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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Life Beyond the Cookie

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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The Programmatic Marketer

Amazon’s DSP ambition: Becoming the primary DSP for advertisers Read More

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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The Programmatic Marketer

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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T-Mobile has held talks to purchase Vistar Media, as the U.S.’s third-largest telco seeks to strengthen its non-traditional revenue streams by further expanding its footprint in the advertising sector, sources told Digiday.

Such discussions are understood to have taken place amid what would appear to be an ongoing sales process from Vistar Media, which is said to have fielded several inbound inquiries since late 2024, and come as parties in the space anticipate a flurry of mergers and acquisitions. 

T-Mobile and Vistar Media declined to respond to Digiday’s requests for comment, but later confirmed the deal.

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Yahoo has entered ad tech’s curation fray, focusing on supply-side intelligence tie-ups amid a host of partnership announcements as part of its Consumer Electronic Show activity.  

It’s a positioning it hopes will differentiate it from rival demand-side platforms, such as The Trade Desk, claiming its approach can help simplify the growing complexity of the programmatic ecosystem. 

In particular, Yahoo claims it will help sophisticated advertisers manage transparency challenges and supply path optimization with CTV — an intuitive key topic of conversation at CES — while granting them more control.  

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Billy (not his real name) is the kind of senior marketer who usually has a hot take for every occasion. Brand safety? He’ll unravel the industrial complex behind it. Transparency? Buckle up; he’ll spill it all.

However, when it comes to Interpublic Group’s Acxiom, Billy’s take is conspicuously missing. It’s not because he’s uninformed; he just doesn’t think IPG has offered enough answers to form an opinion worth having. 

“It [Acxiom] was always much stronger in the U.S. compared to Europe in terms of the IDs at its disposal, so there wasn’t really enough we could’ve done with them,” said Billy, who is one of IPG’s clients. “And even then, it was us pushing for it, not them [IPG].”

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Omnicom’s proposed acquisition of IPG, announced last month, would make it the world’s largest agency-holding company, with $25 billion in annual ad revenue and over 100,000 employees.

The deal aims to generate $750 million in cost synergies, primarily by consolidating back-office functions and reducing redundancies by potentially cutting 30% of staff. A depressingly familiar page in the corporate playbook.

However, the initial pitch from IPG and Omnicom’s executive teams focused on other outcomes, such as AI and the combination of both entities’ big bets in data-enabled marketing. 

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The Holiday or Xmas Party season intuitively leads to thoughts of revelry, marking the end-of-year cadence whereby those contributing to a common cause are thanked for their efforts, and standout performers are acknowledged.

However, as many HR managers can attest, such affairs can also be fraught with liability, an experience that organizers of the AdTechChat Xmas Party Extravaganza underwent in the days after the Dec. 4 event when community divisions flared.

The event was hosted by organizers of the AdTechChat community — a series of discussion groups for industry practitioners taking place on various social channels, primarily in the form of several WhatsApp groups — and took place in The Phoenix Arts Club, London, a venue known for “cabaret & variety from drag to musical theatre, burlesque,” acts.

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In what is likely to be one of the year’s biggest media stories, Omnicom Group has announced plans to acquire The Interpublic Group of Companies in a stock-for-stock transaction valued at approximately $13 billion.

This merger is set to create the world’s largest advertising conglomerate, combining renowned agencies such as BBDO, TBWA Worldwide, and McCann Worldgroup under one umbrella, after the two entities’ respective leadership teams decided that scale is the way forward on Madison Avenue.

According to official filings, the combined entity is projected to generate annual revenues exceeding $25 billion with an adjusted EBITA of $3.9 billion and free cash flow of $3.3 billion. Individually, Omnicom’s full-year revenue for 2023 was $14.69 billion, reflecting growth of 4.1%, while IPG’s was $10.89 billion, down from $10.93 billion in 2022.

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The much-touted revival of ad tech mergers and acquisitions appears underway. Earlier this week, Experian confirmed it is buying curation firm Audigent, capping off a round of such consolidation moves in Q4.  

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Strategizing for the Future

The number of ad tech mergers and acquisitions is developing from a trickle to a steady flow Read More

As the week closed, sources told Digiday that Channel Factory, is seeking to join these ranks, with the company understood to be holding talks with potential new backers in recent weeks.

Sources consulted by Digiday estimate the company, which specializes in the brand suitability sector, could command an exit price in the hundreds of millions of dollars range. Albeit it’s understood Channel Factory is characterizing its latest efforts as a bid to gain further investment, as it seeks to accelerate its growth.

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