The Complete Feed

Publicis’s planned acquisition of LiveRamp has put neutral advertising infrastructure in play. ID5 co-founder and CEO Mathieu Roche returns after his Cannes conversation with Rio to map the real replacement job: onboarding, identity, clean rooms, activation, measurement, governance, and publisher distribution. Brett and Rio also examine ID5’s TrueData acquisition, its work with Optable and other pub-tech partners, and whether a coalition of specialists can replace an embedded

Kurt Donnell left M&A law for digital media and became the first CEO of Freestar, helping scale it into a global publisher monetization business. Now the open web faces a harder test: declining search traffic, AI answer engines, fragmented AdTech, and advertiser dollars moving to simpler closed platforms. Can radical transparency restore trust, what publishers should demand from AI companies, and whether Freestar’s new pubOS creates real leverage—or merely manages declines.

Programmatic advertising automated the transaction. AI may automate the negotiation. In this episode of Signal & Noise, Brett House and Rio Longacre sit down with Andrew Mole, CEO and Co-Founder of PubX, for a provocative conversation about agentic trading, publisher monetization, and what happens when AI agents begin representing both sides of the advertising market.