made for advertising sites

Every week, we publish an original comic inspired by trends in the online advertising industry. These are the stories – and the puns – behind AdExchanger’s top 10 comics of the year.

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…

Is the programmatic advertising industry in a rut? Maybe just call it a midlife crisis, says JiYoung Kim, president for North America at GroupM Nexus, because there are bright spots – namely, retail media.

Josef Najm, director of programmatic and partnerships at Reuters, has a message for advertisers: Don’t be afraid of journalism.

Looking for unvarnished, sharp views on transparency, the lack thereof, defining ad quality and the industry’s new obsession with made-for-advertising websites? Then this is the episode for you, with guest Tom Triscari, CEO and founder of programmatic advisory firm Lemonade Projects.

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…

Taboola CEO Adam Singolda bristles at the terms “clickbait” and “chumbox.” Quality is subjective, he says. Also: Inside Taboola’s exclusive 30-year native advertising sales deal with Yahoo.

According to the ANA, brands could save at least $20 billion a year by cutting out low-quality programmatic inventory on the open web.

Success in the first-party web is based first and foremost on relationships, quality and trust, neither of which are improved by most content currently provided by recommendation engines, writes audience and data strategy consultant Alessandro De Zanche.

There’s a new TLA (“three-letter acronym”) that’s crept into the media-buying conversation. MFA: Made-for-advertising content. MFA is a combination of paid traffic, clickbait and other incentivized traffic, engineered to create ad impressions and generate revenue. New sites pop up virtually overnight with millions of impressions, sucking up ad dollars and hurting campaign performance, writes Tal Almany, VP of publisher development at Kargo.