AWS

Amazon is building new AI features into its ads business, and humans are still the ones making the purchases – for now.

Amazon’s advertising businesses earned a total $19.8 billion in Q2, the company reported in its quarterly earnings on Thursday. That’s up from $15.7 billion in Q2 2025, and good for a 26% year over year growth rate.

Amazon teases an AI licensing marketplace for publishers; not every country is fine with targeted gambling ads; and YouTube’s ad revenue share isn’t enough for its entrepreneurial creators.

AWS RTB Fabric offers ad tech platforms more streamlined integrations with ecosystem and infrastructure partners, allegedly lower latency compared to the public internet and discounts on data transfers.

The desire for a data-driven reinvention of OOH inspired OUTFRONT to create agentic AI tools for executing and measuring OOH campaigns and comparing OOH to other channels.

Generative AI tech is hurting publisher search traffic, but it’s also helping pubs optimize their ad sales efforts. The head of publisher ad tech solutions for AWS explains how AI is transforming how advertisers value media and the implications for publishers large and small.

Perplexity is thirsty for revenue streams; Marketecture’s media biz grows; and Duolingo goes dark on social after its AI pivot.

The biggest cloud tech companies, – namely AWS, Snowflake, Databricks and the Google Cloud Platform – are investing heavily in their own ad tech and marketing verticals. But, funnily enough, ad tech vendors themselves tend to avoid the big public clouds.

Oracle’s TikTok bid is a warmed-over Project Texas; Amazon’s ads biz has its sights set on Google; and gen AI search is a good traffic source for retailers, but bad for news pubs.

Ad tech is headed to the stratosphere. As in, on the way to becoming part of the cloud infrastructure technology.

Publishers were encouraged to see the DOJ highlight Google’s stranglehold on the ad server market and its attempts to weaken header bidding.

Why streaming TV might adopt the cloud-usage model for content; MAGNA projects strongest ad market in two decades; and “go woke, go broke” gets proven wrong, again.

It’s not that publishers aren’t keen to do their part to reduce media-related carbon emissions; they just don’t want to make changes without understanding the impact on their revenue.

In today’s newsletter: The DOJ publishes its antitrust suit against Apple; Reddit’s stock pops on its IPO day, but its long-term prospects depend on Google; and Amazon’s hollowing out Twitch.

Last week, Gartner released its first-ever Magic Quadrant report for CDPs. The hot new tech five years ago, CDPs face increased scrutiny and significant headwinds.

LiveRamp has always been a facilitator, a data platform that plugs into your tech stack. Nowadays, that means being a cloud-jumping service provider.

While other holding companies are touting their AI roadmaps, Omnicom is focusing more on a different shiny object: retail and commerce media.

The deification of data clean rooms, the need for privacy compliance and this year’s generative AI explosion were just a few of the trends pushing businesses away from owning and maintaining their own servers and toward cloud-based tech infrastructure.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Help Me, Help Me Amazon announced ad platform upgrades at its annual UnBoxed conference, just ahead of quarterly earnings today. Like Google, Amazon is now a content fortress with its own cloud, which means that when it makes ad tech updates, the result […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Apple’s Sauce As Apple wades deeper into the advertising industry sea with its own ad network and attribution system, the company might have to navigate a tricky riptide if it upsets iPhone customers or attracts a regulator’s ire. For instance, Apple doesn’t apply […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Google Gripe Google is refunding agencies for “billing discrepancies,” aka ads that ran in places where they weren’t supposed to, Ad Age reports. The refunds (which Google refers to as credits) closely follow the viral Adalytics report alleging that YouTube placed TrueView ad […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Amazon Prime(s) Its SSP Play Based on its job listings, Amazon is getting ready to launch a supply-side platform. The company has 11 open job listings on a “PubTech team” tasked with building “the new Amazon Ads Supply Side Platform,” Insider reports. The […]

Amazon Web Services took another step in its development as a key ad tech integration hub on Wednesday, with the general launch of a product called Entity Resolution.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Pour One Out For Pub Tech During the heady days of gonzo social traffic and zero-dollar interest rates, publishers were launching their own software businesses. But that cottage industry has practically disappeared without so much as a whimper. Vox Media, one of the […]

The Washington Post is experimenting with a variety of large language models–but setting boundaries and guidelines to keep them in check.

Ad tech and cloud tech are converging; there’s no doubt about that. But how much of ad tech will get eaten by cloud platforms? That’s harder to answer, says Myles Younger, head of innovation and insights at U of Digital.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Layser Focused Stephanie Layser, former News Corp VP of ad tech, data and identity products, joined Amazon Web Services a year ago as global head of publisher ad tech solutions. And she just recorded a podcast with Marketecture about what she’s been up […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Go Big Or Go Home Apple, Amazon and Google (via YouTube) are now presumptive leaders for major sports broadcast deals.  Apple snapped up Major League Soccer and Major League Baseball rights last year, while Amazon and Google had National Football League coups.  These […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. A Verified Love Triangle When Netflix jumped into ad sales, it promised to include ad verification through both DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science. And so it came to pass. On Monday, DV and IAS both released their verification solutions for Netflix inventory. Considering […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Heads In The Clouds Amazon Advertising and AWS are bolstering one another in pursuit of marketing budgets, Digiday reports. Both Amazon and Google have deeply intertwined their advertising and cloud businesses via clean rooms, which provide an advertising service built on cloud-based privacy […]