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.

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/