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The Slowest Fastbreak in History
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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You Cannot AI Generate a Ferrari
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.
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Adtech No Longer Needs Premium Media Brands
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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What Do You Do, When Quality Becomes Infinite?
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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Authenticity Isn't a 2026 Trend for Media
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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Beyond the Pilot: How AI Becomes Strategy
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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Commoditization 2.0: How Agentic AI Could Undermine The Open Web’s Best Publishers | Adexchanger
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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Stop Waving AI at a Problem That Needs a Hammer
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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Advertising’s ID-Less Future Depends On More Than DSP Adoption | Adexchanger
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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My 2025 Non-Predictions
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
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Escaping The Outrage Loop: How To Break Free From Programmatic Transparency Challenges | Adexchanger
The regular drip of reports by watchdogs like Adalytics is normally followed by widespread – more or less genuine – outrage. This pattern reveals two facts about the digital advertising industry. One: The road to (real) accountability is still long and winding. Two: The way most of the industry is tackling the
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Media Alliances vs. Curated Marketplaces: The Race to the Top
The digital advertising industry faces conflicting interests, leading to polarised perspectives on various topics, which slow down its progress and transformation. Media alliances and curated marketplaces are not an exception, both emerging as two of the most promising trends in the aftermath of the near-miss disappearance (for now) of