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For operators — publishers, agencies, DSPs, SSPs, identity, measurement — who'd rather read an opinionated newsletter than six bland ones. Free. 5 days a week.
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Recent podcasts
From the last 5 days
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Podcast episode
Ep 151: Tanja Mimica of Kovva on What the Future Holds for Media Buyers
AdTechGod hosts Tanja Mimica, founder of Kovva, a startup selling AI-powered workflow orchestration to media buying agencies. The episode is essentially Mimica's pitch: agencies are getting squeezed, and Kovva is the fix. The numbers she cites are bleak.
Sep 29, 2026
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Podcast episode
Companies Don’t Transform, People Do: Rishad Tobaccowala on Work, Agencies, and Reinvention
Rishad Tobaccowala, a former Publicis strategist and current author, joins hosts Brett House and Rio Longacre to argue that AI transformation is a people problem, not a technology problem. The core claim: companies sandbox their AI (walling it off from the internet for safety), run versions that are six months to a year old, and then wonder why their employees get more out of ChatGPT on a personal laptop. Two claims survive scrutiny.
Sep 29, 2026
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Podcast episode
MadTech Daily: McDonald’s Bets on $1bn Ad Business; Temu Cuts $1bn Fake Influencer Network on Meta
The MadTech Podcast
A 112-second news-brief episode covering three discrete stories: McDonald's entering retail media (commerce media) with a $1 billion ad-network target, Temu dismantling a suspected fake-influencer operation on Meta worth roughly $1 billion in ad spend, and TikTok settling Alabama's teen-safety lawsuit for $100 million. Minimal analysis; purely a headline digest.
Sep 28, 2026
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Podcast episode
Episode 192: The PE Guy and Cameo CEO Steven Galanis Close Out Marketecture Live Chicago
Marketecture
Marketecture Live Chicago wrapped with Ari Paparo and Eric Franchi interviewing Cameo CEO Steven Galanis, but the conversation that actually mattered was about Meta's new Muse agent app. Muse plugs into Shopify, Walmart, Instacart, and Expedia and can complete purchases on your behalf. Amazon blocked it from accessing its catalog.
Sep 28, 2026
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Podcast episode
Coins in the Wishing Well
AdTech AdTalk
"Coins in the Wishing Well" is a conversation between Chalice CEO Adam Heimlich and sell-side strategist Gareth Glaser covering three things: Google quietly re-enabling per-bidder price floors in Google Ad Manager, the economics of running AI models inside cloud infrastructure (AWS Bedrock, Azure) rather than through a standalone vendor, and a Palantir commercial revenue figure that Glaser drops without sourcing. The Google floor reversal is the only claim that's fully checkable and live. Google's 2019 Unified Pricing Rules forced publishers to set one minimum price for every buyer; that rule was a central complaint in the antitrust case Google just lost.
Sep 28, 2026
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Podcast episode
From Cash Back to Outcomes: Bryan Leach on Building Ibotta, Going Public, and Betting on Denver
Signal & Noise
Bryan Leach, founder and CEO of Ibotta, spent an hour on Signal & Noise with Brett House and Rio Longacre making one core argument: promotions should be priced on verified incremental sales, not impressions or clicks. Ibotta measures this with randomized holdouts against retailer loyalty IDs run through clean rooms (secure data-sharing environments where neither party sees the other's raw data). A Circana meta-study he cites claims Ibotta campaigns drive seven to eight times the incremental lift of an average digital CPG ad.
Sep 25, 2026
Recent news
From the last 5 days
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Industry story
OpenAI Ad Business at $1B Run Rate, Eyes $25B by Year-End
OpenAI's ad business is running at a $1 billion annualized rate seven months in, and the company is projecting $25 billion in actual revenue by end of 2025. That projection is already impossible to hit as of fall 2026, which tells you how seriously to take the $100 billion by 2030 number. The five hurdles Digiday names are measurement, privacy terms, inventory scarcity, SMB adoption, and ad plumbing, and those aren't speed bumps; they are the business.
Sep 29, 2026
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Industry story
Google Unifies YouTube Shorts and Open Web Video Buying in DV360
Google just handed itself the allocation dial on every vertical video dollar that runs through DV360. The new Unified Vertical Video product lets advertisers buy YouTube Shorts and open web inventory through a single interface, with Gemini deciding how the budget splits between them. That sounds like new demand for open web publishers, but An AI optimizes toward Google's revenue, and the company that owns the auction is now also grading it.
Sep 29, 2026
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Industry story
Lumen Research lands button in The Trade Desk, partners with Amazon and IAS
Lumen Research landing a native button inside The Trade Desk, plus partnerships with Amazon and IAS simultaneously, is not three lucky breaks. Mike Follett is making Lumen acquisition-ready, and the distribution deals are the proof of life a buyer needs before writing a check. IAS already has the partnership and gets first look; DoubleVerify has been the hungrier acquirer.
Sep 29, 2026
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Industry story
Viant CEO: Meta Collapsing Ad Funnel Into Single Commerce Interface
Tim Vanderhook, CEO of Viant (a demand-side platform, or DSP — software advertisers use to buy digital ad inventory programmatically), publicly called Meta's move into the checkout experience 'the most consequential development in ads and agentic commerce.' His argument is that Meta, having spent years building detailed user interest profiles, is now attempting to collapse the traditional advertising funnel — from awareness through to purchase — into a single interface, eliminating intermediate steps and platforms. This positions Meta as a direct competitor not just in upper-funnel brand advertising but in the full commerce transaction layer.
Sep 29, 2026
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Industry story
Google Antitrust Remedy Phase Questioned Whether Open Web Display Would Survive
During the remedy phase of the Google ad-tech antitrust trial, both Google's attorneys and US District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema raised serious questions about whether open web display advertising would even exist as a material supply source in a few years — and therefore whether pursuing a multi-year structural remedy made sense. This reflects how deeply the 'open web is dying' narrative has penetrated even legal and regulatory circles. The article uses this as a foil, arguing that the conventional wisdom may be wrong and that open web display is more durable than the antitrust proceedings assumed.
Sep 29, 2026
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Industry story
AI Recommendation Engines Compress Retail Product Visibility for Brands
GEO is a consulting invoice looking for a strategy memo. Blake Droesch at EMARKETER raises a real issue: AI recommendation engines like ChatGPT and Gemini compress product visibility to a narrow shelf, and brands with no presence on the sources those models scrape simply disappear. But Droesch's own numbers undercut the alarm: if moving AI visibility from 18% to 20% can't clear the ROI bar, the category isn't ready for a budget line.
Sep 28, 2026
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Industry story
Publishers Accept Google Search Traffic Is Gone for Good
At the September 2026 Digiday Publishing Summit, executives from major media companies including USA Today, The Verge, and Ziff Davis declared that the era of mass Google-driven referral traffic is effectively over. USA Today Media president Kristin Roberts disclosed that Google's share of the company's referral traffic has dropped from over 70% a few years ago to roughly 40% now, and said the company is actively weighing blocking Google's crawlers entirely once its search dependency falls further. Publishers are now restructuring audience and revenue teams around subscriptions, newsletters, direct registration, and platform diversification — including emerging sources like Instagram's Threads, TikTok, and Reddit — rather than optimizing for search scale.
Sep 28, 2026
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Industry story
New Jersey Data Broker Law Unexpectedly Snares Publishers as "Data Collectors"
New Jersey's newly enacted data broker law — which passed and took effect immediately in June — introduces a novel "data collector" category that captures publishers who collect first-party audience data and then share or license it downstream, even without a direct cash transaction. Unlike other state data broker laws that target middlemen, NJ goes after the original data source: any publisher that shares data with a company qualifying as a data broker under the law is automatically in scope, regardless of scale or intent. Compliance carries steep financial consequences — annual registration fees range from $5,000 (for data on up to 100,000 NJ consumers) to $1.5 million (for data on more than 4.5 million consumers) — plus reputational risk, since qualifying publishers appear on a public registry that consumers may conflate with traditional data brokers.
Sep 28, 2026
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Industry story
Opinion: The Trade Desk is a broker, not a platform
Adotat argues that The Trade Desk's core business model — connecting buyers to inventory and data it does not own, then charging for the connection — is functionally that of an ad broker (a middleman who earns a fee facilitating transactions between buyers and sellers). The piece contends this model is under structural pressure because three forces converged: the ANA's open-web study quantified the cost of the middle (29 cents of every dollar in a DSP goes to transaction costs), the Kokai platform redesign made buying harder rather than easier, and a reported fee/audit dispute with Publicis undermined The Trade Desk's brand identity as a transparent, buy-side-aligned alternative to walled gardens. The author also challenges the data-targeting premium that justifies much of The Trade Desk's margin, citing a B2B study showing off-the-shelf third-party audience segments performed no better than random prospecting, while publisher first-party and contextual signals outperformed them.
Sep 28, 2026
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Industry story
Infillion Acquires Foursquare in Ad-Tech Consolidation Move
Infillion acquired Foursquare in a deal announced on a Friday in the fall. AdExchanger Editor-in-Chief Allison Schiff covered the acquisition, analyzing the strategic rationale and what the combined entity could achieve that neither company could accomplish independently. The deal is part of a broader wave of ad-tech consolidation.
Sep 28, 2026
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Industry story
Shopify Integrates Meta's AI Shopping Agent for Agentic Checkout
Meta wired its AI shopping agent into every Shopify store, and Tobi Lütke called it delightful and free. Both of those things are true for about five minutes. The agent handles the full purchase flow on a shopper's behalf, which means the retargeting ad that used to close that sale never gets served, and Meta owns the data on what people bought and why.
Sep 25, 2026
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Industry story
Combined Paramount-WBD Ad Tech Stack Faces Integration Challenge
Merging two struggling ad-tech stacks rarely produces one great stack, and that is the bet WarnerMount is asking the market to take. Paramount's programmatic build and WBD's Neo have different ad-decisioning logic, different identity spines, and different pacing systems, and now they have to become one coherent buy point across Paramount+, Pluto TV, HBO Max, and Discovery+ while both companies service serious debt. Magnite carries the real exposure here, monetizing CTV inventory for both sides today, but the timeline before that changes is long enough that the revenue looks fine right up until it doesn't.
Sep 25, 2026
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Industry story
MCP Servers Emerging as Standard Interface Layer for AI Ad Buying
MCP is a real standard, open-sourced by Anthropic and now under the Linux Foundation, and Google, Meta, and Amazon have already shipped ad-buying servers on it. But "open standard" and "concentrated power" are not contradictory. Whoever writes the most complete server writes the vocabulary every AI agent uses to compare inventory, and the three biggest platforms got there first with the most engineers.
Sep 25, 2026
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Industry story
John Nardone of JWX: Viant Measurement 'Absolutely Not' Independent
John Nardone, identified as being at JWX (the merged entity of JW Player and Connatix), gave one of the most pointed on-record responses in the Adotat survey, calling Viant's combined ownership of agent and measurement tool 'absolutely not' independent. He added a significant qualifier: common ownership may be irrelevant in most contexts, but not 'unless you are trying to be an industry standard.' The article then notes that Viant's own press release for the TVision acquisition declared 'While our competitors measure themselves, Viant measures the market' — language that explicitly auctions the company as the would-be industry standard, triggering precisely the condition Nardone identified as making ownership the whole story.
Sep 25, 2026
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Industry story
German Court Rules Meta Liable for Scam Ads Under DSA Framework
A German court has ruled Meta liable for scam advertisements that misused a financial portal's branding, ordering the company to remove the ads, pay damages, and disclose related revenue. The court found that Meta's algorithmic control over content distribution strips it of the 'lack of knowledge' defense provided under the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA) — the EU's landmark platform liability law — making Meta directly responsible for harmful ad content it algorithmically amplifies. Meta has disputed the ruling and may appeal, but the decision sets a precedent that could expand platform liability for ad-driven harm across Europe.
Sep 25, 2026
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Industry story
California SB-690 Keeps Private Right of Action for Online Tracking
The California legislature passed a compromise version of SB-690 that preserves private right of action under the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA) — meaning individual citizens, not just regulators, can sue companies over online data collection practices. This shifts the compliance burden from satisfying bureaucratic rules to satisfying juries, since courts and not agencies will now be the primary arbiters of acceptable data practices. The article argues this is net positive for smaller, customer-centric companies and negative for Big Tech, whose data practices (e.g., pervasive tracking pixels and third-party data sharing) are the same ones juries are most likely to reject.
Sep 25, 2026