Heather Macaulay

Excited to share that Aperiam has invested in Bedrock Platform. Obvious statement of the century: programmatic advertising has a complexity problem. The infrastructure that was built to give media buyers control has, over time, done the opposite. Burying teams under layers of operational overhead, legacy tooling, and opaque supply chains. Bedrock is built on a simple but powerful thesis: what if you stripped away the bloat and rebuilt the stack around what actually matters... precision, transparency, and speed to execution. Their platform combines AI-driven campaign automation with curated, premium inventory across video, CTV, DOOH, and audio, and aims to be flexible and get smarter over time. Plus, the team (Shane, Austin, Ryan, James) has deep roots in the infrastructure layer of ad tech and understands the plumbing better than almost anyone. We believe the next generation of programmatic will be leaner, faster and AI-first. Bedrock is building that.

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Teads is elevating the role of Connected TV with the launch of CTV Performance, introducing a new way to optimize and measure real business outcomes. This innovation allows advertisers to connect premium streaming exposure to measurable results, bringing brand awareness and performance closer together than ever before. https://lnkd.in/eJqdjEZS

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Audio represents 20%+ of consumer media time but under 5% of ad spend (eMarketer). For pharma brands focused on reach, frequency, and trust, this unlocks smarter investment without sacrificing accountability. "Viant Technology’s direct integration with iHeartMedia... allows both companies to match their data graphs and create shared IDs for targeting audiences in digital audio, as well as broadcast radio, where audience ID signals are scarce." Net-net: we're making hard to measure channels measurable and heping healthcare marketers better understand who they’re reaching, how often, and how audio fits into the full patient and HCP journey. Audio has always driven impact. Now, with Viant, it drives insight too. #HealthcareMarketing #PharmaMarketing #Viant #Programmatic #AddressableAdvertising #MeasurableMedia #AudioAds https://lnkd.in/ek8J-iJE

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CMOs demand guaranteed delivery, lowest CPMs, strategic flexibility, and outcome-based pricing. Physics says you can't have all four simultaneously. Principal media delivers three of them. The question is which three matter most. Forrester's new principal media report from the inimitable Jay Pattisall is very much worth a read, and it's going to trigger the predictable debate. Critics will argue agencies are creating conflicts. Evangelists will tout cost savings. Both will miss the strategic reality: CMOs facing compression don't have the luxury of perfect markets. I've watched boards push CMOs for guaranteed outcomes while slashing budgets. In that environment, academic arguments about strategic flexibility mean nothing. The anti-principal media argument assumes unlimited client patience, perfect information, and rational markets. Reality looks different. Reality is: your board wants cost certainty so they can model P&L without media volatility. Reality is: your CFO wants guaranteed delivery so you're not scrambling for Super Bowl inventory in scatter markets. Reality is: your CEO wants outcome-based pricing that ties media spend to business results. Principal media trades strategic flexibility for the three things boards actually care about: cost certainty, delivery guarantee, and outcome alignment. The Forrester report shows 80% of marketers are interested in principal media advantages. That's not because CMOs are naive about conflicts of interest. It's because they're making rational trade-offs under real constraints. The criticism of principal media comes from people who've never faced the impossible triangle. They can afford to optimize for strategic flexibility because they're not accountable for the P&L impact when media costs spike or inventory disappears. Yes, principal media requires transparency. Yes, it needs contractual controls and performance accountability. Yes, clients should cap how much spend flows through principal arrangements. But the mechanism itself? It's agencies finally building inventory positions that enable the outcome-based pricing we've demanded for years. I'm a big supporter as, for two decades, I've watched CMOs demand that agencies move from billing hours to pricing on outcomes. "Put skin in the game," they said. "Share the risk." Now agencies are doing exactly that with principal media, and the industry is calling it a conflict of interest. We can't have it both ways. Forrester predicts principal media will grow to one-third of billings by 2026. Read their report, then decide which three variables matter most for your business. https://lnkd.in/eKHg5qmk #PrincipalMedia #MediaBuying #CMO #MarketingLeadership #MarketingStrategy

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 In the telecommunications race, the battle for market share isn’t just fought on airwaves, it’s fought in the mailbox. For national brands, the challenge is cutting through digital noise while reducing churn. Our President, Dina Kessler, recently shared insights on why direct mail remains the "anchor" of a successful omnichannel strategy in 2026. From hyper-personalization to automated retargeting, we’re showing how data-driven print scales telecom growth. Is your current strategy working as hard as your network? Read the full insight here: https://lnkd.in/eyzauxVP #TelecomMarketing #DirectMail #Omnichannel #GrowthStrategy #KesslerCreative #DataDriven

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Our latest blog provides a comprehensive breakdown of the evolving advertising landscape, emphasizing the advantages of Connected TV (CTV) over other TV strategies. By integrating CTV with intent data, brands and marketers regain control over their desired audiences, allowing for tailored messaging and targeted spending. This approach also enhances the cross-channel and cross-device opportunities for attribution. There is little doubt that CTV will become more and more prevalent in the marketing mix for the vast majority of brands in 2026. Check it out below: https://lnkd.in/eiZbktjz Kevin Frisbie Lillian Morgan Delilah Adrian Sabrena Collins Chris Gruening

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CTV is a driving force for digital ad spend growth, but those of us who have been around since the days of "Ad Network 1.0" know that non-transparent "ad bundles" and fuzzy PMPs with fancy logos and no accountability will burn out the minute that the supply - demand imbalance come into play. With the rise of Amazon Prime Video and the growth of FAST channels reaching saturation overload, we are just about there. Program level transparency and full impression-level accountability across all CTV sources is only a matter of time.

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Our latest case study showcases how Magnite and D2 Media Team helped a US national auto dealership network launch its first connected TV campaign, unlocking premium CTV supply, high-intent local targeting, and robust measurement to deliver real business impact. Check out the full case study to learn more.

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Advanced measurement is moving from a “nice to have” to a requirement for brands that want to prove how marketing drives real business outcomes.✅ Nowhere is this more visible than in Retail Media Networks. RMNs like Instacart give brands access to closed-loop performance data tied to actual purchases. That data is powerful, but it also raises an important question for marketing leaders: How do we validate results beyond platform-reported metrics and understand true incremental impact? This is why third-party measurement is becoming a critical part of the RMN conversation. Circana has emerged as a leading independent measurement partner for retail media performance, including Instacart. By combining retailer point-of-sale data with broader market and category intelligence, Circana helps brands understand not just what sold, but what actually changed because of advertising. https://lnkd.in/gp4CghWf For food and beverage brands, this matters because RMN performance rarely exists in isolation. Retail media influences household penetration, repeat rates, brand switching, and category growth, not just attributed sales within a single platform. Third-party measurement helps separate signal from noise by providing a consistent view across retailers, channels, and time. The broader industry trend is clear. As RMN budgets grow, marketers are being asked to answer harder questions around incrementality, brand impact, and long-term growth. Platform dashboards alone are no longer enough. At Effective, we see advanced media performance reporting as a layered system. Platform data shows what happened. Third-party measurement helps explain why it happened and whether it was truly incremental. Together, they create a clearer connection between media investment and business results. This is how performance reporting evolves from tracking activity to proving impact. Jeff O'Shaughnessy Joelle Kaplan #MarketingMeasurement #RetailMedia #MediaPerformance #Incrementality #F&B #MarketingEffectiveness

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As more households shift from traditional MVPDs to vMVPDs and streaming platforms, TV manufacturers increasingly control the user interface, and therefore, the path to content discovery. Are you engaging directly with the teams at LG, Samsung, Roku, Vizio, and others? How do they view your station, your network, or your content brand in the context of their viewer experience? The screen may be the same, but the gatekeepers have changed. It's time to ensure local broadcasters are at the table and not left on the sidelines! https://lnkd.in/gwEscpUN

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MARCH 4, 2026 📰 The Trade Desk announced OpenTTD, their platform-pure-play. But the bigger news had already come from London six hours earlier. Find out what it was and why it matters for every company building or using ad tech ---> https://lnkd.in/ezVnvKBT

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Michel Lacaille of Mediaclip writes about why Q5 and Early Q1 (December 26 through early March) represent a prime opportunity to convert holiday buyers into repeat customers, with lower competition, warmer audiences, and emotionally-driven use cases. https://ow.ly/Ytmi50YnzlH

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Really interesting piece. We’ve spent years in ad tech chasing sophistication, whether that's smarter targeting, deeper insights, or more automation. Sophistication without connection, however, isn't really progress. In my experience, it's closer to paralysis. The truth is, most teams don’t need more data. They need usable data. They need systems that connect, not compete. When we get that right, marketing becomes less about simply managing platforms and more about making decisions that actually move the business forward. That's the kind of infrastructure that changes everything. It's not the shiny new tech, but the connective tissue underneath it.

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Markacy In The Press 🚨 Great piece by Kimeko McCoy from Digiday on Retail Media Networks and if they will fall into the same pitfalls and limitations as programmatic buying has encountered. https://lnkd.in/ebSbVnxt

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Happy to help our partners at Amazon with this measurement initiative. Proof that real purchase data, not modeled proxies, is what closes the gap between streaming exposure and verified sales outcomes.

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