The Complete Feed

Every AI breakthrough starts with something less glamorous than the latest model: clean, trustworthy data. In this episode of Signal & Noise, Hyatt's Jer Tippets joins Brett House and Rio Longacre to explain why data quality, governance, identity, and privacy are the real foundation of AI. From customer identity and CDPs to personalization and digital measurement, this conversation explores what brands need to get right before AI can truly deliver.

For years, digital advertising has optimized for cheaper impressions, stronger identity signals, and higher ROAS—but what if it's been overlooking the quality of the media itself? In this episode of Signal & Noise, Rio Longacre and Brett House are joined by Erez Levin, Founder of Emmett Advisory, to explore why media quality may be the industry's missing performance signal. They discuss attention, CTV, attribution, AI, and why marketers must rethink what truly drives advertis

As enterprises race to deploy AI, many are discovering that the biggest challenge isn’t choosing the right model—it’s building a trusted, consented, real-time data foundation. In this article, we explore why data quality, identity, and consent are becoming the true competitive advantage in enterprise AI, and how companies like Tealium are helping organizations prepare for this next era of intelligent, customer-centric experiences.

The future of digital advertising may have just taken a major step forward. Following Boostr and Vox Media’s landmark agentic media buy using AdCP, Patrick O’Leary joins Signal & Noise to explain how AI agents negotiated a real media transaction, what humans still controlled, and why this could reshape buying, selling, and the economics of digital advertising. If you want to understand where agentic trading is headed, this conversation is essential.

Attribution was supposed to make marketing measurable. Instead, privacy changes, signal loss, and walled gardens have made it harder than ever to know what's actually driving results. In this episode of Signal & Noise, Brett House and Rio Longacre sit down with Brian Quinn, President & GM of AppsFlyer, to explore the future of attribution, fraud, clean rooms, AI, and why the industry's most trusted metrics may deserve a second look.

Agentic trading is no longer a future concept—it has already begun. As AI agents start negotiating media transactions directly, the real question isn't whether RTB disappears, but how much of advertising shifts to a new hybrid model. What happens to DSPs, SSPs, agencies, and publishers when machines can negotiate outcomes? A look at the economics, incentives, and future of programmatic advertising.

Colorado has become ground zero in the debate over how to regulate AI without slowing innovation. In this episode of Signal & Noise, Brett House and Rio Longacre sit down with Srinivas "Chinnu" Parinandi of the University of Colorado Boulder to explore AI regulation, privacy laws, technology policy, and data centers. The conversation examines how today's policy decisions could shape America's competitiveness, innovation, and the future of AI.

What happens when being yourself becomes your biggest competitive advantage? In his first solo Signal & Noise episode, Krish Raja sits down with Justin Kramm, Founder & Creative Director of Shit Show Creative, for a conversation that blends humor with genuine insight. They explore authenticity, creativity, AI, LinkedIn, Cannes Lions, and why embracing your unique voice can open doors, build community, and create opportunities no polished corporate persona ever could.

Day 4 closes out Signal & Noise’s first Cannes Lions with conversations that capture where marketing is headed next. From AI agents and ad fraud to transparency, identity, enterprise transformation, and publisher innovation, Rio Longacre, Brett House, and Krish Raja speak with leaders from Dstillery, CHEQ, Stagwell Marketing Cloud, Chili Piper, Credera, and more to wrap up an unforgettable week at Cannes Lions 2026.

Day 3 at Cannes Lions 2026 brought some of the week's most insightful conversations from Hearst House. Signal & Noise sat down with leaders from Experian, Klarna, Zeta Global, Hearst, ID5, Real Chemistry, Omnicom Media Group Health, and MediaRadar to explore AI deployment, identity, healthcare innovation, measurement, and why trusted data and premium content are becoming more valuable as the industry moves from AI experimentation to real-world execution.

A family vacation in the Dominican Republic becomes a reflection on technology, careers, and the hidden cost of familiarity. Mike Vicenzino explores why our favorite tools, habits, and workflows shouldn’t simply be inherited—they should continually earn their place. In a world changing faster than ever, comfort may be a floor, but it should never become a ceiling.

Signal & Noise is live from Cannes Lions 2026 with Rio Longacre, Krish Raja, and Brett House. Recorded at Hearst House, this special compilation features conversations with leaders across media, advertising, and marketing on the biggest trends shaping the industry—from agency transformation and premium TV to creativity, measurement, healthcare marketing, and the future of brand building.

For weeks, reports suggested Publicis was exploring a relationship with Hightouch following its acquisition of LiveRamp. In this special Signal & Noise Signal Break, Hightouch CEO Tejas Manohar publicly confirms those discussions for the first time. Brett House, Rio Longacre, and Tejas explore what it could mean for identity, composable CDPs, AI, activation, and the future of marketing infrastructure.

Publishers create the content, build the audiences, and bear the costs—yet often capture only a fraction of the value they generate. In this Signal & Noise exclusive, Rio Longacre and Brett House sit down with Keith Petri and Rich Hyden of Viant to explore the future of publisher monetization, identity, CTV, signal quality, and programmatic advertising. The conversation examines how publishers can strengthen their position in the digital advertising ecosystem and reclaim econ

AI won't just eliminate managers—it will collapse entire categories of work. As AI absorbs research, analysis, coding, design, and coordination tasks, the value of specialization declines while the value of judgment rises. The winners won't be the people who know the most, but those who can combine experience, context, and AI into unprecedented leverage. The real challenge isn't replacing workers—it's figuring out how the next generation gains the experience needed to become

What happens when an AdTech engineer decides software isn’t ambitious enough? In this episode of Signal & Noise, Brett House and Rio Longacre speak with Blake Scholl, Founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, about reviving supersonic flight, lessons from Amazon and Groupon, the future of AI, and why the biggest breakthroughs come from building hard things the world stopped believing in.

What happens when AI stops assisting consumers and starts acting on their behalf? In this episode of Signal & Noise, Rio Longacre and Brett House speak with industry analyst Karsten Weide about the future of AI-powered advertising, agentic commerce, and autonomous media buying. The conversation explores how OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Meta, and emerging AI platforms could fundamentally reshape the digital economy and the future of the open web.

As AI leaders envision a future of abundance powered by “machines of loving grace,” an older warning feels newly relevant. Drawing on E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops, this essay explores a question that receives surprisingly little attention: What happens when humans outsource not just labor, but memory, judgment, creativity, and thinking itself? The most important question about AI may not be what machines become—but what humans become in response.

In this episode of Signal & Noise, Vanessa Otero, Founder and CEO of Ad Fontes Media and creator of the Media Bias Chart, joins Rio Longacre and Brett House to explore trust, misinformation, media fragmentation, and the future of journalism. The conversation examines social media algorithms, AI-generated content, local news decline, brand safety, CTV advertising, and whether objective journalism can survive in today’s polarized information ecosystem.

The future of marketing isn't about managing more software—it's about connecting data, intelligence, and decision-making. Scott Brinker explains how AI is dissolving the boundaries between MarTech, AdTech, and enterprise operations, creating a new operating model built around context, automation, and orchestration.

The MarTech Stack was built for a world where humans operated software manually. But AI agents don’t navigate dashboards, workflows, and software categories the way people do — they orchestrate systems. As AI collapses the boundaries between Martech, AdTech, data infrastructure, and workflow automation, the industry is shifting away from disconnected stacks of tools and toward integrated Marketing Operating Systems built around context, orchestration, identity, and intelligen

As AI-driven advertising shifts from cookies and IDs to embeddings and vectors, many in AdTech are treating abstraction as a privacy loophole. In this Signal & Noise Executive Voices piece, Evgeny Popov argues that embeddings do not eliminate GDPR risk — they simply move it into a more opaque layer of the system. The architecture changed. The regulatory reality did not.

The future of marketing isn't about managing more software—it's about connecting data, intelligence, and decision-making. Scott Brinker explains how AI is dissolving the boundaries between MarTech, AdTech, and enterprise operations, creating a new operating model built around context, automation, and orchestration.

Advertising is coming to AI, but it may not reshape the industry in the way many expect. In this article, Rio Longacre examines the fierce debate between skeptics, optimists, and purists, arguing that ads will become a significant revenue stream for AI platforms like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini. The key insight: unlike Google Search, these companies already generate extraordinary subscription and enterprise revenue, making advertising highly valuable—but ultimately incremen