Commerce

Cleo Davis-Urman, CEO and co-founder of wearable vitamin brand Barrière, talks word-of-mouth, measurement, retail media and what it takes to build a new category around patches instead of pills.

There’s a new type of DSP with a shiny new acronym; AI search optimization is a tricky game; and M&Ms struggle to switch to natural coloring.

Where will OpenAI put its ads?; YouTube may or may not be considered TV; and Uber and Lyft deals really are too good to be true.

The Trade Desk expanded its relationships with a host of travel, hospitality and mobility-focused commerce media partners, including Uber Advertising, Booking.com, United Airline’s Kinective Media and MARRIOTT MEDIA.

Some DOJ staffers wanted to challenge the Paramount/WBD merger on antitrust grounds; ad tech M&A is poised to pick up; and social media marketers want to normalize controversial clipping.

Hyundai was the pilot advertiser between Chalice and OpenX of the SSP’s container product, called OpenXBuild, that launched this year.

Advertisers can target high- and medium-attention ad inventory in Amazon DSP while filtering out low-attention placements and made-for-advertising sites.

By partnering with GrowthLoop, GoPuff has beefed up its retail media offering with more specific audience targeting.

Amazon has third parties selling some of its ad inventory; Scope3 selling Adloox to Peer39 suggests sustainability is out; and “fabric” is the new AI-related buzzword for ad tech.

Over the past few years, driven primarily by AI adoption, there has been a truly radical change to how quickly and easily brands will abandon old standards of quality ­– or even decency – in the name of performance.

The programmatic intelligence layer is owned by the same parties that are extracting margin from it. That structure is now being dismantled by an AI-underpinned protocol that moves the intelligence layer into the open.

Meta wants to own online communities; Ecommerce brands face old-school advertising scrutiny; Omnicom wants fewer ad tech middlemen.

Agentic shopping is the next big thing. At least that’s the message from Google’s big annual conference for ad product updates.

AI can’t handle complex media plans; Retail media lands under the CMO; Airbnb flirts with ads, cautiously.

Tale of Two Webs As AI answer engines reshape how audiences discover journalism, The Economist is quietly preparing for what Josh Muncke, VP of generative AI calls “two versions of the web.” The publisher is testing stripped-down, agent readable content built for ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, Digiday reports.  “We want our marketing content to be […]

Podcasts are becoming broadcasts; your kid’s college scholarship might be a data mining venture; and states are getting wise to false advertising from non-profits.

This year’s TV Upfronts buzzwords are in: performance, dynamic, AI and fandom We explain why this quartet of phrases wove their way through the presentations.

“If we only are looking at ROAS, we’re being fairly myopic about how we understand the actual relationship between the retailer and the brand,” says Liz Roche, VP of media and measurement at the grocery chain Albertsons.

Amazon Ads expects this year’s television upfronts to be an outcomes-focused affair. That may explain why the company preempted its Monday evening presentation by announcing the launch of a new ad product called Dynamic TV Creative.

For companies like Shopify, Criteo and Instacart – and even for giants like Amazon and Walmart – figuring out if the agentic oasis is real or a mirage is their priority No. 1.

Criteo shares dropped by 20% Wednesday morning after the company reported shaky Q1 earnings and revised its guidance downward for the rest of the year.

Programmatic enemies make better friends in the AI era; social video projected to outgrow CTV this year; and apps are integrating into chatbots, but where are the users?

Amazon has packaged a handful of upgrades to its ads measurement solutions, obviously catered to TV and streaming media advertisers.

Going viral isn’t great; AI search is a nightmare; and CTV is forcing everyone to get along.

Amazon is optimistic about agentic commerce; the costs of AI may soon outweigh profits; and AMC Global Media thinks old shows deserve new ads.

With its new funding, commerce data platform Chord plans to help brands access their data more easily by unifying it within one platform.

The two longest-standing names in the affiliate and partnership marketing category, Rakuten and Impact.com, have decided to stop fighting each other and will instead fight together. 

The Trade Desk announced that it will begin allowing mutual clients to use its DSP within the Pacvue or Skai platforms.

If you thought programmatic didn’t have room for yet another advertising ID graph, then you’d be wrong. On Monday, PayPal launched the PayPal Ads ID, a new identity product tied to PayPal and Venmo’s customer base.

Dappier’s new ad format allows advertisers to insert a custom brand agent into AI chat sessions on publisher sites.