The Complete Feed

Marketers have more customer, commerce, media, and third-party data than ever—but turning it into usable insight remains slow and complex. This piece explores how agentic data orchestration can simplify access, embed governance, connect distributed data environments, and help business users move faster from question to insight to action.

Advertising legend Rishad Tobaccowala joins Brett House and Rio Longacre for a wide-ranging conversation on AI, reinvention, agencies, and the future of work. Drawing on four decades at Publicis, Rishad explores why AI transformation is really organizational transformation, how careers are becoming more fluid, and what human skills will matter most in an age of abundant intelligence.

We spent years centralizing customer data—then started shipping copies of it back out across the marketing ecosystem. The Great Customer Data Boomerang explores a better model for audience activation: keep intelligence close to the source, move fewer records, and give downstream platforms the signals they actually need to act.

Alex Collmer built Vidmob on a provocative idea: advertising creative should be measurable without becoming mechanical. Now, as generative AI makes content nearly infinite, Vidmob is moving its creative intelligence into assistants, agents, APIs, and media workflows through Vidmob360. Brett and Rio ask what creative data can truly prove, whether optimization produces sameness, why Alex handed over the CEO role, and what humans must still control when machines begin making and

Jeffrey Cohen had a front-row seat as Amazon Ads became a global advertising giant. Now, as Chief Business Development Officer at Skai, he is working on the harder next chapter: making fragmented commerce media measurable, interoperable, and ready for AI agents. Brett and Rio ask what Amazon got right, why attributed sales are not the same as incremental sales, what Skai’s Celeste AI and agent-native platform can actually do, and who controls the budget when machines start ma

AI agents can access more data than ever—but who decides what they are allowed to do with it? Brett and Rio sit down with SafeGuard Privacy CEO Richy Glassberg to explore why privacy is becoming a permission layer for the AI era. They discuss consent, vendor diligence, machine-readable authority, and how auditable privacy infrastructure can help companies innovate responsibly while building customer trust.

Fern Potter left a senior ad-tech leadership role to co-found Intelligent Assistance around a bold premise: AI works best when it expands human judgment rather than pretending to replace it. She joins Signal & Noise to discuss why AI is not a strategy, how companies move from pilots to commercial impact, what programmatic advertising can teach us about unchecked automation, and why the future belongs to organizations that combine machine speed with human context, creativity,

As AI becomes the primary gateway to discovering brands online, traditional SEO is giving way to a new discipline: AI Visibility. In this episode, Leah Nurik, CEO and Co-Founder of Brandi AI, joins Signal & Noise to explore Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), how AI decides which brands to recommend, and what the shift from search engines to answer engines means for marketers, publishers, and the future of digital marketing.

Agentic media trading is moving from concept to real-world execution. This article examines the infrastructure buyers and publishers need to participate—and the discovery, protocol, execution, verification, settlement and governance layers taking shape around it. As the market automates, the industry may believe it is choosing software while actually choosing its next set of intermediaries.

The internet was built around attention. The next generation may be built around trust. In this episode, Nextdoor CEO and Co-Founder Nirav Tolia joins Signal & Noise to discuss how AI is reshaping local discovery, why trusted communities matter more than ever, the future of local journalism and advertising, and how technology can help people make better real-world decisions—not just spend more time online.

As AI reshapes personalization and customer engagement, consent can no longer live in a static compliance system. This article explores why permission is becoming the critical layer that determines whether customer data can be used responsibly—and how brands can build trusted, AI-ready customer intelligence.

Marketing technology and advertising are converging faster than ever. Anna Mourão, Global Marketing Technology and Customer Data leader with experience through four FORTUNE 500 companies , joins Signal & Noise to discuss how global brands activate first-party data, partner with media teams, navigate the evolving CDP landscape, and prepare for an AI-driven future. It's a candid, brand-side perspective on customer data, enterprise AI, and why the traditional MarTech stack is be

Mobile advertising has become one of digital marketing’s biggest innovation engines, but its future may be defined less by targeting and more by creative. Alex Merutka, Founder & CEO of CRAFTSMAN+, joins Signal & Noise to share lessons from helping build AppLovin, why he left before its IPO to launch his own company, and how AI, playable ads, and creative intelligence are reshaping performance marketing.

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.

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

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.

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

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

In this episode of Signal & Noise, Scott McKinley joins hosts Brett House and Rio Longacre to unpack the hidden data quality crisis inside Connected TV. From identity graphs and audience targeting to authenticated users and trust in advertising, the conversation explores why bad data may be wasting billions in media spend.

The independent infrastructure era may be ending. In this "Signal Break," we unpack one of the most consequential AdTech deals in years: Publicis Groupe acquiring LiveRamp. Joined by Bob Walczak and Krish Raja, we break down what this deal really means for identity, clean rooms, publishers, UID2, systems integrators, and the future of the open internet.