Steven Sesar

Closing out Season 2 of Embracing Erosion with Alena Morris, VP of Product Marketing at Kargo 🙌 Alena has spent 15+ years in ad tech and media, leading product marketing across the publisher, DSP, and SSP sides at PubMatic, Quantcast, and now Kargo. Few people have seen this ecosystem evolve as closely (or as practically) as she has. In this episode, we go deep on where ad tech is actually headed. How AI is unlocking creative intelligence - surfacing patterns, themes, and performance signals that were never accessible before, and turning creative into a true optimization lever. We also dig into: - The blurring lines between SSPs, DSPs, and retail media - Why competition in ad tech is more aggressive than ever - What it takes to lead product marketing and sales teams through real transformation and much more! A fitting way to wrap 20 episodes in Season 2... and 66 total since we started🤯 🎧 Full episode: https://lnkd.in/gwv7JhmW

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Eric roasts the "ad tech haters" after tvScientific sells to Pinterest and Jim Payne explains how app developers can use his new SDK to manage yield using Claude and AI prompting.

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A 2-year-old AI adtech startup just acquired the U.S. operations of a 19-year-old company. Rembrand (an Aperiam portfolio company) has acquired Mirriad’s U.S. business, expanding its AI-powered product placement into premium Hollywood content. I think this kind of acquisition is a signal of what’s to come, which is a generational handoff in media and advertising. In this case, traditional VFX - manual, slow, and expensive - is being reimagined by generative AI. What once took months and a team of artists can now be done dynamically, programmatically, and with context-aware intelligence. With this move, Rembrand: - Absorbs deep media relationships and licensing rights (think Modern Family) - Can enter the world of high-end TV and film integrations - Unlocks new, personalized programmatic ad inventory Love Omar Tawakol’s example in the article: You’re watching a scene and see DoorDash. Someone across the globe sees Deliveroo. Same content, different context... rendered by Rembrand’s AI with physics-aware realism. Congrats to Rembrand (Omar, David Wiener, John Sedlak, Cory Treffiletti & co.). The future is AI-native and it’s unfolding quickly! Link in comments.

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Tech vs Service. Today, we manage two companies. Pontiac Intelligence: A Demand Side Platform to buy advertising space. A technology company. Clients pay a transparent licensing fee. Programmatic Mechanics: A trading desk model where we provide high quality traders and data scientists for organizations looking for personnel assistance in managing campaigns. Comes with dashboarding service across all channels. We spend a lot of time discussing the value of a service business versus technology. And, I just think the times are changing. It's not that technology is dead. It's just that really high quality service models might be able to retain clients for longer, and that might start to even the valuation playing field. Technology isn't dead. The ability to switch between technologies is easing. The moat is drying out. Every single technology companies moat is drying out.

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Publishers like On3 | Rivals & Brit + Co are seeing their RPM/RPS lift by over 25% & dwell time over 200% respectively. 📈 How? By moving beyond basic tools and using AI that understands context at a deeper level. Mula helps publishing teams turn dormant inventory into revenue drivers through: ✅ Semantic analysis ✅ Dynamic content placement (eCommerce, Next Page, Vertical Video, Polls) ✅ Real-time testing Drive stronger engagement and scale revenue based on actual reader intent, recommending content they actually want to engage with; not toe fungus or belly fat. #makemore #digitalpublishing #ai #agentic

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Jeff Green / The Trade Desk getting into the CTV OS space is a smart move. There’s a lot of mid-size CTV providers globally that could benefit from a solution that isn’t from big tech, but is from a company that can max their inventory yield. If you’ve used any CTV app recently, you’ll know the UX has a lot of room for improvement, and if they have ads - they are often irrelevant.

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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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Welcome to The Advertising Forum! Angel Suarez, Founder and CEO of PIXEL & PLUME, shares how smaller agencies compete with larger players using flexible tech stacks, strategic partnerships, and AI-driven tools. He also discusses w/ us the importance of trust, customization, and prioritizing quality over scale in building strong client relationships. This is episode 2 of our "Open Garden Series" sponsored by AI Digital. Speed is a competitive advantage for small agencies and open ecosystems enable flexibility. Thank you for popping on w/ ATG and me, Angel!

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My First AI Post @2025 (and thank you to the Aperiam AI Fellows and to Dawn West and Alex Netelkos for making that happen!): If viewability was the training wheels of digital measurement, attention is the carbon-fiber racing bike we’ve just learned to ride. Erica kicked us off by pointing out the obvious: “viewable” doesn’t mean “seen,” and certainly doesn’t mean “engaged.” McKinsey’s neat formula — time × focus × intent — resonated as a starting point, but the real magic is in using that across channels and across the funnel. Why does this matter now? Because omni-channel is no longer a buzzword — it’s the messy, lived reality. CTV, digital out-of-home, mobile gaming, social feeds — each has wildly different engagement norms. An attention metric gives marketers and publishers a lingua franca, a Rosetta Stone to compare value and outcomes without pretending a click on a banner is the same as leaning into a big-screen spot. Publishers want credit for premium environments. Marketers want to normalize buys across hundreds of brands, countries, and media types. Attention-weighted CPMs (ACPMs) start to solve both. Even a global CPG can look across Meta, YouTube, stadium signage, and print — and make sense of it. Is it perfect? No. Is it better than a stack of inconsistent KPIs and gut feel? Absolutely. And yes, AI is in the wings — not as the protagonist, but as the stagehand making the hard stuff easier. It can normalize messy data, connect attention signals to outcomes, and embolden teams to try bolder experiments. Which brings us to the closing provocation: What if a few brave brands and publishers agreed to really transact on attention — rough edges, no gaming, shared responsibility for outcomes? The moment feels right to test whether attention can become not just a metric, but a currency. Marc Guldimann Adelaide David Zapata AB InBev Michael Shields Cory Treffiletti Rembrand McKinsey & Company

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The main thing to remember is that your site, at its core is a funnel. From landing to FTD. It even goes further back from Campaign to FTD. This is the most crucial part of the process, and the design is the trail that leads the player to their destination. The smater your design, the higher your conversion ratio. Vegas Kings takes this seriously! Let up help you optimise your player Journey... DM me for advice...

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Performance agencies sometimes think they need to differentiate by building proprietary tech. I’ve seen that story many times — and I disagree. I recently had a check-in with two C-level execs at a performance agency. We’d been delivering exceptional results for their clients, including a $33 CPA using our machine learning optimization engine, compared to $120 manually. But performance wasn’t their focus. They'd decided to build new tech in-house. “If other agencies can use tvScientific,” they said, “we’re not unique.” It brought to mind the New York Times’ decision to build its own ad server — a costly, years-long detour that ended with a move back to DFP. The problem was a lack of clarity about what business they were really in and what they were positioned to excel at. The same applies to performance agencies. They’re not in the business of building ad tech (which is a constantly evolving, capital intensive business and is an entire business in its own right). They’re in the business of delivering outcomes. That means using the best tools available on the market and winning on superior client service. Not rebuilding tools from scratch. The edge comes from execution — knowing how to evaluate, adopt, and apply best-in-class technology to drive better results. Trying to be both a tech company and a service business is a recipe for subpar results on both fronts. Instead, invest in identifying cutting-edge technology, use it better than your competitors, and deliver both superior results and superior client service. That’s the path to agency differentiation. Just my .02. More detailed thoughts on this topic in my weekly newsletter (see comments).

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