Publishers

After a prolonged will-they, won’t-they phase between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery, Netflix swooped in with an $83 billion offer on Friday to acquire the Warner Bros. side of the business.

The metaverse hype is over; Apple Maps forays into advertising; and streamers vie for HBO Max and the WBD studio archive.

Spencer has exited The Trade Desk after 12 years, marking another major leadership change amid friction with ad tech trade groups and intensifying competition across the DSP landscape.

Broadsign may actually be building a platform that will make an attractive acquisition target down the road. And one of the major cross-platform Big Tech players feels like the most likely buyer.

CTV spending is flattening, performance is plateauing and buyers are hesitant to push budgets further. The reason is not complicated. When buyers cannot see what they are buying, they cannot commit their spend with conviction.

Enjoy this weekly comic from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem … and happy Thanksgiving!

On Tuesday, digital out-of-home (DOOH) ad tech startup Place Exchange was acquired by Broadsign, another out-of-home SSP.

E.l.f. Beauty’s “So Many Dicks” campaign targets corporate leaders via contextual advertising with the goal of increasing diversity in corporate boardrooms.

After pulling back on moderation, Instagram gets flooded with antisemites; BidSwitch builds a programmatic way for AI bots to pay to crawl websites; and nearly half of Gen Z dislikes AI content.

Most of what’s sold as “contextual” today still runs on the same keyword logic we used a decade ago. The industry didn’t reinvent contextual targeting; it simply replaced one keyword with a cluster.