Attention is no longer the gatekeeper. For two decades, digital marketing has been engineered around one dominant design: the ad unit. Paid search. Pre-roll. Display. We optimized bids, refined audiences, and scaled reach with precision. Marketing became a predictable, capital-efficient growth engine. That engine still works, but the interface that governs decision-making is changing, and that changes what drives performance. Marketing is shifting from a system optimized to win attention to one optimized to win recommendation. As AI increasingly shapes what consumers see and choose, competitive advantage depends less on distribution scale alone, and …

The Advertising Research Foundation's CIMM East Conference began where last year's left off: on an advertising "currency fiesta," per Fox Senior Vice President-Research & Data, Ad Sales' Kym Frank, who famously made that quip in 2025.

Just when it seems like the ad industry has been getting a grip on some forms of ad fraud, an analysis of 2025 performance ad spending finds that AI is optimizing -- er, I mean exacerbating -- it.

"We made a pretty big shift a few years ago when we moved almost all of our media planning analysis - and in some cases buying - in-house, because we needed to be more agile."

You're probably familiar with Paul Parton's name from the byline that appears on some of the best columns published here. This column is about where it appears next: his just-published, "Share Of Culture."

Nielsen, which delayed a recalibrated version of its monthly Gauge from this week to next, is now delaying it until September.

Following up on its 2024 benchmark study on principal media buying, the Association of National Advertisers has released a new one showing the practice has become far more prevalent among big advertisers.

Insurgent brands accounted for 36% of aggregate growth across all categories, which seems pretty impressive, given that they only comprise an aggregate share of less than 2%.

Trade reporters typically cover Nielsen ratings like a horse race, but that's also what Nielsen has been doing according to my analysis of nearly five years of monthly press releases.

I originally planned this column for Monday, the day before Nielsen normally publishes its monthly Gauge data, but turns out it's delaying it another week due to a recalibration.