Scott Stevenson

Sooo... how can the same product, from the same company, with the same experience; suddenly grab market share from the market leader. No flashy launch, no innovation, no nothing. Change your brand positioning. How about if you are Anthropic (Claude), and you go up against a powerful government department like the DoW? Your intent was not brand position change; that'd be too pedestrian. There is of course, a lot of nuances in what happened; but the market does not care about the nuance - most of which I am most likely missing. The market cares about what they see and hear and feel. The Brand Positioning Deck on Amodei's laptop on never changed. Perceptions of the market changed of what Anthropic was. What it stood for, how far it will go for something as abstract, yet important as principles. As an aside: Amodei has re-engaged DoW and opened negotiations again as of late last week. Anthropic is still a business; and sometimes the market make a lot of assumptions, so you never know what is going on behind the scenes. But the users have made up their minds of what OpenAI and Anthropic stands for - rightly or wrongly. Both CEOs played a big role in this evolution. Speaking of CEOs and big companies and their 'products,'.... Nah, that'd be too easy. https://lnkd.in/gyfapkyF

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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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Google releases more Agentic Shopping tools: Direct Offers allow customers to shop and buy within AI Mode. UCP enables Google Pay checkout (PayPal coming soon). Branded agents using Merchant Center. #Shopify #Google #Etsy #Ecommerce https://lnkd.in/ehjapxFv

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Causal has partnered with Quorum, Inc. to unlock foot traffic attribution, helping destination marketers measure what really matters: real-world visits. In our first collaboration with a Florida DMO, we drove 2.3M attributed visits, with insights down to the DMA and ZIP-code level, powering smarter targeting and clearer ROI. Read more: https://lnkd.in/gYUngEfn

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we've posted a couple of reports in the past - but I think that this one is the BEST and most interesting one we published (...so far...) this is a true comparison of "attribution" vs. incrementality - comparing the actual aggregated, weighted, and indexed results based for the clients who share attribution data with INCRMNTAL Super interesting - get it below!

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U.S. TVOS platform revenue by company: 1) Roku OS (Roku) - $3.5B (25%) 2) Fire TV (Amazon) - $2.4B (17%) 3) Android TV (Alphabet) - $2.2B (15%) 4) Tizen Smart Hub (Samsung) - $1.5B (11%) 5) Apple TVOS (Apple) - $763M (5%) 6) WebOS (LG) - $759M (5%) 7) SmartCast (Vizio) - $738M (5%) 8) Xumo (Comcast/Charter) - $189M (1%) 9) Other - $2.4B (17%) Read the full post: https://screenwa.rs/9337d9

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$250 million. That’s how big Macy’s retail media play is supposed to get by 2026. But the real stuff? They’re quietly building it to run without owning the full media stack. Criteo runs the onsite ads. Pentaleap now handles the routing. Amazon’s ad platform may soon be a demand source. This is not a walled garden. It’s an ad bazaar. Here’s the shift no one’s spelling out. Retail media used to mean: “run your ads on our site, through our tools.” Now? It means “bring your spend, wherever it’s parked, and we’ll take it.” That changes everything for DTC brands trying to scale. 🧩 Sponsored slots become portable Once Macy’s inventory is accessible through other platforms, brands no longer need separate teams for every retailer. 🎯 Onsite wins are earned, not bought If five DSPs are bidding, relevance becomes the battlefield. Feed quality, PDP optimization and conversion rates matter more than bid strategies. 🛠️ Complexity shifts from media buying to execution Setup gets easier. Success does not. If your Amazon ad feed underperforms on Macy’s, it still flops. ⚡ Retailer control is out. Interoperability is in Expect every retailer with growth ambitions to rethink their ad tech stack. The Criteo era might quietly become the Pentaleap era. Macy’s just made retail media feel more like programmatic. For some, that’s a dream. For others, a data nightmare waiting to happen. But one thing is certain. If you're not updating your feed strategy to support this shift, someone else will take the slot. #retailmedia #marketplaces #dtc #ecommerce #macys

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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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Retail media is moving beyond the shelf. DSP, CTV, and social commerce are becoming standalone growth engines powered by commerce data according to Skai & Stratably's 2026 State of Retail Media Report. But as industry leaders told us, this requires dedicated strategy, expertise, and investment. Explore what this means for you: https://okt.to/SN9Jnd

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Magnite has introduced pause ads into its SSP, now available to buy programmatically through ClearLine, major DSPs, and streaming partners, including DirecTV, Dish Media, and Fubo. This shift provides advertisers with access to a non-intrusive, obvious moment in the viewer's journey, when audiences are most attentive. With scalable inventory and emerging VAST standardization, pause ads will become a powerful addition to the programmatic toolkit. For brands, the opportunity is clear: diversify CTV campaigns, strengthen engagement, and drive ROI with a format built for today's streaming behaviors. Read on for more: https://heyor.ca/eu20le #CTV #Programmatic #DigitalAdvertising #MediaBuying

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