Last week, the online advertising standards body IAB Tech Lab unveiled its Trusted Server Framework proposals. The scheme hopes to give “publishers complete control over ad monetization…” but not everyone agrees, and debate broke out.

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Both sides defend their corners vehemently, with participants in the debate (seemingly) asking, ‘Is this necessary when Prebid exists?’

For some, supporting Trusted Server Framework will emancipate publishers from Big Tech – think web browsers from Apple and Google. However, for others, it could turn out to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing – think infrastructure providers like Amazon.

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According to LUMA Partners’ 2024 Full Year Market Report, the digital media and marketing ecosystem experienced a 13% annual increase in overall mergers and acquisitions compared to the previous year.

Specifically, the ad tech sector saw a notable 73% rise in deal volume during this period, and per the Q1 deal flow this year, that trend looks set to continue. Some have even tipped a return of initial public offerings in the space in 2025. 

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Confirmed: T-Mobile’s talks with Blis end in $175 million sale Read More

But what kind of mergers and acquisitions will keep corporate development execs busy in the coming months: distressed exits or frothy returns, and who will be in market?

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Critics were quick to round on Google following the publication of its latest Privacy Sandbox report, with hard-hitting punditry highlighting concessions around its flaws.

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The quarterly report — which Google is obligated to publish, per the U.K.’s Competition Markets Authority requirements — acknowledged functionality challenges, particularly with its attribution reporting API.

Of course, vocal Privacy Sandbox critics, such as Movement for an Open Web and The Trade Desk, were quick to offer their thoughts, with the former labeling the report “yet another nail in the coffin.”

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Scope3 aims to upend ad tech with an ‘agentic platform’ for ‘effective, responsible advertising’  Read More

Last week, Scope3 made a series of product announcements, touching on two of the hot-button issues in ad tech right now: brand safety and ad curation. This is a further sign that competition in ad tech is heating up.

First of all, it’s worth recapping the particulars of the launch — Digiday earlier perused the details in an interview with Scope3 CEO Brian O’Kelley — which included an “agentic advertising platform” among a raft of tie-ups. Among the high-profile names involved are Amazon, Google, Meta and The Trade Desk.

At the core of all the announcements was “AI-driven media optimization,” including a hub for agentic media products, a curation offering whereby users can use a centralized application to set controls across supply-side platforms, and a Brand Standards tool.

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The presence of leading executives, including Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, at President Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration led many to believe that Big Tech would have a smooth course in the coming years, especially in any antitrust trial. 

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So, when it emerged that Google met Justice Department execs, encouraging them to roll back earlier proposed remedies, including the divestiture of web browser Chrome, in its search antitrust trial, many assumed its political influence would win out. 

However, developments later in the week suggest those efforts — Bloomberg claimed last week that Google’s arguments centered on maintaining the tech hegemony of U.S. companies — proved fruitless in the case, where Judge Amit Mehta ruled Google’s search market tactics were illegal last year.  

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Amazon, Google and verification vendors among ad tech cohort under fire from U.S. senators over child safety shortcomings Read More

A little over a month ago, a bombshell report documenting ad tech’s shortcomings in stopping the monetization of child sexual abuse material raised the ire of senior politicians and prompted leading names to tighten up their operations.

Since then, the industry debate has been intense, with a growing chorus calling for more vendor transparency. And with that has come some confusion as to how the industry’s leading demand-side platforms will respond.

IAB CEO David Cohen made his philosophy clear on how the industry should move ahead. “Instead of pointing fingers, it may make sense to talk about the misalignment of incentives … move the conversation from efficiency at all costs to effectiveness and starve bad actors from monetization,” he said in a LinkedIn statement.

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During the halcyon days of the 2010s, business growth rates in the online ad industry were buoyant, as advertisers clamored for ‘media-firsts,’ and VC-backed tech firms competed at a breakneck pace in an industry land grab.  

However, during the subsequent decade, a more somber atmosphere prevailed as the industry matured, despite the overall industry registering double-digit growth, with the sector surpassing $309 billion (15% growth) for the first time.

While these numbers appear healthy, eMarketer researchers also note how the industry’s annual growth rates consistently averaged more than 20% in the decade prior. Hence, a plateau is starting to emerge, and the sector is taking a Darwinistic hue. It is in this climate that ‘Joint Business Plans,’ a.k.a. ‘joint business partnerships’ or JBPs, are an increasingly common tactic to remain on clients’ media plans.      

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Update Wednesday 11:50 a.m.: T-Mobile has confirmed its sale negotiations with U.K. outfit Blis, announcing it will buy the ad tech startup for $175 million. This comes a day after Digiday first reported the discussions. Below is the original report on the developments.

According to three separate sources familiar with the developments, Blis has been exploring its exit options in recent weeks, conducting discussions with both private equity and strategic suitors.

However, according to separate sources, the U.K. outfit is now understood to be on the brink of announcing a deal with T-Mobile, one of the few telco groups still interested in exploring ad-funded operations.

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In recent weeks, the ad tech sector’s leading lights have issued their financial results for the closing quarter of 2024 — traditionally, the big-money period of the financial year — and while almost all reported numbers that were up and to the right, the markets reacted negatively.

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The year 2025 has been widely touted as a comeback year for mergers and acquisitions, and even some initial public offerings, in ad tech, although Wall Street’s reactions to the latest round of earnings calls from companies in the sector will likely prove a drag on valuations.

For example, revenues for the sector’s big two, i.e., AppLovin and The Trade Desk, issued double-digit annual revenue increases (44% and 26%, respectively), but the slings and arrows of the public markets resulted in precipitous price declines in recent weeks.

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It’s been a little over two weeks since The Trade Desk issued its first-ever earnings miss, during which time its stock price dropped by almost 40%. However, at its flagship NYC partner event on Thursday, executives there outlined their priorities for the year ahead. 

Joined on stage by the likes of The New York Times, NBC Universal, Paramount, and Warner Bros.Discovery (among others), the narrative heralded “the rise of the premium internet,” indicating its priorities on Madison Avenue for the year ahead.

In opening remarks, its commercial chief Tim Sims outlined The Trade Desk’s outlook on a new industry paradigm, one that’s free from Google’s influence. This paradigm includes the importance of authenticated audiences and a more efficient supply chain.  

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Away from headlines discussing the fissures between government and Big Tech, particularly those with a trans-Atlantic bent, representatives of the digital ad industry are attempting to woo policymakers by underlining their economic impact on the region.

Google is poised to face fresh charges, this time for breaching the EU’s Digital Markets Act. The news comes hot on the heels of antitrust authorities in Germany investigating Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework. Both investigations’ primary concern is whether Apple and Google’s policies favor their own technologies over those of third parties. 

In Germany, authorities have asked if Apple’s ATT treats third-party data differently from its own, granting itself advantages in the ad market while enforcing stricter restrictions on competitors. Meanwhile, the pan-European investigation will reportedly probe if it favors its vertical search engines, such as Google Shopping, Google Flights, and Google Hotels, over rivals.

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Google’s latest Chrome update leaves third-party cookie phase-out as unclear as ever Read More

The fate of third-party cookies is arguably the ad tech story of the 2020s, particularly how the industry’s most popular web browser (Google Chrome) will permit third parties to track its three billion-plus users. 

However, the online behemoth’s recent policy update, particularly around the timings of its rollout of a much-anticipated user consent prompt, hints at the continuation of the status quo for much of the remainder of the decade.

Of course, an undercurrent to this has been device fingerprinting, an issue that has generally been frowned upon by the sector, given concerns over the ethics of collecting user attributes such as a device’s operating system, language setting, and (more pertinently) IP address — see video below.   

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The Trade Desk saw its stock price plunge by as much as 26% after it issued its first-ever quarterly earnings miss, i.e., its market capitalization lost billions of dollars of value despite double-digit growth.

It was the first in its eight-year run on the public markets, with CEO Jeff Green keen to show his company was grabbing the nettle by outlining a “15-point action item list” on The Trade Desk’s subsequent earnings call.

The independent ad tech talisman posted Q4 revenues of $741 million – its earlier guidance was for $756 million – representing a 23% revenue increase (full-year revenues were $2.4 billion, up 26%), but its stock price dipped from just above $122 to $92 per share in the minutes after this disclosure.

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Uncertainty over the evolution of the ad tech sector has defined its public conversations in the 2020s, but amid talk of strategic pivots some of the sector’s leading names are turning to startups.

Sources tell Digiday that ad tech verification company DoubleVerify has invested $1 million in the Europe-based venture capital firm FirstParty Capital, which specializes in early-stage ad tech.

FirstParty Capital bills itself as an aid to the development of companies that want to build infrastructure, and further introduce automation to the ad tech and mar-tech sectors, as well as capitalize on the opportunities posed by emerging channels, such as CTV.

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Amazon is poised to issue its full-year earnings today, a quarterly requirement that has helped market observers gauge the growing importance of the e-commerce giant’s advertising services. And key to that is ad tech, one it’s doubling down on.

Amazon Ads is further opening up to third parties, signing partners to its latest beta program, which involves its demand-side platform telling them what supply it needs and when it needs it more efficiently than historical practices. 

The nascent program involves Amazon DSP’s trading partners employing its “Dynamic Traffic Engine” to signal what types of ad inventory they have on offer at specific times by sending “low demand” or “high demand” signals to one of the industry’s largest trading platforms.

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Criteo’s latest earnings call represented the passing of the baton between outgoing chief executive Megan Clarken, and its incoming CEO Michael Komasinkski, with the former of the pair underlining the overhaul that marked her four-year term of office.

“We no longer plan our business around the deprecation of third-party cookies,” said Clarken, later noting how ad retargeting represented 40% of its business, as it exited 2024, compared to 2020, when she first took the reins.

The fortunes of Criteo, a pioneer of ad retargeting based on the use of third-party cookies, are widely regarded as a proxy for how the industry is faring now such audience targeting tools are losing their utility as a result of privacy expectations around the globe.

The impact of Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention in Safari predated Clarke’s arrival, but it was Google’s confirmation of the planned deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome soon after her arrival that fundamentally altered the digital advertising landscape, Criteo’s strategic moves since.

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The IAB Annual Leadership Meeting closes today, hosted in Palm Springs, Calif., and featuring more than 1,200 high-profile industry leaders, including “marketing game-changers,” according to its promotional material. 

Justifying the admittance fee, which can cost anywhere up to $5,000, notable speakers, including filmmaker Edward Norton and Academy Award-winning director Ron Howard, helped add some glamor to the affair.

Topics of discussion at the conference focused on hot-button issues such as artificial intelligence, commerce, creativity, measurement, privacy and addressability, responsible media and streaming. 

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President Donald Trump was sworn in for his second term earlier this month. During the inauguration ceremony, a coterie of Big Tech CEOs in prominent positions was prominently featured, and observers interpreted this as a bid to curry favor with the current occupant of the Oval Office. 

Among their number was Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, who, despite being the lowest profile of the assembled executives, is arguably in the deepest hot water given the host of battles it faces with the Justice Department and could do with a sympathetic ear in the executive branch of the U.S. government.

Examples include the business-critical search case, where it faces the forced sell-off of the Chrome browser, and in addition to this case, which Google lost but is in the process of appealing, is its ongoing ad tech antitrust trial, where a verdict from presiding Judge Leonie Brinkema has been anticipated for weeks. DOJ lawyers are pushing for a forced sell-off of its sell-side ad tech tools. Many expect the ruling to go against Google, prompting (yet another) appeals process, with the looming uncertainty splitting opinion on how best to position oneself for the resulting fallout.

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Telcos and ad tech: the media world’s messiest on-again, off-again relationship. T-Mobile’s $600 million cash swoop for outdoor ad specialist Vistart is the latest reunion in this turbulent love story.

Slated to close this spring pending approval, its ad tech’s first notable deal of the year arrives as outdoor advertising cements itself as the sector’s rising star.

What truly stands out, though, is the deja vu. The bit where hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, exchange hands only to come crashing down years later? Haven’t we seen this movie before?

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How Megan Clarken plans to get Criteo out of the ad retargeting ‘box’ Read More

Criteo yesterday announced an end to its months-long search for a new CEO with the unveiling of former Dentsu Americas chief Michael Komasinski. 

He takes over the reins from Megan Clarken both as CEO and board member beginning next month in what’s likely to be a pivotal year for both the ad tech company and the broader digital media industry as a whole. 

While maintenance of the stock price is the core priority of any publicly listed company’s CEO, Komasinski’s task is a multifaceted one if he is to build on Clarken’s five-year tenure, during which time she took the company on a transformative period.

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