Adexchanger

Serial ad tech entrepreneur Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan founded two startups roughly a decade apart, both for a similar reason: making data available across the enterprise in a way that’s also respectful of the consumer.

Last month, Hyundai eliminated the chief marketing officer role and split the function in two: creative and performance. The move makes sense because two brains are better than one, says Angela Zepeda, Hyundai’s former CMO and now its chief creative officer. But there are critics to this approach.

There’s only so much you can do to measure earned media, says Najah Ayoub, CMO of Piece of Cake Moving & Storage. That’s why the brand invests so much in the customer experience. Plus: Piece of Cake’s hybrid MMM/MTA approach to attribution.

AI-powered systems should make the humans that use them smarter, says WPP CTO Stephan Pretorius. “It has to be people first, not technology first.” Plus: why “technology doesn’t destroy jobs, it destroys tasks.”

What does programmatic media have in common with toilet paper? A lot more than you might think, says Sherine Ebadi, managing director of forensic investigations at Kroll. It’s a question of quality (or the lack thereof).

With Judge Amit Mehta’s ruling expected this fall, Adam Epstein, co-CEO of adMarketplace, breaks down the DOJ’s search-focused antitrust case against Google. Plus: why Google’s Performance Max has some search advertisers hopping mad.

It’s time for advertisers to get more nuanced with their approach to brand safety, says Mia Libby, The Wall Street Journal’s SVP of enterprise. It’s okay to be cautious, but excluding all news from programmatic media plans isn’t the answer.

Once consumers are ready to travel, they’re often ready to spend on almost everything, from beauty and booze to electronics and streaming services. And that creates a unique opportunity for advertisers to reach a new audience with high intent, says Christine Maguire, global VP of commercial business at TripAdvisor.

It’s been almost one year since MediaMath went out of business. Two months later, Infillion acquired the assets out of bankruptcy. Now it’s time for the next phase, says Infillion CRO and CMO Laurel Rossi.

Shoppable TV ads may encourage sales, but they lack the measurement and performance benchmarks advertisers expect. Buyers must create their own benchmarks – and can only do so by actually testing these new ad units, including with their upfront budgets, says Mike Fisher, executive director of investment innovation at GroupM US.

It’s hard to set a strategy for AI adoption without getting a little hands-on experience first, says Betty Louie, a partner and general counsel at The Brandtech Group. You have to play around with the different tools before you even know where the guardrails are, she says.

If there’s one thing that makes advertising measurement consultant Andrew Covato roll his eyes and shake his head, it’s the endurance of last-click attribution. Last click may seem “simple” and “tidy,” Covato says, but it doesn’t reflect the full funnel.

Signal loss is real, but don’t write an elegy for data management platforms just yet, says Andy Monfried, CEO and founder of Lotame, which turned 18 this year. Also in this episode: Lotame’s reinvention of itself as a data collaboration platform.

With the rise of generative AI software and major changes to search platforms even in just the past year or two, SEO and SEM tactics are back. Everyone and their mother is trying to figure out how to make search work and what the new world of search marketing even looks like. Enter Navah Hopkins.

What is Google’s true motive in launching the Chrome Privacy Sandbox? An optimist might give Google credit for not dropping the hammer like Apple did. But it’s hard not to be a little cynical about Google’s goals, according to Samantha Jacobson, chief strategy officer at The Trade Desk.

Alternative TV currencies are ready for prime time from a technology standpoint. But media buyers aren’t quite there yet when it comes to adoption, says Josh Chasin, VideoAmp’s former chief measurability officer.

Roblox’s head of immersive media Ashley McCollum explains how the online gaming giant built its ad platform with demand for programmatic video in mind. And she previews Roblox’s ambitions to grow an ecommerce platform for real-world purchases.          

Quad Media President Joshua Lowcock asks all ad tech partners for log files as a matter of course. And if a company isn’t willing to hand them over, that’s a sign it’s probably hiding something. Plus: The fallacy of scale and pondering the true role of a third-party verification partner.

Cookie deprecation and the reduced availability of mobile ad IDs is rocking the ad tech ecosystem. But signal loss is also an opportunity for a younger company to build new privacy-preserving targeting technology and grab market share, according to Remco Westermann, CEO of Verve Group’s parent company, MGI.

Jeromy Sonne only began bootstrapping his ad optimization and analytics startup Daypart.AI in 2023, having missed the heady days of low interest rates and easy money. Still, there’s gold in them thar hills for a programmatic startup that isn’t exactly a DSP, isn’t built on cookie-based data and is native to cloud-based advertising.