Mo Allibhai

Last week, Forbes was accused of misleading major advertisers with a spoof of its own website – www3.forbes.com. The company created the site in 2017 as a subdomain, stretched its own content to fit more ad formats (e.g., turning 700-word articles into 34 slides), and sold advertising on this made-for-arbitrage (MFA) site to brands that […]

The US election cycle in 2024 will it be the priciest media buy to date. Get three tips on how to prepare your advertising spend for the upcoming cycle.

In 2024, digital marketers and publishers have a unique opportunity to rebuild trust in digital advertising and the internet overall. Given how loose security standards are across the programmatic ecosystem, this requires abandoning “blind programmatic” in favor of more coordinated, stringent buying strategies. 2023 was an eventful year for bad ads, which Forrester defines as […]

Generative AI’s emergence triggered a landslide of interest and experimentation across sectors, including social media and content. Forrester’s Global AI Software Forecast, 2023 To 2030 supports this, as content marketing is the third-largest category for specialized genAI software spend. The rapid evolution of generative AI technology within the social tech landscape has sparked a race […]

Microsoft completed its largest ever acquisition of Activision Blizzard earlier this month. Buried under the lede is the fact that it now owns King, a hugely successful mobile advertising platform with over $300 million in advertising revenue annually. It’s not the first acquisition of its kind: Earlier this year, console gaming giant Sega purchased Rovio, […]

Adtech is supposed to efficiently connect marketers with publishers — demand with supply. Marketers rely on a suite of vendors, including demand-side platforms (DSPs) to furnish brand-safe, fraud-free inventory, and publishers use supply-side platforms (SSPs) to match their unique content to relevant ads and buyers. Ads and cash travel one way; as the funds disperse […]

As the dust settles from the slow, then sudden, death of MediaMath, it’s clear that this was a one-off case of financial mismanagement rather than a canary in the coal mine for demand-side platforms (DSPs) or adtech. The event resurfaces the interdependency of the ecosystem and recalls the last time that a major DSP turned […]

This year, programmatic advertisers face an unusual economic paradox: Ad spend continues to go up, but sellers of programmatic advertising and adtech vendors alike are consolidating and reorganizing in pursuit of efficiency. The stakes (and the same factors that drove real-time bidding adoption in the first place) are high: millions of hours of monetizable consumer […]