Liz 
Manual reporting may keep ad ops teams close to the numbers, but it also asks experienced people to spend their best hours searching for problems instead of solving them.
Six large publishers (Condé Nast, Time among them) told Digiday how they’re shifting from impression-based pitches to direct-sold custom content, products, and events as Google search referrals tank.
In one sense, the world of publishing that most of us have built our careers around is gone. But the world as a whole needs publishing to hold fast. Human-created, fact-based content is more valuable than the market currently understands.
For publishers, page speed is no longer just a technical concern. As advertising stacks become more complex and pages rely on dozens of third-party technologies, even small delays can affect viewability, user engagement, and ultimately revenue. Yet understanding what is causing those delays remains one of the industry’s biggest challenges.
Publishers are not the only ones being forced to rethink their model. Agencies are going through their own reset as AI puts pressure on the traditional headcount and agency-of-record fee structure.
Does agentic buying count as self-serve? Rough consensus says yes, with caveats. Today’s self-serve partners likely aren’t tomorrow’s agentic players.
We’re in a world right now where the only constant is that everything and everyone wants our attention, and people only have so much attention to give. What the platforms have learned is pulling us back and forth with conflicting stories holds our attention better than anything else: it confirms my biases while simultaneously testing them.
We’re kicking off this month’s Camp.Fire with Evan Thor, who digs into a broken part of the mobile ecosystem: interstitial ad UX. We also recap, review, and analyze the critical conversations from Navigator NYC and AI Publisher Response.
A pub asked how critical it is to send schain in bid requests to the buy side, and whether demand partners are blocking publishers without it. Another publisher said flatly: Don’t send it if you’re a publisher.
Last week, someone on a panel described their AI workflow in a way I have not been able to shake. They set an agent in motion, then go work out. When they get back, they review what happened, kick off the next agent, and go take a shower.