Everybody Wants a Piece: Of Your Screen, Your Data, and Maybe Your Job

As AI takes over media buying, Precise.ai wants to make sure someone is keeping score. The startup just raised $7 million to analyze the individual decisions behind every impression purchase, from audience segments and bid strategies to supply paths and optimizations.

The pitch is simple: Advertisers know campaign outcomes, but rarely know which inputs actually drove results and which just added cost. As programmatic buying becomes increasingly agent-driven, Precise is betting that transparency and accountability will become just as important as automation.

Read AdExchanger

Gaming has one of the largest and most engaged audiences in media, yet it still attracts a surprisingly small share of advertising budgets. Unity believes the issue isn't audience scale. It's transparency.

The company is expanding its Unity Core Standards initiative into advertising, giving brands more visibility into how ads appear inside games. That means better insight into ad placement, rendering, and the overall player experience, helping advertisers separate premium gaming environments from the low-quality inventory that often gets lumped into the same "in-app" bucket.

What's interesting is the broad industry support behind it, including agencies, publishers, measurement providers, and ad tech platforms. If gaming wants a bigger piece of brand budgets, trust has to come first. This feels like a meaningful step toward making mobile gaming a more premium and accountable advertising channel.

Read Unity’s blog

Fox is making one of the biggest media bets in years, acquiring Roku for $22 billion and gaining access to more than 100 million streaming households. While the headlines focus on content, this feels much bigger than that. The real value may be in owning the operating system, audience data, identity signals, and consumer relationship that sit at the center of the connected TV ecosystem.

I (AdTechGod) brought together Kyle Dozeman (Kovva), Richie Hyden (Viant), and David Nyurenberg (InterMedia Advertising) for a special breaking news episode of the AdTechGod Pod to unpack what this means for advertisers, publishers, and the future of CTV.

We discussed whether this is ultimately a content play, an identity play, or the deal that reshapes connected TV for the next decade. One thing is clear: Fox didn't just buy a streaming platform. It bought a seat at the center of the living room.

Listen or watch here

Hightouch is trying to make things interesting.

The fast-growing ad tech startup has offered Publicis between $800 million and $1.2 billion in cash and stock for LiveRamp’s identity and data onboarding business, including RampID and LiveRamp Connect.

That is a pretty bold move considering Publicis only just announced its $2.2 billion deal to take LiveRamp private.

What makes this fascinating is that after years of streaming wars, content wars, retail media wars, CTV wars, and every other war the industry could invent, we seem to have arrived at the final chapter.

And lo, in the final days, when the dust settled and the consultants stopped making PowerPoints, there stood only Data and Identity.

That's really what this battle is about. Hightouch sees enormous value in the identity layer that powers much of the advertising ecosystem, while competitors continue to question whether that infrastructure should sit inside one of the world's largest agency holding companies.

The acquisition hasn't even closed yet, and the bidding has already started. Grab the popcorn.

Read Axios

Nexxen is the latest ad tech company embracing a future where AI agents do a lot of the heavy lifting. The company announced support for Anthropic's MCP and Google's agent-to-agent protocol, allowing agencies to connect their own AI systems directly into Nexxen's platform for campaign management and optimization.

The bigger story is what this says about where media buying is headed. Agencies are increasingly building their own AI tools and don't want employees bouncing between a dozen different platforms just to launch, optimize, and report on campaigns. They want their AI agents talking directly to the platforms themselves.

A few years ago, every ad tech company wanted to be the destination. Now the goal seems to be becoming the infrastructure that plugs into everyone else's AI ecosystem.

The race is shifting from building the best interface to building the best connections. 🤖

Read ADWEEK

The Marketecture team is heading to the Croisette, bringing the heat from the Riviera straight to your feed all week long.

From Hot Yachts and Hot Takes to fireside chats, intimate dinners, and spontaneous run-ins, we’ll be capturing candid conversations and exclusive industry intel from the people shaping media, marketing, and technology. Expect conversations about Cannes’ evolution from creative showcase to industry-wide extravaganza, the less obvious places AI is making an impact, and hot take why adtech is becoming an underpinning of Cannes Lions itself.

Keep an eye on your feed. From the Croisette to your timeline, we’ll be bringing you Cannes coverage that goes well beyond the headlines.

This fall, Marketecture Live is headed to the beating heart of ad land: Chicago. The Windy City serves as the industry epicenter for some of the biggest shifts happening across brands, agencies, media, and tech. If you’ve been wanting to attend Marketecture Live but couldn’t make the trip to NYC, meet us in Chicago on Sept. 23. Lock in your seat and the lowest price of the season today.