AdExchanger

Prog AI Live: AI’s Slippery Slop

Allison Schiff — Thu, 21 May 2026 17:17:30 +0000

This episode was sponsored by Verve. Verve captures over a billion daily search, AI chat and zero-party signals, giving brands and publishers a real-time understanding of intent. Does the definition of premium change in an agentic world? Advertisers have spent years chasing “premium” content: prestige publishers, high-quality video and top-tier entertainment. But in an AI-saturated […]

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AI Is Finally Doing Real Work In Ad Ops (But Only When It Works With Your Existing Tech)

Andrew Byrd — Thu, 21 May 2026 16:02:28 +0000

For all the AI-in-ad-ops talk, plenty of publisher teams are still trapped in the grind of pulling GAM reports by hand and trying to reverse engineer why revenue dropped. At Programmatic AI in Las Vegas, Jordan Cauley, who launched a publisher monetization tech consultancy after an eight-plus-year stint as a product lead at Mediavine, made […]

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The Programmatic Auction Is Changing In Real Time – Here’s How

Andrew Byrd — Thu, 21 May 2026 05:00:30 +0000

Programmatic advertising has changed a lot in the nearly 20 years since the first RTB ad auction. On the surface, programmatic is just the automated buying and selling of digital ads. Under the hood, there’s a complex, high-speed auction system that decides in milliseconds which ads appear across display, video, CTV, audio, retail and other […]

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Making Marketing More Modular: What Agentic AI Can Learn From The Shipping Container Revolution

AdExchanger Guest Columnist — Thu, 21 May 2026 04:35:29 +0000

Today’s explosion of AI service providers has everyone looking back at the dot-com bubble, revisiting the technological boom and bust at the turn of the millennia for historical precedent to help us separate real innovation from BS. History is a valuable teacher, but I look beyond the history of the ad tech industry for inspiration. […]

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Autonomous Ad Buying Just Ain’t Ready Yet; A CMO By Any Other Name

AdExchanger — Thu, 21 May 2026 04:03:51 +0000

End-To-When? Fully automated AI-powered ad buying is real – so long as your ambitions are small. Somewhere between 80% and 90% of campaigns are just too complex for AI to handle on its own, Emily Lai, WPP Media’s group director of media optimization, told the crowd at AdExchanger’s Programmatic AI event in Las Vegas this […]

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Snap Stops Grading Its Own Homework

Joanna Gerber — Wed, 20 May 2026 13:00:57 +0000

Advertisers don’t always trust the measurement they get directly from ad platforms. Snap gets it. Buyers need third-party measurement and a system with checks and balances to “assign credit where credit is due,” Fintan Gillespie, Snap’s global director of ad partnerships, told AdExchanger. On Wednesday, Snap announced a new product called Unified Attribution that aligns […]

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Three Takeaways From POSSIBLE That Signal Where CTV Is Headed Next

AdExchanger Content Studio — Wed, 20 May 2026 12:00:40 +0000

Coming back from POSSIBLE last month, one thing stood out to me: Streaming TV has entered a much more operational phase. The conversation has evolved from where streaming is headed to how marketers drive better performance today. The content and conversations focused on how AI can improve campaign execution, how data can sharpen targeting and […]

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Brands Don’t Need Perfect Data To Use AI

AdExchanger Guest Columnist — Wed, 20 May 2026 04:35:02 +0000

There is a common refrain that AI requires high-quality data to deliver high-quality results. “Garbage in/garbage out” refers to the idea that any AI trained on less than perfect data will not be able to produce valuable outputs. Before I get accused of dismissing the importance of quality data, high-quality data does produce the best […]

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Are Chatbots Replacing Search?; AI Is Muddying How Ad Tech Describes Itself

AdExchanger — Wed, 20 May 2026 04:03:39 +0000

Chat To Cart As more people use AI chatbots for, well, everything, advertisers need to blow up their old playbook. Take product research. Brands have a tremendous opportunity to get in front of consumers as they move away from classic Google Search in favor of recommendations from AI, according to Debra Aho Williamson, founder of […]

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Influencer Marketing Grows Up

Allison Schiff — Tue, 19 May 2026 10:00:27 +0000

Influencer marketing used to be the squishy line on a media plan. Marketers would choose who to work with based on follower counts and gut feel. But now influencer is a performance channel – and creators are media channels in their own right, with loyal audiences, CPMs and measurement expectations to match. “If I’m a […]

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