Newsletter
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.
Alessandro De Zanche
Newsletter
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.
Newsletter
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
Newsletter
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
Newsletter
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
Newsletter
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
Newsletter
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
Newsletter
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
Podcast
The Sell-Side Strikes Back
What happens when the sell-side starts taking back control? In today’s digital advertising landscape, many of the old assumptions no longer hold. The traditional buy-side/sell-side divide is becoming less relevant, AI is changing how decisions are made, and publisher alliances are reshaping the scale game.
Podcast
Advertising Is a Cloud Science: The Myth of Precision in Ad Tech
In this episode of the 'not just ADZ' podcast, Erez Levin, an ad tech veteran, and I try to explore what "quality" in digital advertising really means. Advertising has long pretended to be a clock science: something measurable, predictable, and precise. But in reality, it'
Newsletter
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.
Podcast
Trust, Privacy & Data Ownership with David Kohl
For years, the advertising industry has been trapped in a cycle, reacting to shifting regulations, privacy changes, and platform policies rather than proactively shaping its own future. This is nothing new, and I’ve discussed it with representatives from all sides of the industry on the "not just ADZ&