Data + Privacy

To explain Forrester’s latest creative ad tech wave, we bring on author, Senior Analyst Nikhil Lai. Then, the untold story of how Prebid.org became an independent industry organization.

Digital advertisers should be able to agree that there are about 345 million people in the US, making up about 133 million households. But, historically, media buying has been all about scale, even if it meant outrageously false population counts on audience segments.  More recently, advertisers have started to accept that there is a correlation […]

We discuss the rise of curation in programmatic buying and the current backlash. Is curation an ad network with new window dressing? And will it save or undermine the open web?

Ad-free subscriptions are coming to social media. Snapchat was actually one of the first social platforms to offer a monthly subscription, starting in 2022. Its $3.99 Snapchat+ plan provides subscribers with exclusive, experimental and prerelease features (but still features ads). Snapchat+ had 11 million subscribers in August 2024, an increase of 6 million since September […]

With Google’s recent U-turn around third-party cookie deprecation, it’s easy to think there’s no rush to adopt alternative data strategies like conversion API (CAPI).  But that’s a dangerous assumption.  CAPI is a tool developed by platforms such as Meta, LinkedIn and Snap to help businesses track customer interactions and conversions directly from their server, bypassing […]

From the Amazon Ads Unboxed conference, AdExchanger reports on the ad tech products it’s building. Plus, why brand safety and news publishers remain at odds with each other, and what each side is doing about it.

The cookie is already gone. The budgets have shifted. All the howlers screaming about Chrome’s road map for deprecation are akin to the last soldiers standing on the battlefield clinging to the flag of a fallen nation. In short, it’s over. But we can’t measure the downfall of cookies by looking at the bidstream. There […]

In its antitrust suit against Google, the US Department of Justice is portraying the company as a monopolistic giant, but the reality of Google’s ad tech business – and its future – is far more complex and evolutionary. The courtroom drama is drawing attention away from the real changes already reshaping the industry. These shifts […]

As The Trade Desk grows more powerful, it’s attracting more attention – and frustration – from independent ad tech. Plus: an update on Google Chrome’s user choice mechanism.

For all the fireworks and detailed coverage of US v. Google – including financial disclosures that thrilled our analyst hearts – no one has yet suggested a sensible way to unpick the hideously complex “spaghetti football” of the world’s largest ad tech business. Closing arguments in the case aren’t until the end of November, but […]