AdExchanger

Nobody gets into media buying for the joy of reconciling reports or QA-ing a campaign. But trusting AI to do those things takes more than a promise to save time, says Kovva COO and Co-Founder Tanja Mimica.

The biggest obstacle to AI transformation may not be disorganized data but the messy workflows around it, says Rebecca Sykes, a partner at The Brandtech Group, where she leads the emerging tech practice.

What if AI companies had to pay publishers every time they used their content? Cloudflare's Lara Cohen explains the new playbook for dealing with AI bots, from blocking them to billing them.

Most publishers add SSPs like insurance. More partners means more demand and more demand means more competition for every impression. But at The New York Times, every ad tech partner has to earn its place in the stack, says Courtney Glaze, its VP of revenue operations.

Everyone in Adland wants to show off their shiny new AI agent. But you can't do the cool stuff unless you build the data foundation first, says Tinuiti CEO Abbey Klaassen.

Creator marketing and influencer relationships are a top priority for marketers, but both are still behind other digital channels when it to scale, proper reporting and transparency. That's starting to change, though, says Jennifer Quigley-Jones, the founder of Digital Voices and VP of strategy and partnerships at PMG.

In the AI era, according to Tim Frank, the man in charge of AI monetization at Microsoft, "information is the new bid." In other words, the brands that get recommended won't necessarily be the ones with the biggest ad budgets, he says, but rather those with the most clear, complete and transparent product data.

With AI eating everyone's traffic, publishers could use a sympathetic ear. AdTech Therapy's Jana Meron and Scott Messer talk through the sell side's biggest challenges and break down what Google avoiding an ad tech breakup means for media owners.

Creator marketing is the talk of the town, but how do you prove it genuinely drives sales? Emily Steele, co-founder and CEO of creator platform Hummingbirds, breaks it down.

Agentic AI just ran a CTV campaign end-to-end through a new, agent-driven buying workflow with far less manual optimization and a lot less waste. Butler/Till's Scott Ensign explains what that means for the future of programmatic.

Thousands of advertisers are taking Google to arbitration over alleged ad overpayments. Attorney Ashley Keller of Keller Postman explains the legal strategy and what a positive outcome could mean for claimants.

Liquid Death is all jokes and dark humor on the surface, but the canned water brand's chief media and digital commerce officer, Benoit Vatere, takes measurement deadly seriously. He's tackling one of the gnarliest problems in CPG: proving that media actually moves product off the shelves.

Chalice AI's COO and co-founder, Ali Manning, explains how the AI startup – don't call it a custom algorithm company – is helping brands like Bayer use advertiser-specific bidding models to drive real outcomes as opposed to poor proxies.

Marketing consumer products comes with plenty of challenges. But just try selling a political candidate in a hyper-polarized, 24-hour news environment, says Mark Jablonowski, CEO of DSPolitical, a political ad platform that caters to Democrats and progressive causes.

Sharona Sankar-King, Havas Media's chief data and product officer, on why marketers should stop chasing shiny AI toys and get serious about the fundamentals, including truly understanding the customer and only collecting data that's "fit for purpose."

Most brands worry about competitors. Whisker is worried about complacency, says CMO Hew Loyd – specifically, the millions of cat owners who have decided that scooping an open box of poop in their home is just one of life's little chores.

You wouldn't accept paying for a Big Mac and getting a single chicken nugget. But that's essentially what a lot of marketers are doing with their digital ad budgets, says Reckitt's Sameer Amin, on this week's episode of AdExchanger Talks recorded live in Cannes.

Reddit is now one of the main data sources feeding LLMs and AI search. In this episode, recorded live in Cannes, COO Jen Wong talks data licensing deals, how people use Reddit to validate what they're about to buy and what it takes to stop bad actors from gaming its forums to sway AI results.

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.

Tom Kemp, executive director of CalPrivacy, unpacks the DELETE Act, his agency's enforcement priorities, the rules governing automated decision-making tech – and why ad tech should pay close attention to it all.