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.

If Alex Schultz, Meta’s CMO and VP of analytics, had his way, the term “performance marketing” would be retired. There isn’t a line [between] brand and performance,” he says. “It all performs.”

It’s been more than a year since Bloomberg stopped running third-party programmatic display ads on its website – and it was the right move, says Christine Cook, Bloomberg Media’s global CRO.

Businesses will always need to find a compromise between privacy and utility, but it’s more than possible to strike a healthy balance, says Graham Mudd, president and chief product officer at privacy startup Anonym.

It’s not that enterprise analytics is broken. The bigger issue, says Obele Brown-West, president of data intelligence platform Tracer, is that enterprise analytics was never all that functional to begin with.

Advertisers expect direct proof of performance from their streaming ad buys. But even though most people don’t shop via their TV screens (yet), new ad formats can still help brands boost consideration, says MediaLink Managing Director Mark Wagman.

If you’re an ad tech or martech vendor thinking about pitching a marketer, then Kamal Bhandal, global VP of brand and consumer experience at Invisalign, has some important advice for you.

“There is no scale in multicultural media.” Lashawnda Goffin, CEO of Colossus SSP, has heard that statement many times – and it simply isn’t true. Yet the misperception persists, in part because of problematic programmatic practices.

Do people hate ads? No, according to Vegard Johnsen, who joined eyeo as chief product officer last summer after nearly a decade at Google. What people don’t like, he says, is having no real choice over what they see and not being treated with respect.

Lots of marketers are playing around with generative AI. But for Ally Financial, generative AI is a serious investment, not a game or a gimmick, says CMO Andrea Brimmer.

Over the summer, Gartner placed generative AI at the peak of inflated expectations on its hype cycle covering emerging technologies. Sounds about right. But at the same time, marketers are getting more serious about AI adoption, says Abhay Parasnis, CEO and founder of Typeface.ai.

Rather than a competitor to data clean rooms, Amazon Web Services – which has a data clean room offering of its own – considers itself to be a facilitator of ad tech companies, says Adam Solomon, global head of biz dev and go-to-market for AWS Clean Rooms. Guess there are no competitors in ad tech, only frenemies.

Meet Doceree, a programmatic health care marketing platform with a twist. Rather than allowing brands to target patients on the open web, Doceree has a specialized DSP for targeting doctors with secure messages on physician-only platforms, says CEO Harshit Jain.

Reaching a scaled audience is important for publishers, but scale at all costs is just a race to the bottom in disguise. When publishers have a deep and direct relationship with their readers, advertisers see stronger performance, says Semafor CRO Rachel Oppenheim.

Ad revenue in the US is set to grow in 2024. So pour one out for 2023 – and try not to make the same mistake as last year. Despite a more-than-decent ad market in 2023, media executives nearly manifested a recession out of fear that one was coming, according to professional advertising prognosticator Brian Wieser.

Google’s Performance Max and Meta’s Advantage+ often get tossed into the same bucket, but they’re different animals. And despite certain benefits, advertisers aren’t in love with all that these two have to offer, says Nii Ahene, chief strategy officer at Tinuiti, on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks (our last of 2023!).

The Media Rating Council has the same goals of promoting fair media measurement as it did when it formed in the ’60s. But it has had to polish its methodology to keep pace with change in the TV measurement space, says Ron Pinelli, the organization's SVP of digital research and standards.

As TikTok’s global head of marketing science, it’s Jorge Ruiz’s job to prove that ads on the platform can drive results. But marketing measurement is as much an art as it is a science. Also in this episode: self-attribution, the rise (again) of MMM and how TikTok managed to roll with the ATT punches.

Just because a channel isn’t where a final transaction happens doesn’t mean it’s not a performance channel. Connected TV is the perfect example, says Brian Mandelbaum, CEO of commerce data platform Attain.

It’s not that brands don’t care about supporting the news and good journalism. But an overreliance on keyword blocklists has made it seem that way, says Zefr CEO Rich Raddon on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.

Google Analytics dominates the analytics market – but analytics isn’t a zero-sum game, says Ben Young, CEO of insights and measurement startup Nudge. Also: The important of measuring attention and finding "value at the margins."

Local advertisers are spending more on social media platforms today than three years ago, despite being unconvinced social media is the best place to reach their customers. What gives? Corey Elliott, Borell's EVP of local marketing intelligence, explains the story behind the numbers.

State Farm has spent tens of billions of dollars on TV advertising and brand marketing. But programmatic media buying also has a big role to play in helping nurture leads, says Alyson Griffin, State Farm’s head of marketing.