AdExchanger

Omar Tawakol is a serial entrepreneur. He sold two companies in five years, including BlueKai to Oracle in 2014. But he's in no rush with his new virtual product placement startup Rembrand. He says he's having too much fun. Plus: Meditating on the end of Oracle Advertising.

Covering Google's ad tech antitrust trial in Virginia is surreal for anyone who's been in ad tech as long as Ari Paparo. He knows most of the people on the stand.

If Adam Heimlich could travel back in time to alter the future of online advertising, he would go to Google's acquisition of DoubleClick in 2007, but not necessarily to stop it.

Advanced audience targeting is perhaps the most significant change in TV ad buying structures, says Alison Levin, NBCUniversal's president of advertising and partnerships, on this week's episode of AdExchanger Talks.

It's a misconception that Redditors categorically dislike advertising, says newly hired VP of Ad Product Management Jyoti Vaidee. In fact, 60% of Reddit users want brands to participate in communities, she says, so long as their interactions are relevant and respectful.

Have we finally reached peak retail media, or is the recent explosion of RMNs the sign of a healthy and thriving marketplace? "It's the right question to be asking, especially at this time," says Gopuff's SVP of business, Daniel Folkman, who helped spearhead the company's advertising business.

Serial ad tech entrepreneur Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan founded two startups roughly a decade apart, both for a similar reason: making data available across the enterprise in a way that's also respectful of the consumer.

Last month, Hyundai eliminated the chief marketing officer role and split the function in two: creative and performance. The move makes sense because two brains are better than one, says Angela Zepeda, Hyundai's former CMO and now its chief creative officer. But there are critics to this approach.

There's only so much you can do to measure earned media, says Najah Ayoub, CMO of Piece of Cake Moving & Storage. That's why the brand invests so much in the customer experience. Plus: Piece of Cake's hybrid MMM/MTA approach to attribution.

AI-powered systems should make the humans that use them smarter, says WPP CTO Stephan Pretorius. "It has to be people first, not technology first." Plus: why "technology doesn't destroy jobs, it destroys tasks."

What does programmatic media have in common with toilet paper? A lot more than you might think, says Sherine Ebadi, managing director of forensic investigations at Kroll. It's a question of quality (or the lack thereof).

With Judge Amit Mehta's ruling expected this fall, Adam Epstein, co-CEO of adMarketplace, breaks down the DOJ's search-focused antitrust case against Google. Plus: why Google's Performance Max has some search advertisers hopping mad.

It's time for advertisers to get more nuanced with their approach to brand safety, says Mia Libby, The Wall Street Journal's SVP of enterprise. It's okay to be cautious, but excluding all news from programmatic media plans isn't the answer.

Once consumers are ready to travel, they're often ready to spend on almost everything, from beauty and booze to electronics and streaming services. And that creates a unique opportunity for advertisers to reach a new audience with high intent, says Christine Maguire, global VP of commercial business at TripAdvisor.

It's been almost one year since MediaMath went out of business. Two months later, Infillion acquired the assets out of bankruptcy. Now it's time for the next phase, says Infillion CRO and CMO Laurel Rossi.

Shoppable TV ads may encourage sales, but they lack the measurement and performance benchmarks advertisers expect. Buyers must create their own benchmarks – and can only do so by actually testing these new ad units, including with their upfront budgets, says Mike Fisher, executive director of investment innovation at GroupM US.

It's hard to set a strategy for AI adoption without getting a little hands-on experience first, says Betty Louie, a partner and general counsel at The Brandtech Group. You have to play around with the different tools before you even know where the guardrails are, she says.

If there's one thing that makes advertising measurement consultant Andrew Covato roll his eyes and shake his head, it's the endurance of last-click attribution. Last click may seem "simple" and "tidy," Covato says, but it doesn't reflect the full funnel.

Signal loss is real, but don't write an elegy for data management platforms just yet, says Andy Monfried, CEO and founder of Lotame, which turned 18 this year. Also in this episode: Lotame's reinvention of itself as a data collaboration platform.

With the rise of generative AI software and major changes to search platforms even in just the past year or two, SEO and SEM tactics are back. Everyone and their mother is trying to figure out how to make search work and what the new world of search marketing even looks like. Enter Navah Hopkins.