Karsten Weide

AdTech influencer. Drive demand for your products with our articles, posts, infographics, videos, appearances. Custom research: competitive info, TAMs, surveys.

[Karsten Weide @KarstenW]

Here are @WMediaResearch's Top 10 Trends in Advertising in 2026!

1. The Big Short: The Hidden Risks Lurking Beneath the Forecasts
2. There Will Be Blood: The Supply-Chain Shakeup
3. Honey, I Shrunk the Art Department: Gen-AI Taking Over
4. Advertising Wars: The Rise of AI Agents
5. Rules of Engagement: The Protocols Fueling the Agentic Era
6. No Country for Old Cookies: The New Identity Playbook
7. Measure for Measure: Can We Keep Up With Signal Loss?
8. The Verdict: The Post-Google Era Begins for the Open Web
9. The Day After Tomorrow: The Zero-Click Search Apocalypse
10. I, Agent: When Bots Buy - What Happens to Advertising?

READ all 10 trends for FREE here:
Everything Everywhere All at Once: The Advertising Revolution Of 2026
https://t.co/twUjF2ObiS

Companies covered: @Adobe, @AdRoll, @Albertsons, @amazon, @AppLovin, @criteo, @Disney, @doubleverify, @epsilon, @Google, @humansecurity, @IABTechLab, @IndexExchange, @integralads, @Meta, @Microsoft, @MSAdvertising, @Novacap_HQ, @OpenX, @prebidorg, @PubMatic, @Rockerbox, @Sincera, @TheTradeDesk, @TikTok, @Yahoo.

[Karsten Weide @KarstenW]

@eve_bouff Well, I for one want to see something in movies that I do not see in the real world.

[Abhishek B R @abhitwt]

Every company’s AI workflow rn be like 😭💀

[Karsten Weide @KarstenW]

@WSJbusiness Barry, what did you do to Jeeves? What?!

[Karsten Weide @KarstenW]

I’m beginning to wonder if there is enough capital to fund three offerings this size (OpenAI and Anthropocene).

See How SpaceX Is About to Eclipse Every Other Blockbuster IPO https://t.co/BCFC7KTPQ3

[Karsten Weide @KarstenW]

@LarryJones 20/20

[Karsten Weide @KarstenW]

The Trade Desk has just announced the hiring of a new CFO, Nate Olmsted.

This is good news for TTD. Nate comes with large-scale tech company experience (Logitech), and with public company chops (which the two previous CFOs lacked), helping to navigate Wall Street expectations.

As TTD matures and growth slows, Nate’s background is well suited to instill fiscal discipline and maintain profitability.

The commentariat, while reflexively snarky, does point out two fair concerns. He is being hired into a high executive turnover situation, which does contain risk (“fourth CFO in a year”). Yet he seems to have the exact qualities needed to steady the boat.

Also, while it is true that Nate does not have an AdTech background, he does come with AI infrastructure expertise. This will help TTD with mastering the new world of LLM-based AI and agentic AI.

But above all, I like to see a solid CFO come in who knows his numbers.

Everything else is just icing on the cake.

[ADWEEK @Adweek]

EXCLUSIVE | @TheTradeDesk has named Nate Olmstead as its new chief financial officer, with a start date of July 9 reporting to CEO Jeff Green, making him the company’s fourth finance chief in about a year. https://t.co/9JDXH0U0JF

[PubMatic @PubMatic]

Shared screens make ads stick. 53% of co-viewers recall brands better than solo viewers across APAC. Attention is one thing - memory is what drives results. Read the full study: https://t.co/ClC5hn6lYF

#CTV #Advertising #AdTech #Programmatic

[Karsten Weide @KarstenW]

@MorningBrew Good Lord! If Disney had set out to deliberately destroy the Star Wars franchise, they couldn't have done a better job.

[Karsten Weide @KarstenW]

PubMatic: Bring Your Own Model, Move Decisioning to the Supply-Side

Here's an interesting news item that got too little attention: @PubMatic just launched Decision Fabric, a bring-your-own-model framework that lets DSPs and algorithm companies deploy their proprietary decisioning models inside PubMatic's auction.

Here’s the gist of the announcement: partners package their model as a Docker container, PubMatic hosts it within its infrastructure, and at each qualifying auction the model runs inference on live bidstream signals before traffic shaping has filtered anything away. The output is a list of segment IDs returned in under ten milliseconds, qualifying impressions for curated deals in real time. Deploy your container, read PubMatic's bidstream data, activate at auction speed. That's the loop.

What's in it for DSPs? A lot of what they've been missing. By the time a bid lands at a DSP, it's already been compressed, shaped, and stripped of context. Decision Fabric puts qualification upstream of that loss, on the full signal set. That means better-informed decisioning and better performance - it also means giving PubMatic more power and creating a lock-in effect.

What’s more, moving decisioning onto PubMatic’s high-speed stack also means faster transactions, making this infrastructure news as well as feature news, and news that differentiate PubMatic from other SSPs.

Today it's US-only, one container per partner, and requires Docker packaging capability. Early live partners on the algorithmic side are @inpoweredai and Chalice, with more coming over the course of the year according to PubMatic.

https://t.co/NnilbA5Yxi

[Karsten Weide @KarstenW]

Free-flowing conversation on the future of agentic AI, ad tech, and the coming wave of agentic commerce with @eMarketingAssoc's Kevin Lee.

https://t.co/kKGO5mOKvv via @YouTube

[Karsten Weide @KarstenW]

@RaminNasibov Still play EQ. 27th anniversary just now.

[Karsten Weide @KarstenW]

@verklin Fair point, Ryan, thank you for pointing it out!

[Karsten Weide @KarstenW]

Walmart Opens Door to its Walled Garden in Partnership with Yahoo and Magnite

For years, retail media operated on a simple premise: if you wanted access to a retailer's first-party shopper data, you had to come into that retailer's walled garden and play by its rules. Yesterday, Walmart, Yahoo and Magnite blew up that conventional wisdom with a deal that is a limited first step, but whose implications for retail media can hardly be overstated.

Walmart Connect is making its audience data and closed-loop sales measurement available inside Yahoo DSP, initially across VIZIO CTV inventory, with Magnite providing the supply-side technology for audience activation. In plain English, advertisers can now use Walmart shopper data, buy premium VIZIO CTV inventory through Yahoo, and measure results against actual Walmart sales - without living inside Walmart's own buying environment.

Everybody Wins

Yahoo gets the most obvious victory. Few DSPs can offer direct access to one of the world's largest retail media datasets tied to actual purchase outcomes. Walmart's shopper graph instantly makes Yahoo DSP more relevant to agencies and brands seeking alternatives to Google, Amazon and The Trade Desk.

Walmart benefits because on-site retail media growth eventually hits a ceiling. To keep growing, Walmart must export its data and inventory into the broader internet - while preserving what makes retail media valuable in the first place: sales attribution.

Magnite also wins: SSPs were once viewed as dumb pipes. Increasingly they are becoming intelligence layers. Positioning itself as the infrastructure where retailer data, audience decisioning and measurement happen close to the impression is a far more defensible business than simply auctioning inventory.

What This Means For Everyone Else

The message to competing DSPs is clear: retail media data and inventory are becoming portable. Walmart's deepest programmatic ties were historically associated with The Trade Desk; that exclusivity has now expired. Expect others to follow Yahoo to the table.

Every SSP from PubMatic to Index Exchange is studying this announcement carefully as you read this. If audience activation and commerce signals can occur at the supply layer, SSPs gain real leverage.

Competing retail media networks - think Kroger Precision Marketing, Target's Roundel, Instacart Ads - should be nervous. Networks have spent years convincing advertisers to use proprietary platforms, and Walmart is now suggesting a different future: bring data and inventory to where buyers already buy.

Some networks will follow. Some will double down on closed ecosystems and find themselves explaining to advertisers why they can't buy Kroger or Target or Instacart audiences from their existing DSP seats.

[Karsten Weide @KarstenW]

Amazon 2026 Publisher Services Summit: Improving Publishers’ Lives

Amazon Publisher Services (APS) held its annual Summit this morning, and if you are trying to understand Amazon's end game in digital advertising, you can learn some of it here. The announcements range from practical upgrades to ambitious swings, and together they paint a picture of a company positioning itself as the operating system of publisher monetization.

Amazon wants to own the signals layer

Signal IQ expanding to the full OpenRTB bidstream might sound dry, but it's arguably the most important thing on the list of APS news. Amazon is now benchmarking publishers' signal pass rates against their peers and, this summer, will tell them in dollar terms exactly how much money they're leaving on the table. That's the kind of thing that gets a CFO's attention.

Amazon's Signal IQ is a publisher measurement tool that evaluates the performance or value of advertising signals (e.g., third-party IDs). Pass rates refer to the percentage of ad requests in which a publisher successfully includes or "passes" specific advertising signals in the bidstream to buyers.

Mobile SDK: More Biz For App Publishers And Exchanges - And More Dependency

The new Mobile SDK bridge lets third-party bidders like InMobi plug into APS demand and compete in on-device auctions. Its main idea is to reduce friction between Amazon’s advertisers and mobile app inventory, making it easier to bypass the patchwork SDK integrations that have historically given smaller exchanges their foothold.

PSAI: the AI assistant everyone needed

Publisher Supply AI, launching in open beta this summer, lets you ask plain-English questions about your bid signals and performance logs without downloading seventeen spreadsheets first. If it delivers on proactive monitoring and automated alerts, it could be the most impactful thing on this list for day-to-day publisher teams.

Shopping Insights, Interactive Video, and APC round out a full-funnel story

Shopping Insights deals - Amazon's shopping and streaming signals paired with publisher inventory - now extend to web and mobile. Interactive Video Ads expand to mobile and CTV with tap-to-purchase, no QR codes needed. And Amazon Publisher Cloud now covers mid-funnel consideration objectives starting in June, explicitly courting brands that don't sell on Amazon at all.

What this means for advertising

For publishers, this is mostly good news with a side of dependency risk. For rival adtech vendors, Amazon is building direct bridges where intermediaries used to sit. For advertisers, it's straightforwardly positive. More inventory, better signals, lower friction.

The APS Summit has always telegraphed where Amazon thinks the market is going. This year's message: signals, AI, and commerce are the three legs of the stool, and Amazon goes for all three. And for anyone thinking Amazon Ads might discontinue its APS network business - that’s not going to happen anytime soon.

[Karsten Weide @KarstenW]

@StevenCheung47 Language.

[Karsten Weide @KarstenW]

@aviationbrk "I'm still alive, that is the main thing."

[Karsten Weide @KarstenW]

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