YouTube may be the largest "audio" medium in the world, but it's a tiny player in terms of audio ad sales. Which explains why it hired SiriusXM as its rep.

A year after the ad industry launched an ethical AI certification program, publishers in its ad-supported media supply chain now have one too.

Three years after the client-side began benchmarking programmatic transparency, the IAB Tech Lab is jumping in with a new supply- and agency-side council.

The just-published report - the first in a planned series of ongoing studies - also finds there is no rule of thumb for effective frequency. "It depends," says Chief Intelligence Officer Joanna O'Connell.

I'm writing this for those not fortunate enough to attend the Advertising Research Foundation's recent Audience X Science conference in New York City. You will want to pay attention, because one session in particular -- the ARF's Tracy Adams' and Paul Donato's review of Phase 3 of its attention measurement validation initiative -- is all about it. You can read my previous commentaries on Phase 1 and Phase 2, but this year's session, dubbed "Attention As Signal, Or Beyond," demonstrated how many in the industry are now using attention metrics to judge relative media …

Imagine consumers delegate shopping to agents. Businesses will no longer sell to humans. They'll be selling to smart technologies. No need to communicate with people. No need for marketing.

*"The Gauge and Media Distributor Gauge do not reflect Nielsen's currency TV ratings."

According to some who should know, it's happening right now. If you don't believe me, listen to Laura Desmond, David Kenny, Bill Koenigsberg and Matt Seiler explain why.

That was the question that closed Tuesday's MediaPost upfront panel discussion, but the bigger question throughout might well have been "What's an upfront?"

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 …