The future is zero- and first-party data. Audiences must regain a central role in the digital advertising ecosystem. But the industry is facing one of its biggest challenges to date, and it’s not on the technical and regulatory fronts. There is a clash between the need to regain credibility by…

Over the years, publishers have accused advertisers of rewarding media agencies and buyers through business models that prioritize the wrong metrics, favoring quantity over quality and overlooking the uniqueness of the media owner’s environment and content. But this is only one side of the story. In fact, media owners have…

Media owners today risk losing control of one of their most precious assets. The parasitic nature of certain ad tech is back, as some players try to pull control of resources and assets away from media brands. This time, they’re threatening the very essence of intellectual property: content. Content is…

Ad tech stocks are soaring even as regulators clamp down on ad tech, especially in Europe. How can we understand this irrational behavior? Let’s backtrack. IAB Europe recently announced that Belgium’s data protection authority (APD) will likely find it in breach of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for its…

Progress is not a straight line or a smooth path, as many in history have reminded us. It seems to be the case for data and privacy regulations, too, as the spotlight was recently on the UK and its call for data reform it published in September, “Data: A New…

One aspect of ad tech that was (almost) unthinkable even until a couple of years ago is its role of agnostic enabler, of infrastructure provider at the service of its clients’ own strategies and assets and whose success fully overlaps with the one of its partners. In the audience-centric, privacy-first…

Apple is not destroying digital advertising, it is killing a certain interpretation of it. In fact, it seems that an audience only exists if ad tech can track it. It doesn’t matter if, as in the case of Apple devices, it represents some of the wealthiest online users. This topic…