to 40 percent of potential conversions to digital friction, not from broken links, but from journeys that feel broken. Mobile users bail the moment things feel clunky, when a link traps them in an app browser that won't remember their login, or makes them choose a country or language from a tiny dropdown on their phone. For years, marketers have obsessed over what happens before the click: the creative, the targeting, the timing.

Agency teams are under pressure to move faster, deliver sharper work and manage a growing mix of AI-enabled tasks-all without losing strategic rigor or creative edge. As GPT models become more capable, they're shifting from simple drafting tools to support partners that can strengthen research, planning and production workflows. Yet the real advantage comes not from the technology itself, but from how well professionals guide, structure and refine its output.

"I wanted revenue predictability, and so every deal that we did this year and for next year, we did on an annualized basis, and so I pitched every advertiser that we were basically building like a kind of Formula One team," Hays told Axios' Eleanor Hawkins.

In 2021, Apple tweaked its privacy rules to make it harder for app developers to track their users across the internet. This created a massive problem for social media platforms, because without access to users' browsing data, they could no longer target them accurately for advertising purposes. Millions of people in developed markets like the U.S. use Apple's iPhone to access social media, so this was a gigantic sea change.

In a move that could clean up one of programmatic advertising's messier processes, IAB Tech Lab has released version 1.0 of its proposed Deals API for public comment. The new spec introduces a standardized way for supply-side platforms (SSPs) and demand-side platforms (DSPs) to sync deal data-cutting down on the manual errors that often derail private marketplace (PMP) transactions. The public comment period runs through the end of January,

Marketers instinctively know that better data and higher-quality media drive better outcomes. But bad habits are sticky and they die hard, said Jamie Barnard , CEO of Compliant, a startup that tracks data quality standards across digital media. The ad industry has "a volume-based mentality," said Barnard, who knows that struggle firsthand. He spent nearly 16 years at Unilever as its general counsel focused on global marketing, media and ecommerce before leaving in 2022.