Black Friday still carries the same headline energy, big discounts and limited time offers. What changed is how people actually reach those purchases. Instead of rushing straight to retailer sites, shoppers float through a mix of content. They read reviews, scan gift guides, watch videos, compare brands, and relax with entertainment. Somewhere along that path, the decision gets made. The cart is just the final step. For brands, that means Black Friday is less about screaming

Agentic AI has become one of the biggest topics in advertising this year. Everyone is talking about systems that take more control, make more decisions, and automate more of the daily work that used to fall on media buyers. But the term “Agentic AI” can feel intimidating if you are not deep in machine learning. The truth is much simpler. Agentic AI is just AI that does not wait for you to give it step by step instructions. It plans, evaluates, and acts on its own. It is a shi

People enter the shopping season with clear goals. They plan earlier, compare more, and trust the content they choose on their own. The path to purchase used to be impulse driven. Now it is a steady mix of research, emotion, social influence, and moment level signals that reveal what someone is actually thinking. This is why campaigns that rely only on broad audiences miss the mark. Real performance now comes from understanding the meaning, tone, and intent inside the content

Mavern Media Integrates with Index Marketplaces to Advance AI-Powered Curation   and Transparent Supply Path Optimization    Philadelphia, PA • October 2025   Mavern Media and Index Exchange set a new standard for signal-driven, transparent, and performance-focused programmatic media.    Mavern Media, a programmatic curation company known for its advanced contextual and semantic AI, SignalTap, announced it has joined  Index Marketplaces,  Index Exchange’s  omnichannel platfor

The Shift Happening Now The open web isn’t collapsing, but it’s definitely contracting. Forrester projects that nearly a third of display budgets could disappear from open web environments by 2026 as brands chase performance and predictability in more controlled ecosystems like CTV, retail media, and social. Even Google has acknowledged that open-web display is “in rapid decline.” The reasons aren’t mysterious, traffic is fragmenting, user behavior is changing, and the moneti

For years, advertising rewarded scale above everything. The biggest networks owned the advantage: premium inventory access, data privileges, and measurement capabilities locked behind enterprise spend. Independent agencies did the smart work, yet constantly found themselves fighting uphill. That system is finally changing. AI is breaking the legacy model wide open. Today, independent agencies have access to the same (if not better) technology and intelligence than the holding

The Digiday Media Buying Summit in Phoenix was more than another industry event, it was a real look at where media is heading. The conversations were sharper, the questions bolder, and the energy felt less about buzzwords and more about building what’s next. Across three days, one theme kept surfacing: the industry isn’t waiting for the future of media, it’s rebuilding it. From retail and commerce to TV and AI, the lines between data, creative, and culture are blurring and fa

Connected TV has become the backbone of modern advertising. Streaming isn’t the “new channel” anymore, it’s the channel, and that shift...

For years, digital advertising relied on user IDs (cookies, device IDs, hashed emails) to find and follow audiences. But as those...

For years, ad networks promised “premium inventory” and “hand-selected placements.” It sounded great—until buyers realized there was...

At Digiday DPS, the chatter wasn’t about privacy or Core Web Vitals, it was about AI Overviews. Search engines are increasingly serving...

Everywhere you turn in ad tech, someone’s launching a new AI tool promising smarter targeting, faster optimization, or better ROI. It...

Retail media is rewriting the rules of digital advertising. By the end of 2025, nearly 90% of digital display ads will be bought...

The ad tech space is full of big promises and shiny terminology. Words like “omnichannel,” “identity resolution,” and “precision...

How Mavern and SignalTap make relevance and clean supply work together The signal that moves people isn’t a profile, it’s the moment....

Q4 is when everything tightens...budgets, timelines, and the margin for error. And if you’re planning to win the holidays, your CTV...

How Curation, Clean Supply, and Feedback Loops Are Resetting the CTV Market Why This Matters Now CTV is finally delivering the scale,...

Creative has historically lagged behind in programmatic strategy. While media buying has become increasingly automated and...

Let’s be clear. Programmatic has never been short on tools. But the real unlock isn’t just better tech, it’s better signal. And in CTV,...

Programmatic is getting smarter, but it’s also getting noisier. More inventory, more players, more layers. That’s led to a paradox:...