AdTech with Analysis
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
I've Tried Everything But AdTech Therapy
The 500th episode of AdExchanger Talks brings together Ad Tech Therapy's Jana Meron and Scott Messer with host Anthony Vargas to take stock of where publishers actually stand: Google survived the antitrust breakup attempt, AI Overviews are eating referral traffic, and a quiet change in Google Ad Manager is about to lop up to 25% off reported impression counts (the raw number of times an ad loads, which is what most yield guarantees are built on). Meron and Messer's central point is that no external rescuer is coming. The remedy left Google's demand intact.
Sep 9, 2026
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Podcast episode
Beyond the Genre: Bill Condon on Gracenote’s Vision for CTV Transparency
Bill Condon, Gracenote's head of global advertising sales, joined the AdTechGod podcast to make the case that CTV buyers still don't know what their ads actually ran against. They see the app, sometimes the channel, rarely the specific show or content rating. Gracenote's pitch is to turn its decades of TV-guide metadata into ad-targeting signals, now plugged into The Trade Desk, Index Exchange, and PubMatic.
Sep 9, 2026
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Podcast episode
MadTech Daily: Digest: Brits Turn to Commercial Media Alone; ISBA Study Examines UK Retail Media Networks
The ISBA (Incorporated Society of British Advertisers) released a study on UK retail media networks, and a separate IPA report found that 44% of UK commercial media time is now consumed alone, up sharply among young adults. MadTech Daily's AI host covers both alongside a brief on UK commercial media's solo-consumption shift. The retail media finding is the one that travels.
Sep 9, 2026
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Podcast episode
Ep 150: Apps, Ops and OEM with Mike Brooks
The AdTechGod Pod
Mike Brooks, founder of Brooks Industries and former head of business development at LG Ad Solutions, sat down with AdTechGod's podcast to make one central argument: the $100 billion mobile app economy and the $38 billion connected TV market are converging, and almost nobody operates fluently in both. Mobile buyers have never heard of AppsFlyer (the software that attributes app installs to the ads that drove them). TV buyers have never heard of iSpot.
Sep 8, 2026
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Podcast episode
AI Isn’t the Strategy: Fern Potter on Intelligent Assistance, Human Judgment, and the Future of Work
Signal & Noise
Fern Potter, co-founder of Intelligent Assistance, joined hosts Rio Longacre and Brett House on Signal & Noise to make one argument: enterprise AI pilots fail because companies buy the technology before they define what a good output looks like. If you can't write down the standard, no model saves you. The episode has two things worth taking seriously underneath the consulting pitch.
Sep 8, 2026
Recent news
From the last 5 days
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Industry story
Publishers relieved Google AdX divestiture was rejected by court
Following a U.S. court ruling that declined to force Google to sell its AdX ad exchange (the marketplace that connects publishers selling ad space with advertisers buying it), large publishers expressed a pragmatic mix of relief and resignation rather than outrage. Many feared a forced sale would trigger years of expensive replumbing of their ad infrastructure — similar to the disruption caused by Google's now-abandoned Privacy Sandbox initiative — at a moment when AI is already eroding their search traffic and revenues.
Sep 9, 2026
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Industry story
Trade Desk Q3 Revenue Guidance Marks First Decline Since 2016 IPO
The Trade Desk guided Q3 2025 revenue to $650 million, representing a 12% year-over-year decline — the company's first down quarter since going public in 2016. EBITDA margin is expected to compress to approximately 25%, down from 34% in the prior year and 39% the year before that. The layoffs of 575 employees are characterized by the author as a structural move to recapture five to six percentage points of margin rather than a response to financial distress, given the company's cash position and cash flow generation.
Sep 9, 2026
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Industry story
Nielsen Quietly Shortens Local TV Viewing Qualifier, Inflating Audiences
Nielsen didn't find more viewers on August 31. It changed the rule for counting them, dropping the local TV viewing qualifier from five minutes to one minute, across every U.S. market, in the exact window when broadcasters lock fall rates and audience guarantees.
Sep 9, 2026
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Industry story
Gracenote Partners With The Trade Desk to Distribute CTV Content Signals
Gracenote's deal with The Trade Desk is less a product launch than an infrastructure play. With TTD now joining Index Exchange and PubMatic, Gracenote has seeded show-level content signals across most of the open programmatic CTV market, which shifts the question from whether content metadata is available to whether it becomes the layer every CTV bid runs through by default. The pressure lands in two places: ACR contextual vendors like Samba TV and LG Ads, whose core pitch just got commoditized, and CTV publishers with sloppy content taxonomies, who will quietly lose buys to cleaner inventory.
Sep 9, 2026
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Industry story
The Trade Desk's OpenSincera Raises Bar on Publisher Media Quality Scoring
The Trade Desk scoring publishers on ad-to-content ratio and page experience through OpenSincera is less about helping publishers and more about owning the definition of quality inside the bidding layer itself. Once buyers wire their inclusion lists to a tool living in their own seat, third-party graders like IAS and DoubleVerify lose their best argument, at least on the quality-scoring side. The deeper problem is the one the publishers can't solve: the tool makes decline legible, and legible decline gets priced faster, but cutting reseller SSPs and cleaning up page load both cost real revenue now, in Q4, when nobody volunteers for that.
Sep 9, 2026
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Industry story
Trade Desk Removed from S&P 500 as Mass Layoffs Take Effect
a major independent demand-side platform (DSP) used by advertisers to buy digital ad inventory programmatically — was removed from the S&P 500 index on the same day approximately 575 employees were laid off, drawing significant attention. S&P Dow Jones Indices confirmed the removal was a routine index rebalancing based on market capitalization criteria and had no official connection to the company's workforce reduction, though the coincidence heightened scrutiny of the company's current challenges.
Sep 9, 2026
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Industry story
European Commission ad-tech case seen as bigger threat to Google than U.S. ruling
For European publishers, the parallel European Commission (EC) investigation into Google's ad-tech practices is viewed as more consequential than the U.S. court outcome. Publishing executives noted that Brussels could impose even tougher remedies than the U.S.
Sep 9, 2026
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Industry story
Remedies hinge on auction data transparency and interoperability
The practical value of the U.S. court's behavioral remedies against Google will depend heavily on how far they force Google to open up bidding and auction data to publishers. Currently, publishers can access log-level data (raw records of how their ad auctions ran) but the data is messy, often paywalled, and requires specialized analysts to interpret.
Sep 9, 2026
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Industry story
VideoAmp and Comscore Both Cut Staff Near Nielsen Acquisition Announcement
Within days of Nielsen's announcement of its DoubleVerify acquisition and its local measurement methodology change, two of Nielsen's closest currency competitors announced significant workforce reductions. VideoAmp confirmed it eliminated 50–60 roles — roughly a fifth of the company — including its chief technology officer. Comscore announced a restructuring expected to generate $20–25 million in annual savings.
Sep 9, 2026
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Industry story
Bot and AI agent traffic now over 50% of web requests, poisoning ad retargeting
More than half of all web requests are now bots and AI agents, per Cloudflare, and the retargeting stack is the casualty. Bots fill carts, complete newsletter signups, and trip every signal a human would, which means the audience lists powering your retargeting are garbage. One agency reports e-commerce clients saw bot traffic jump 80% year-on-year, CPA started climbing in Q4 2024, and the response has been predictable: narrower inclusion lists (up ~20% on CPMs), budget moving to Meta, Amazon, and Google, and a quiet migration toward retail media where purchase data can't be faked.
Sep 8, 2026
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Industry story
Google to Shift Ad Impression Counting to Begin-to-Render in 2027
Google has announced that beginning February 17, 2027, it will change how it counts ad impressions — switching to a 'Begin-to-Render' methodology, meaning an impression will only be recorded once an ad has successfully loaded and begun displaying on the user's device. This is a meaningful shift from counting impressions at the point of an ad call or load request, and could reduce reported impression volumes industry-wide while improving measured viewability. The change has implications for publishers' reported inventory supply, advertiser CPM benchmarks, and measurement comparability across platforms.
Sep 8, 2026
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Industry story
Trade Desk Cuts 15% of Workforce in Strategic Reset
575 people is not a rounding error. Jeff Green is calling it a strategic reset, backed by $1.5 billion in cash and zero debt, and that balance sheet is real. But when the category leader cuts 15% of its workforce and points to Kokai as the replacement for the human layer, the question every agency trading desk and independent DSP has to answer is whether automation just quietly dissolved the pricing argument for sitting in the middle of a programmatic buy.
Sep 8, 2026
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Industry story
Roku Curate and Retail Partnerships Drive Shoppable CTV Results
Roku's Carly Friedman highlighted the platform's scale — 100 million authenticated households — as the foundation for full-funnel measurement, from brand awareness through closed-loop sales attribution. She introduced Roku Curate, a product that partners with retailers including Best Buy and Instacart to simplify campaign execution and measurement across the fragmented CTV landscape. A specific campaign with The Hershey Company and Instacart for Reese's during March Madness reportedly generated a 30% lift in new buyers and more than $4 in return on ad spend, illustrating the commercial case for retail-integrated shoppable CTV.
Sep 8, 2026
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Industry story
Google AI Overviews Shrink Search Ad Inventory, Raising CPCs
Google's AI Overviews feature — which displays AI-generated answer summaries at the top of search results pages — is reducing the amount of paid advertising space available to buy, pushing up the cost of search ads. Go Fish Digital's president estimated search advertising costs on Google rose approximately 20% during August, driven both by increased advertiser competition and the structural reduction in ad surface area caused by AI Overviews. He said this dynamic is unlikely to reverse after the back-to-school season ends.
Sep 8, 2026
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Industry story
PepsiCo Moves $3.4B Ad Account from OMD to Publicis
PepsiCo is shifting its $3.4 billion advertising account from OMD (part of Omnicom) to Publicis Groupe, one of the largest media account moves of the year. Publicis plans to build a bespoke unit called 'One PepsiCo' to serve the account. In a related development, Publicis reportedly withdrew from the competing Coca-Cola account review.
Sep 8, 2026