It can be hard to keep up on everything adtech in the news. Here are a few interesting stories from recent weeks:

Green Supply Path

In late January, IAB Tech Lab announced its Green Supply Path initiative, MarTech Series reports. The purpose of this initiative is to address the global carbon emissions that the digital advertising industry creates through the use of programmatic advertising. Green Supply Path “will become the benchmark for how carbon emission signals are sent and received programmatically,” according to MarTech Series. Forbes also notes that the first part of the initiative is to measure the carbon footprint of the digital advertising process.

Artificial Intelligence

AI has been everywhere in the news lately, and the digital advertising industry is no exception. Digiday recently reported that, according to a recent analysis by GroupM, an estimated “90% of digital ad campaigns will be influenced by AI by 2027.” There are various ways that AI is expected to be, or already is used, in the industry:

• Automating tasks such as optimized media buys, creating custom algorithms for bidders, and other tasks considered to be mundane.
• Creating new tools and technology with machine learning.
• Training bots to assist with media campaigns.
• Generating insights from first-party data.

AdExchanger also focused on the ways that several advertising companies are utilizing AI, and stressed that even the best AI is lacking the human element of discerning “how and why” insight results are having the impact being reported by automated technology.

Walled Gardens

Finally, The Current discussed the concept of “walled gardens” in a recent What the Tech column. It stated that the Big Tech companies – Google, Meta, and Amazon – are known for their walled gardens of personal information. These walled gardens are described as a confined platform in which personal insights and information (user preferences, search histories, etc) is tightly controlled. 

Advertisers sacrifice “transparency for the rich profiling and targeting capabilities they receive in return.” The advertisers can neither see the walled-off data, nor verify it. They lack understanding of the audience that their ads are reaching as well as a way to verify the results of their ad campaigns. Data and privacy laws, as well as the upcoming shift to using first-party data, may finally change the Big Tech walled garden approach.