Spotlight
Welcome to the latest edition of Spotlight, your monthly recap of the biggest stories in adtech and digital marketing.
What we have for you today: Ad agencies double down on data, AI privacy issues come into focus, and publishers struggle in a tough market
As the possibilities of data-driven marketing continue to expand, ad agencies are stepping in as guides to help brands make the most of the opportunities on offer. As this happens, we’re seeing agencies shift away from data activation on the buy side and increasingly turning to sell-side data marketplaces to support smarter decision-making and strategic advising. What’s more, by teaming up with trusted adtech partners, the best agencies are helping brands realise more value from data with greater speed and precision.
For anyone interested in new opportunities in CTV advertising, there was good news this month with the announcement that Magnite is making pause ads available to buy programmatically. Elsewhere, studios, publishers, and streamers are looking at new ways to monetise CTV. Warner Bros., for example, is currently focusing on contextual to drive CTV advertising performance.
CTV is clearly being recognised for its strategic value, but effective targeting remains a challenge. While broad adoption is currently limited, solutions are starting to emerge. One such is telco-verified IDs, which are already being implemented in select environments. Watch this space – CTV advertising is just getting into gear.
Anthropic is shifting its data policy to start drawing on user conversations and coding sessions to train its AI models, with a five-year data retention period for those who don’t opt out. This major update raises questions regarding privacy, not least around what happens to user data downstream. The move also seems largely unworkable in jurisdictions with privacy laws that require explicit consent. Overall, this feels like a step backward for privacy and runs against the broader direction of travel online.
It’s not the only area in which AI is raising questions. New AI-powered “headless browsers” have emerged. AI agents using headless browsers can click, scroll, and interact with websites like humans to gather information. That makes it a challenge for advertisers and publishers to differentiate between real and automated traffic, raising fresh challenges for analytics, measurement, and fraud prevention. Now more than ever, brands and publishers need to be able to 100% verify their audiences at source.
Everywhere you look in digital marketing, publishers are under attack. Transaction ID (TID) has become one key flashpoint in programmatic this month, sparking debate over transparency, control, and revenue. Tensions rose after Prebid made TIDs non-unique across exchanges, raising alarm over duplicate detection and governance in open-source standards. For publishers, broad adoption risks exposing duplication that could reduce yields, empower buyers, and further erode control over auctions.
Elsewhere, publishers are readying themselves for “Google zero;” a future where AI overviews have decimated search referral traffic and Google keeps audiences inside its walled garden.
We believe that the best way for publishers to push back is by taking direct ownership of their inventory. Partnering with trusted adtech companies is a good first step, but long-term success depends on reclaiming control of their own environments rather than handing the keys to others.
The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is now an adtech leader. The booming sector has been fuelled by a young, tech-savvy population and surging internet and smartphone adoption. Meanwhile, marketers are embracing new technologies to tackle transparency and trust challenges, pushing the sector to nearly $7B last year; a 20% jump that outpaces growth in the US and Europe.
This maps what we have seen on the ground where organisations like e& UAE and the Choueiri Group are helping to create a privacy-first digital advertising market in the region that delivers better outcomes for brands. We expect to see adtech innovation and growth only accelerate in the region in the years ahead.
Google no doubt breathed a sigh of relief this month having largely survived its search business antitrust ruling intact. The company will not need to divest Chrome as it has feared but it has been barred from using exclusive contracts or revenue-sharing deals to lock in Search, Chrome, Assistant, or Gemini, opening the door for rival apps and services on devices. It must also share search index and interaction data, plus offer syndication services, giving competitors a fairer shot at building and scaling their own search and ad businesses.
While these remedies will no doubt have some impact, it will not in our opinion lead to the open and diversified search market that many of us had hoped for. Google now faces a second antitrust ruling on its adtech business and will be hoping that the ruling leads to a more fragmented and open ecosystem.
It should also be noted that while this has been going on in the US, in the EU the European Commission has levied Alphabet a massive €2.95 billion fine, citing anticompetitive practices in its lucrative ad-tech business. We could well be seeing some major regulatory divergence between the US and EU, and potentially the emergence of quite different digital marketing environments. Watch this space.
As usual, feel free to swing by our blog for more insights on digital marketing and adtech. This month, we’re looking at some of the hotspots for telco industry growth around the world, with a focus on new telco plays in digital advertising.
Telcos are looking for greater revenue streams than their current models provide. Could a smart digital strategy, providing telco-verified ID solutions at scale for publishers and brands, be the answer?
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