The Big Story

Getting personalization right remains tricky, and AI will only make it trickier. Then, inside Privacy Sandbox testing and the rise of curation tech.

This week’s theme is programmatic excess. We start with bid duplication and end with VideoAmp’s fall back to Earth.

At CES in Vegas, streaming services are turning out in force. Then, the lawsuit that pitted LG Electronics against Alphonso (now LG Ads), the startup it acquired.

The end of third-party cookies is upon us, and independent ad tech is diverging on the best approach for cookieless targeting. Meanwhile, agencies and marketers are zooming out from programmatic to a bigger picture that’s focused on first-party data.

Marketers are wasting 25% of their ad spend on made-for-advertising websites and inefficiencies. And the ANA thinks consolidation and education are the solutions. Plus: 2024 ad spend will grow, but at a slower rate. And streamers will grapple with CTV’s rising ad spend and linear TV’s accelerating decline.

Google search ads appear on a host of unsavory and offensive sites, according to recent Adalytics research. And without any transparent reporting from Google, marketers can’t do anything about it.

DSPs and SSPs are being graded by TAG TrustNet on whether they comply with a key transparency initiative: sharing log-file data. Find out who’s passing and who’s failing. Then, we count the ways CTV suppliers are embracing programmatic buying.

As Omnicom’s $835 million acquisition of commerce specialists Flywheel Digital attests, commerce media is flush. Then, why the most sophisticated and data-rich programmatic marketers are intrigued by custom algorithms.

The impact of tech on monetization – from SPO sustainability initiatives to the looming end of the cookie and the challenges of implementing its replacements – has publishers feeling jaded. Plus, for retail media fans: inside the Pantry Wars.

Yahoo Backstage, a sorta SSP, is emblematic of a­n SPO trend that hops over either DSPs or SSPs. Plus: a primer on the ecommerce ad metrics and tools changing how marketers buy digitally, from ACOS to TROAS to cost capping.