Marketing

This year, programmatic companies faced tough decisions about privacy, awkward acquisitions and the cookie die-off that never quite happened. The post Top 10 Stories of 2025 appeared first on AdExchanger.

Even in the era of the 20-person Microsoft Teams meeting, some advertising execs rack up the air miles. Andrea Timmerman, global chief client officer at media agency Assembly, heads out from her Minneapolis, Minn. base to the agency’s offices and those of its clients in Singapore, Dubai, London and New York between two and four

AI-powered search rewrote the rules of SEO this year with diminishing click-through rates and referral traffic upending decades of SEO strategies. In kind, publishers shifted from optimizing headlines and keywords to brand visibility and attribution tracking to appear in AI search results. The shifts are still underway as publishers head into 2026: KPIs are changing,

Competition between DSPs and SSPs was extra spicy this year. The Trade Desk’s aggressive posture against SSPs – which it branded as “resellers” contributing little to the programmatic supply chain – sparked countless hot takes on ad industry social media channels and in AdExchanger columns. Thought leaders also had plenty to say about increased competition

Generative AI tools crept closer to the uncanny valley this year as tools like OpenAI’s Sora or Google’s Nano Banana, have flooded the market. Marketers have higher expectations than ever for AI to streamline marketing processes and save dollars. The novelty of generative AI has worn off and marketers want controllable, consistent tools that can

2025 — what a ride in media. Even for battle-worn publishers already so well accustomed to rewriting their playbooks to adapt to whatever hot plate has been flung at them (the print-to-digital crash, endless Google algorithm swings, Facebook’s pivot away from news, the cookie collapse, to name a few), 2025 was pretty rough.  The stomach-dropping

This story was originally published on sister site, Modern Retail. 2025 was another challenging year for the retail industry, as tariffs added another crushing blow to an industry that had already been dealing with sky-high inflation and waning VC dollars in recent years. The numbers lay bare how challenging it was for the retail industry:

Interested in sharing your perspectives on the media and marketing industries? Join the Digiday research panel. It’s been another year of ups and downs in the marketing and media businesses — and Digiday+ Research tracked them throughout the year, surveying publisher, agency, brand and retailer professionals at regular intervals throughout 2025. This is a member-exclusive

This was the year AI went from being a future concern for publishers to being part of their daily reality. In 2025, generative AI was weaved into traffic analyses, licensing negotiations and product development. Clicks from search waned. AI answers increasingly replaced blue links that drive people to publishers’ sites. Some companies struck AI content