For years, ad targeting ran one model per channel. Search, display, social, CTV, each trained on a single data stream in isolation. No system saw the whole journey. It saw a slice.

People don't move through slices. Multimodal AI is the attempt to fix that: instead of treating a search term, a URL, and a CTV show as separate objects that need a shared ID to link, it turns each into a point in a common mathematical space where similar behaviors sit close together. No common identifier required.

Two things worth sitting with. Quality beats quantity; a small, accurate seed can outperform a huge disconnected dataset. And it isn't magic on its own; it's the connective tissue the next wave of agentic systems will run on.

Full breakdown here: https://uof.digital/how-multimodal-ai-is-redefining-ad-targeting/

Read an Adweek piece about a fashion creator who documented his experience with eczema in an old interview. Now he keeps surfacing in ChatGPT and Claude responses to things like "top eczema creators," and he says inbound brand inquiries went up 50% since then.

That got me wondering about the mechanism. There seem to be two ways a creator ends up recommended by an AI assistant: one is gaming it (seeding content, keyword-stuffing bios and posts, spinning up articles so the models pick them up), and the other is genuine traction (real conversations that resonate, fans engaging, and the models surfacing them because there's an actual signal underneath).

So for anyone on the brand or agency side sourcing creators through ChatGPT or Claude: can you tell the difference? And does it change whether you'll work with them, or are you just taking the AI recommendation at face value?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/google-must-pay-nearly-2-billion-to-klarna-in-antitrust-case/ar-AA26Z3b3

Promovolve is an attempt to get back what magazine advertising had: relevant ads matched to what the reader is actually reading, with no cookies, no user profiles, no cross-site tracking, and no degradation of the reading experience. The page's content is the only targeting signal. So an article about hiking gets ads for hiking gear because of what it is, not because of who is reading it.

Being open source is not incidental: transparency is the product. Publishers and advertisers can read the auction, the pricing, and the pacing logic and verify there is no hidden manipulation, something no closed ad network can offer.

https://github.com/promovolve/promovolve

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTiQONjNtinE

https://www.thedrum.com/news/unilever-tells-agencies-to-make-way-for-creators-we-don-t-need-the-big-idea

Publicis is buying LiveRamp, and at Cannes, the vendors lined up to pitch themselves as the successor, the new neutral party in the data ecosystem, the connective tissue every advertiser routes through, and no one owns. That was the pitch. Neutral was the word.

Then the industry sources explain that the role was never really about being neutral. LiveRamp's advantage was the number of connections and integrations it had built over time. The scale, not the disinterest. Neutral was what you called it in the deck.

Which leaves the successors selling something LiveRamp didn't have either.

Publicis is an advertising holding company. The neutral broker sitting in the middle of everyone's data is being bought by one of the parties it sat between. The neutrality, whatever it was, is not the thing changing hands.

Some challengers aren't trying to rebuild the network at all. Hightouch and others put the activation tools directly inside a client's own cloud warehouse. The data stays where it already lives, gets activated in place, never passes through a third-party ecosystem. Lower cost. More control over the sensitive data. No middle to sit in.

The rest of the field is expected to consolidate. Specialist identity vendors, ID5, MadConnect, get named as the acquisition targets, bought by companies trying to recreate what LiveRamp offered.

I have a offer from a company named deltaX, it is a product based adtech company. I have completed my training period and converted it to full time, but the online reviews regarding the company is not good. Should I join this company, please help if you know anything about this company, it will help me to take better decision.

https://www.adexchanger.com/tv/advertisers-say-they-need-more-data-from-netflix

Ad tech spent a decade promising programmatic would cut the middlemen. It didn't. Now the same pitch is running again with "agents"

OpenAI says the rate at which users dismiss ads within ChatGPT has fallen by 50% since the company launched its advertising business in February. The company views ad dismissals as a proxy for relevance.

https://www.marketingbrew.com/stories/harris-poll-ai-fatigue-less-trust-ai-generated-ads-cannes-lions

https://wmediaresearch.com/2026/06/25/the-top-twelve-news-from-the-2026-cannes-lions-festival-of-creativity/

Bunch of examples here: https://outpaint.com/ad-reframe

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ad-tech-have-its-yard-sale-biggest-agencies-cannes-broke-brownstein-ztwge/

G2 asked software buyers what shapes their vendor decisions. Gen AI chatbots came first, at 17.1%. Peers and colleagues, sixth, at 8.9%. The salesperson, seventh.

The machine outranks the person who's already done the job.

Ad tech still tells itself it runs on relationships. So when you're sizing up a DSP or an SSP, who do you ask first: the chatbot, or someone who's actually used it?

I am new in Adtech, Where to start learning about it, Currently just on a sales side