Newsletter
Premium media owners have one commercial asset that generative AI cannot reproduce at scale: the trust audiences place in their brands. Every other historical advantage publishers once had with audiences – voice, expertise, production quality – is being flattened by AI systems that churn out good-enough output in seconds. Zero-click
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Every conversation at Cannes this year was about AI. The message between the lines confirmed the opposite: the future of monetisation lies in humanity. Neil Vogel, CEO of People Inc., provocatively defined the 2026 Cannes Lions as “the first post-ad tech, post-open web Cannes” on Brian Morrissey’s
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In 2009 I failed to convince sports businesses to monetise their fans like media audiences. Seventeen years later, Fastbreak Digital comes back to life.
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I have always found the comparison of digital advertising to an ecosystem more revealing than the cosmetic use of the word across the industry. It highlights the importance of its different components but also explains why imbalance is not a sustainable state. That holds true with AI, for different reasons.
Newsletter
For 15 years, much of adtech sold a lie the industry was happy to buy: infinite reach without sacrificing quality. The pitch survived only because quality media owners legitimised with their presence pipes full of Made for Advertising (MFA) inventory and the long tail of low-quality content. Generative AI
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Programmatic made real the delusion of infinity. Infinite reach. Infinite inventory. Infinite data. What wasn't infinite was quality. It remained the differentiator for premium media owners, even as everything else became commoditised. With generative AI, even quality could become abundant. When quality becomes abundant, it becomes cheap and
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There is a critical difference between predicting the future and simply observing the present, yet current industry forecasts often confuse the two. Reading through the latest round of 2026 industry forecasts, there is far too much of the latter: concepts that have been written on the wall for years, sold
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Over the past two years, AI has moved from experimental to operational across media organisations. Newsrooms are using it for research and drafting, product teams for personalisation, commercial teams for audience insights. The technology works, adoption is real, and early wins are visible. Yet something curious is happening: whilst individual
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AI agents and so-called “super signal aggregators” are being framed as the saviors of premium publishers and advertisers who prioritize high-quality media. But these technologies could perpetuate programmatic’s worst practices and push premium media brands into a Commoditization 2.0 era. Commoditization 1.0 occurred when quality
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When a major brand's ad budgets end up funding terrorist propaganda or child exploitation, the industry's response is predictably complex: more AI, more algorithms, more “solutions”. But what if the answer has been hiding in plain sight for years? Two decades of added complexity have done
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Because DSPs manage programmatic ad spend, they can be seen as gatekeepers wielding influence over industry standards. DSPs select inventory to bid on, interpret SSP signals and prioritize bids based on historical performance and preferences. However, advertisers, agencies, media owners and technology providers also influence the rapidly evolving programmatic ecosystem.
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That time of the year again, when I spend the first week of January reflecting and getting ready for the new year after making the time between Christmas and New Year just for family and friends. As usual, rather than predicting the future, I'd like to offer some