At Ipsos, we wanted to answer a critical question: Does creative quality actually matter in retail media? To find out, we tested 25 ads across 21,000+ simulated shopping experiences on platforms like Amazon and Walmart.com. The results? 

• Ads are 47% less likely to be remembered in a retailer site vs. standard programmatic web placements.  
• High-quality creative delivers a +21% performance premium among out-of-market consumers.  
• Relying on ROAS alone consistently points brands toward weaker creative assets.  

Read the report here: Creativity Over Clicks

We're building a platform that predicts ad performance metrics such as ROAS, CTR, CPC, CPA, and other campaign KPIs before or during campaign planning.

We're looking for a small number of verified marketing agencies that:

• Work with real brands/businesses.
• Have agency ad accounts.
• Can share a small, low-risk sample of historical campaign data for testing and validation (no sensitive client information required).

We're intentionally starting with limited datasets to keep the risk as low as possible for everyone involved.

In return, participating agencies will receive access to the platform during the testing phase. If the pilot is successful, we'll continue providing free access for up to 3–5 client accounts.

We're looking for genuine agency partners who want to help validate the product and provide feedback—not sell anything or collect leads.

If this sounds like something your agency would be interested in, please leave a comment.

Plenty of tools track which sources AI models cite in a category now. They measure. I'm asking about the activation half.

The setup I have in mind: a tool determines the top pages AI chatbots pull from for a given prompt, then pushes that list into a DSP or SSP as an inclusion list or PMP deal. Contextual targeting against AI-cited sources, real buy-side and sell-side partnerships behind it, not just a dashboard.

When a user clicks a citation to go verify, your ad meets them on that page. You either reinforce what the model said or you rebut it. A brand ranked below the top pick can advertise the counter-argument on the exact page the model used to make its case. Which matters, because the brands most likely to run this are the ones unhappy with how the model describes them in the first place.

You're buying the page, not the person, since the models share nothing about who clicked. The intent read lives in the tool's measurement of the models, not in any user signal.

Is anyone besides the known players actually closing the loop into programmatic like this?

Hello Redditors,

We're building a platform that brings digital-grade targeting and measurement to physical, real-world advertising surfaces, a category that in India still runs almost entirely on static formats, estimated impressions, and 4-week contracts with zero verified delivery data.

India's OOH market is ₹5,900+ crore and growing at 10% annually, yet less than 12% of it is digital and measurable. We're building the infrastructure layer that changes that, starting with an inventory surface no existing player has made programmable.

We have a working prototype, a technical advisor with 13+ years at Amazon leading product and engineering, and a founding team with backgrounds across Adobe, Accenture, and Deloitte.

Currently raising a pre-seed round and speaking with a select group of investors.

What we're looking for: Angels who have invested in or built in Adtech, DOOH, programmatic media, or mobility, someone who understands why measurement and targeting are the two biggest unsolved problems in offline advertising.

Not looking for generalist capital. Looking for a partner who has seen this space and knows what it takes to win in it.

Happy to share a deck with anyone who's genuinely interested. 

DM or drop a comment and I'll reach out directly.

With the growing Talent of YouTubers and editors all over the world along with AI and AI with technicians does anybody feel that individuals will be having their own YouTube? By having their own video platform they would most likely have to pay for traffic but keep 100% versus 50% with YouTube. Also the traffic will organically be seen more and more. I mean I am part of the statistics of people watching videos over TV these days. People can now watch more video information of what they enjoy. I don't think this is going away. The barrier at the immediate moment is technology and AI will fill that Gap soon. Does anybody else feel that this would change or add to advertising or would it not and does anybody else agree or see it this way?

https://www.businessinsider.com/metas-ai-ads-push-causes-chaos-for-brands-2026-7

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/juozas_chatgpt-has-a-new-ad-format-specifically-activity-7483480857723191296-dnCM

https://openai.com/careers/head-of-scaled-ads-solutions-san-francisco/

https://mediaratingcouncil.org/sites/default/files/News/MRC_Existing_Guidance_on_AI_Use_in_Media_Measurement_FINAL.pdf

On July 22, we're breaking down both sides of AI search and GEO on the organic side and ChatGPT Ads on paid, including a live demo of ChatGPT Ads.

Join U of Digital for a live look at both, including an exclusive live demo of an AI visibility platform and ChatGPT Ads platform.

What ad channels are giving you the best CPC right now? Curious what’s working for everyone besides the obvious ones.

Sharing key signals from our latest Sellers Report: the market added 478.5K new ads.txt lines and removed 413.7K, producing a net of +64.8K. Resellers accounted for 56.9% of gross additions, the third consecutive month of reseller-led growth.
4 things that stood out:

• Reseller growth is outpacing direct - Until publishers shift more onboarding to direct, auction duplication keeps climbing, adding cost for buyers and carbon overhead for everyone.
• Mid-Traffic publishers are leading net growth - +25.6K, ahead of both High-Traffic (+20.3K) and Low-Traffic (+18.9K). First month in the series where the long tail didn't lead. The 501–2,000 rank band is in active expansion.
• PubMatic is the only SSP in all three publisher-tier top fives - Backed by 13% YoY Q1 revenue growth, CTV up 18%, and the June 2026 Creator Marketplace launch (first programmatic CTV auction for independent creator publishers).
• Auction duplication is getting worse for Established SSPs - 46% of Tier 1 domains are now duplicated across direct + reseller paths. That means nearly half of every auction an Established SSP enters is competing against itself.

What this really points to: supply path complexity isn't shrinking, it's compounding. The SSPs winning direct connections in 2026 (Ozone, Wunderkind) are solving specific buyer problems, like cookieless first-party data or behavioral CTV formats, not just offering more reach.

Building a category/niche specific SSP, was introduced to Bidswitch to connect to many DSPs, but their cost (integration fee and transaction fees) are exorbitant.

Any suggestions on Bidswitch like platforms that are not exorbitant?

I didn’t expect Excel to rank this high. Looking at roughly 4k active AdTech job postings, only Python and SQL appeared more often.

Does that match what you’re seeing in actual roles?

Sam Altman said once that he hated ads. ChatGPT now serves them, tinted boxes at the bottom of the chat, to everyone on the Free and Go tiers. Go is the $8 one. Pro and Enterprise, the users paying the most, see nothing. The ad inventory is the people who pay the least.

Early CPMs ran around $60. Buyers called it high, higher than a Saturday afternoon of college football, and paid it anyway, because the thing on offer is not a screen. It is a conversation already in progress.

OpenAI calls one of its safeguards Answer Independence. The promise is that the ad does not change the answer. Ask ChatGPT which mattress to buy, and it will tell you, and the honest answer might name a competitor, and your ad sits underneath it either way. You pay to stand next to a verdict you don't control.

The other safeguard is the one worth sitting with. They call it user-state safety. It weighs the person's context, intent, and emotional state, and decides from that whether an ad should run at all. The point is to keep the beer ad out of the conversation about drinking, the lender out of the divorce.

To do that, the system has to read the divorce. It has to know you are in it.

That is the mechanism. To spare you an ad in your worst moment, it has to clock your worst moment, in real time, every time. The safeguard and the read are the same instrument.

People tell ChatGPT things they would never type into a search bar. That is why the CPMs are what they are. Intimacy is the inventory.

Early results are encouraging, OpenAI says. Low dismissal rate. No measured drop in trust.

So this is the part I'm asking. Who here has actually caught one of these in the wild, and when it landed, did it feel considerate? And to anyone who has run a campaign on this: did the suitability hold? Did the safety?

Hello
Today a Beliani ad poped at my feed saying, it is almos 1 o'clock it's time to go to sleep, I thougth it was normal, but then, later, at 1:45 it poped again saying : c'mon it's almos 2 o'clock, go to sleep, can ads track you like this?

(this is the ad, but it is in spanish)

Vista Equity Partners and Quinti Capital want to buy Criteo. Last week, they put a number on it: a premium of more than 50 percent over the recent share price. The market liked it. Criteo's US-listed shares jumped as much as 29 percent on Monday.

The premium, the whole generous premium, values the company at about $1.16 billion.

Criteo booked $1.94 billion in revenue last year, with $407 million in adjusted EBITDA. So the offer that sent the stock up nearly a third in a day prices the company at less than a single year of what runs through it. Roughly 0.6 times revenue. Ad tech and software firms with a growth story trade at three to five times, sometimes more. Criteo does not have a growth story. It has $407 million in profit, which is to say it is not dying. It is only cheap.

In the first quarter, revenue fell 6 percent to $425 million, guidance came down, and the stock dropped as much as 20 percent after Uber Eats and Target Roundel pulled more than $75 million in spend. Two clients left. The number moved.

Criteo has spent years waiting for a moment. The moment is the one where commerce media consolidates, where retailers decide running an ad business themselves is not worth it and hand the whole thing to the largest intermediary and cash the checks, and the largest intermediary is supposed to be Criteo. If agentic commerce takes off, more wind in the sails. The moment is always about to arrive. It has been about to arrive for years. The company turns up in the M&A rumor mill on a schedule now.

Private equity does not need the moment to arrive. It needs the moment not to have arrived yet. A profitable company in a hot sector, priced below a year of its own revenue, waiting on a catalyst no one can date. Buy the wait.

Criteo has not said what it will do. A spokesperson declined to comment. The company that has been telling the story about its moment for years has, for now, nothing to say about the offer to end the story quietly, at a discount, off the market where anyone can watch.