AdExchanger

Ad tech entrepreneur Chris Cunningham’s early-stage investment firm, C2 Ventures, has a new fund: just over $20 million for pre-Series A companies, plus $2.55 million for pre-seed startups. But there’s one thing he won’t be investing in, and that’s ad tech. Listen in to learn why.

Keyword blocklists are blunt instruments, and yet they persist in programmatic media buying. It’s time to kick blocklists to the curb and start curating keywords by campaign, says contextual pioneer John Snyder, who sold his company, Grapeshot, to Oracle in 2018.

When it comes to their DEI commitments, are brands more talk or more action? We bring together the buy side and sell side – Publicis President Jason DaWayne Smith and Black Enterprise President and CEO Butch Graves Jr. – for a frank discussion about whether the industry has measured up.

Shopify seller turned ad tech CEO and entrepreneur Regina Ye founded her startup, Topsort, last year to help retailers launch auction-based ads on their sites through an API. Performance advertising shouldn’t be so hard for smaller brands, Ye says, on this week’s episode.

For years, data privacy regulators didn’t have the tools – or the teeth – they needed to effectively enforce proper standards on the internet. Then came GDPR. Now they have the tools and the teeth, but seem largely unable or unwilling to disrupt the status quo. At least that’s the story to hear Johnny Ryan tell it on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.

Retail media networks are coming out of the woodwork. And it may feel like everyone’s got one. But it’s time to stop using RMN as an umbrella term. The details matter, says Patrick Miller, co-president of commerce at Edge by Ascential, on this week’s episode.

With the lines blurring between traditional TV content and streaming media, YouTube made its upfronts debut this year. YouTube VP Debbie Weinstein explains why.

Probabilistic attribution is a “stopgap,” says newly appointed Adjust CEO Simon “Bobby” Dussart. Using it for now is fine, but SKAdNetwork is the future of measurement on iOS – take it or leave it. Also in this episode: Remaining independent under parent company AppLovin.

Apple’s ATT rollout triggered an industry-wide freakout among mobile ad tech companies. But surprisingly, over the past year Apple has gotten “more accessible,” says Omer Kaplan, CRO and co-founder of ironSource. Also in this episode: Being a newly public ad tech company in a tricky market.

The bad news: The internet as a whole has a larger carbon footprint than the entire airline industry (!!), and programmatic advertising is a contributor. The good news: “The extent to which people are aware of that and open to a conversion is changing at a phenomenally fast rate,” says Amy Williams, CEO and founder of sustainable advertising startup Good-Loop.