Lori Goldberg

Excited to share that Aperiam has invested in Bedrock Platform. Obvious statement of the century: programmatic advertising has a complexity problem. The infrastructure that was built to give media buyers control has, over time, done the opposite. Burying teams under layers of operational overhead, legacy tooling, and opaque supply chains. Bedrock is built on a simple but powerful thesis: what if you stripped away the bloat and rebuilt the stack around what actually matters... precision, transparency, and speed to execution. Their platform combines AI-driven campaign automation with curated, premium inventory across video, CTV, DOOH, and audio, and aims to be flexible and get smarter over time. Plus, the team (Shane, Austin, Ryan, James) has deep roots in the infrastructure layer of ad tech and understands the plumbing better than almost anyone. We believe the next generation of programmatic will be leaner, faster and AI-first. Bedrock is building that.

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For years, we've watched retail media continue to fragment often operating on the promise of "closed-loop data" rather than verifiable, standardized results. In 2025, with IAB's new Commerce Media Standards going live, we're seeing the inevitable fallout: brand satisfaction with RMN transparency has plummeted from 66% to 44%. The market is demanding accountability. Brands are done asking for proprietary dashboards; they're demanding shared, IAB-aligned proof. The old JBP (Joint Business Plan) is evolving into something more like the JVP (Joint Value Partnership), where outcomes replace obligations and standardization is the currency. 👉 Read the full perspective : https://lnkd.in/giDQc9jY #RetailMedia #JBP #JVP #CommerceMedia #Transparency #MediaAMP

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CMO’s and agencies are so enamored with bottom-funnel targeting tactics that they totally lost the ability to move people effectively—their judgement is out of balance with real needs today. The targeting down funnel ‘disease’ gives marketers a feeling that they aren’t being wasteful but so much is showing they aren’t being effective either. “This ….reveals …a fundamental mismatch. Respondents are applying bottom-of-funnel tactics to what they've identified as top-of-funnel brand building objectives.”

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Horizon and Havas have formed a media joint venture in order to chase larger clients. Together, they hope to exploit market disruption. https://lnkd.in/egzx3QK8

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Audio represents 20%+ of consumer media time but under 5% of ad spend (eMarketer). For pharma brands focused on reach, frequency, and trust, this unlocks smarter investment without sacrificing accountability. "Viant Technology’s direct integration with iHeartMedia... allows both companies to match their data graphs and create shared IDs for targeting audiences in digital audio, as well as broadcast radio, where audience ID signals are scarce." Net-net: we're making hard to measure channels measurable and heping healthcare marketers better understand who they’re reaching, how often, and how audio fits into the full patient and HCP journey. Audio has always driven impact. Now, with Viant, it drives insight too. #HealthcareMarketing #PharmaMarketing #Viant #Programmatic #AddressableAdvertising #MeasurableMedia #AudioAds https://lnkd.in/ek8J-iJE

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Impression-level AI is powerful only if the data inputs are clean and the incentives are aligned. Moving intelligence upstream doesn’t eliminate opacity by default. If agentic systems are making micro-decisions in milliseconds, transparency and governance become even more critical especially as AI-driven optimization increasingly determines pricing, prioritization, and access. There’s also a structural implication. When optimization lives at the impression layer, differentiation shifts from bulk inventory to signal quality and predictive modeling. The competitive edge is who can predict value most accurately at the micro level.

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Jennifer Kattula, could not agree more -> "Generative AI is transforming marketing and how brands engage with their audiences. As much as I love AI, robots will not replace human taste, craft, curation, or nuance" What a wonderful conversation with Kristin Reagan from Annalect. Highly recommend this read.

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CMOs demand guaranteed delivery, lowest CPMs, strategic flexibility, and outcome-based pricing. Physics says you can't have all four simultaneously. Principal media delivers three of them. The question is which three matter most. Forrester's new principal media report from the inimitable Jay Pattisall is very much worth a read, and it's going to trigger the predictable debate. Critics will argue agencies are creating conflicts. Evangelists will tout cost savings. Both will miss the strategic reality: CMOs facing compression don't have the luxury of perfect markets. I've watched boards push CMOs for guaranteed outcomes while slashing budgets. In that environment, academic arguments about strategic flexibility mean nothing. The anti-principal media argument assumes unlimited client patience, perfect information, and rational markets. Reality looks different. Reality is: your board wants cost certainty so they can model P&L without media volatility. Reality is: your CFO wants guaranteed delivery so you're not scrambling for Super Bowl inventory in scatter markets. Reality is: your CEO wants outcome-based pricing that ties media spend to business results. Principal media trades strategic flexibility for the three things boards actually care about: cost certainty, delivery guarantee, and outcome alignment. The Forrester report shows 80% of marketers are interested in principal media advantages. That's not because CMOs are naive about conflicts of interest. It's because they're making rational trade-offs under real constraints. The criticism of principal media comes from people who've never faced the impossible triangle. They can afford to optimize for strategic flexibility because they're not accountable for the P&L impact when media costs spike or inventory disappears. Yes, principal media requires transparency. Yes, it needs contractual controls and performance accountability. Yes, clients should cap how much spend flows through principal arrangements. But the mechanism itself? It's agencies finally building inventory positions that enable the outcome-based pricing we've demanded for years. I'm a big supporter as, for two decades, I've watched CMOs demand that agencies move from billing hours to pricing on outcomes. "Put skin in the game," they said. "Share the risk." Now agencies are doing exactly that with principal media, and the industry is calling it a conflict of interest. We can't have it both ways. Forrester predicts principal media will grow to one-third of billings by 2026. Read their report, then decide which three variables matter most for your business. https://lnkd.in/eKHg5qmk #PrincipalMedia #MediaBuying #CMO #MarketingLeadership #MarketingStrategy

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#WednesdayWisdom OpenAI is testing ads for free users and ChatGPT Go, with no ads for Plus/Pro. Target is one of the first partners, bringing Roundel into the mix—and says traffic from ChatGPT is up 40% month over month. #ChatGPT #OpenAI

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Most would agree with the perspective on the programmatic ecosystem shared by PubMatic's CEO, stating that it is “multifaceted, certainly complex.” Unfortunately for marketers, this is dramatically compounded by the lack of transparency, which allows intermediaries to siphon media dollars into fees, direct advertiser investment to “owned” solutions, and compounds the failure to constrain non-human traffic.

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