artificial intelligence

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

New startups are starting to use generative AI to flip the script on in-video product placement, including Rembrand, a new venture launched by ad tech vet Omar Tawakol in February.

Who needs friends when you can converse with your data clean room, chat with your ad platform and, uh, talk to your marketing cloud?

There’s been such a deluge of data privacy-related news over the past few weeks – from the TikTok ban in Montana to the $1.3 billion GDPR fine against Meta in Europe – I hardly know what to focus on.

Forget Skynet. The robot revolution will be fought between large ad platforms (mainly Google, Meta and Amazon) trying to woo advertisers with generative AI and promises of better performance.

Why is there so much misinformation circulating online? Because, unfortunately, “it’s a great business,” says L. Gordon Crovitz, co-founder of NewsGuard, which estimates that advertisers are funneling as much as $2.6 billion a year programmatically to misinformation websites.

Meta is allocating an increasing percentage of the billions of dollars it spends annually on its infrastructure toward building the company’s “capacity for artificial intelligence,” says John Hegeman, Meta’s VP of monetization.

Historically, AppLovin made most of its revenue from its portfolio of apps. Now the company appears to be nearly finished with the bloodletting necessary to transform itself into a primarily software-focused business.

Ad tech and cloud tech are converging; there’s no doubt about that. But how much of ad tech will get eaten by cloud platforms? That’s harder to answer, says Myles Younger, head of innovation and insights at U of Digital.

Apple’s ATT spurred Meta to shore up its ad platform and make it less vulnerable to future changes on other platforms – but that doesn’t change the fact that regulators remain ready and raring to crack down.