Blog
Opinion, commentary, interviews, year-in-review.
A Timeline of Apple's Privacy Changes in Safari and iOS [Infographic]
Over the past several years, Apple has taken an increasingly firm stance on user privacy, rolling out a steady stream of changes to Safari, iOS, and its broader ecosystem. The cumulative effect on the AdTech and MarTech…
Top 4 Programmatic Advertising and AdTech Themes of 2020
Every December, the industry fills up with predictions articles — earnest forecasts about what the coming year will bring. Revisiting those pieces twelve months later is always instructive, sometimes humbling. Looking…
Top Demand-Side Platform (DSP) Companies [2024]
Demand-side platforms (DSPs) first emerged in the late 2000s when real-time bidding (RTB) started to take flight, with the first DSPs on the market being MediaMath and Rocket Fuel. Nowadays, there are hundreds of…
Attribution Modeling in Digital Marketing: The Past [Part 1/3]
Since Google announced plans to shut off support for third-party cookies by 2022, the industry has been awash in proclamations — "cookies are dead," "attribution modeling has no future," and everything in between. This…
The State of Influencer Marketing in 2023
Influencer marketing has grown into a significant channel for brands over the past several years — but like any maturing medium, it's working through a set of structural growing pains. The infographic below maps out…
The Challenges and Opportunities Facing Influencer Marketing Platforms
While examples of influencer marketing can be traced back to the 1920s, the social media variant that dominates conversations today is under two decades old — and in that short window it has grown at a remarkable pace.…
The True Cost of Hiring AdTech and MarTech Developers [Infographic]
When starting a new AdTech or MarTech development project — or adding features to an existing platform — the technology stack is only part of the equation. The other part, often underestimated, is the cost and time…
How Privacy Laws and Browser Settings Are Reshaping Publisher Ad Revenue
Google Chrome's announcement that it would stop supporting third-party cookies by 2022 generated considerable press — and for good reason. It marks the end of a display advertising paradigm that publishers have operated…
Google Chrome's Impact on AdTech and MarTech [Infographic]
On January 14, 2020, Google made an announcement that most people in the online advertising industry never thought they would hear — Google would kill off third-party cookies by 2022. Then, on June 24, 2021, Google…
Privacy in AdTech: Speed Limits vs. Speed Limiters
What impact do privacy laws like the GDPR and privacy settings like Safari's Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) actually have on AdTech? Both carry significant weight on how ads are served, displayed, and measured —…
The Walled Gardens of AdTech [Infographic]
The internet was supposed to be open — a level playing field where anyone could participate on equal footing. The reality of digital advertising tells a rather different story, one that bears a striking resemblance to a…
The Walled Gardens of AdTech [Infographic]
The internet was supposed to be open and equal — at least that was the founding vision. A closer look at the online advertising industry tells a different story, one that looks remarkably like a game of Monopoly played…
AdTech Month in Review: July 2019
A curated look at the top AdTech stories from July 2019 — condensed and to the point. --- A profile of the average ad-blocking user, the motivations driving adoption, and what it means for the industry going forward.…
Taming the Wild West of Consumer Data Sharing in AdTech
The Wild West era in America during the late 1880s gave rise to a new genre of film known as Westerns — vast, rugged landscapes, men on horseback, and gunfights at every turn. The Wild West is famous, above all, for…
AdTech Month in Review: June 2019
Here's a curated digest of three noteworthy AdTech stories from June 2019 — the key takeaways without the noise. --- In a June 20 blog post, the IAB Tech Lab tackled some of the more persistent misconceptions around the…
Why GDPR Hasn't Yet Reshaped AdTech
In the lead-up to the year 2000, dire predictions circulated about a potential end to the digital world — a software timebomb known as the Y2K bug that would trigger at the stroke of midnight on January 1. As it turned…
GDPR in AdTech One Year On: What Actually Changed?
The lead-up to the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on May 25, 2018, had a lot in common with previous looming deadlines like Y2K. Anxious anticipation and speculation set the industry on fire:…
AdTech Week in Review: May 13–19, 2019
A curated digest of the week's most relevant AdTech stories — maximum signal, minimum reading time. --- Airbnb and its verification partner Impact USA surfaced some striking fraud figures at the I-COM Global Summit,…
Google Chrome's Third-Party Cookie Deprecation: What It Means for AdTech
First came new privacy controls, then the Privacy Sandbox initiative, and finally the announcement that shook the online advertising industry to its core: Google Chrome would phase out third-party cookies entirely.…
What Google Chrome's New Privacy Features Mean for AdTech
Transparency, choice, and control over personalized digital advertising — that's the stated goal behind Google Chrome's then-announced privacy overhaul. Rumours had circulated the AdTech industry for some time before…
Walled Gardens vs. Independent AdTech: The Fight for Ad Dollars and Survival
Anyone who works in online advertising — from brand managers and agency planners to publishers and developers — has heard the phrase "walled garden" tossed around. It's one of those terms that gets used constantly in…
Webinar: The Impact of the GDPR on the AdTech and MarTech Industries
The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) had been in force for almost a year at the time this resource was produced, yet despite widespread media coverage, significant misinformation and confusion…
AdTech in 2019: 3 Trends Backed by Data, Not Crystal Balls
Every year-end brings a flood of AdTech prediction pieces. Rather than adding another opinion-driven forecast to that pile, it's worth looking at what the data and recent events actually signal about where the industry…
Challenges AdTech Companies and Advertisers Face With Advanced TV
The migration away from traditional television is well underway. As Advanced TV audiences grow, the medium has become impossible to dismiss as an advertising platform — and the pressure on advertisers to adapt is…