The Complete Feed

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.

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.