Eric Harris

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.

108

14 Comments

Final prediction for 2026 (via video), and this one reframes how you buy media. For a long time, retail media lived next to search. Most teams invested in it because #Amazon or #Walmart were too big to ignore, not because they viewed it as foundational to their media strategy. What’s changing is that retail media is no longer just another place to spend. It’s becoming the data layer underneath everything else. And that’s why retail media is poised to take share from traditional programmatic, not by replacing it outright, but by changing what powers it. Because the foundation on which programmatic was built is eroding in real time. Cookies are gone. Mobile IDs are increasingly unreliable. Lookalike modeling is getting noisier. Contextual targeting is being stretched well beyond what it was designed to do. The signals we relied on for performance over the last decade are getting weaker, not stronger. Commerce data fixes a lot of that. It gives you deterministic identity tied to actual purchase behavior. It shows real intent at the SKU and category level. And it offers closed-loop measurement that holds up in conversations with finance, not just in platform dashboards. That’s why, even as overall ad spend growth cools, commerce and retail media continue to grow at double-digit rates and are quickly approaching a quarter of all digital spend. It’s because it has the data advantage. Amazon is the clearest example of this. Amazon is no longer just a retail media network. It’s becoming one of the most powerful media platforms ever built (and stealing massive dollars from Trade Desk and other DSPs), connecting Prime Video, CTV, audio, display, retail search, and off-site media through a single authenticated identity spine that reaches 90% of US households. Very few companies on the planet can do that at scale. But this isn’t only an Amazon story. Home Depot. Walmart. Kroger. Instacart. AMEX. Even real estate platforms. Any company that owns proprietary purchase data is in a position to become a media network. Because when you look at someone’s last 24 months of purchases, you don’t need age or gender to understand them. You can see their life stage, priorities, constraints, and intent directly in what they buy. So no, programmatic doesn’t die in 2026. But its role changes. Retail and commerce media stop being channels you test or optimize in isolation. They become the data rails that power the rest of the media ecosystem. The brands that win in 2026 won’t be asking how much they should spend on retail media. They’ll be asking how to rebuild their media architecture around commerce data in a way that scales across every channel they use. If you are rethinking your RMN strategy and need some help, feel free to DM me.

10

1 Comment

As Skai continues to release its 2026 State of Retail Media report, I'm so excited that so many of my perspectives have made the cut! The future of retail media isn't just about ads on retailer sites; it's about the data and using that data to power media everywhere. The report shows the fastest budget growth happening in: ✅ Social commerce (+50% net growth) ✅ CTV / streaming (+47%) ✅ DSP (+40%) I don't know about you, but what it tells me is that retail media is no longer a channel; it's the data layer for the entire media ecosystem. Now let's double-tap on the #DSP. 52% of marketers anticipate shifting investments away from open web DSPs and into retail media DSPs. The reason is simple: retail media DSPs are winning, not because they’re cheaper, but because they replace weak proxy signals with verified purchase behavior and attribution marketers can actually defend. It’s about using real retail signals to influence demand long before someone ever searches for your product, and measuring against actual sales. So if your retail media strategy still starts and ends with on-site ads, it's time for a rethink.

7

2 Comments

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

20

2 Comments

As an industry, we need better metrics to help make sure we're buying quality media in premium environments that drive results for our clients. We don't need to sacrifice quality for cost efficiency. From the linked article, "advertisers who prioritize data integrity and make a point of buying impressions from high-value publishers with better data practices see a 33% lower cost per action, a 32% reduction in CPMs and a 5% higher return on ad spend." https://lnkd.in/grKnzm_H

43

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.

23

In light of BuzzFeed's plans to launch its own social media platform, the Media Briefing evaluates other media companies' past attempts to do the same. https://lnkd.in/eXir84YA

5

1 Comment

Love this - AI is the Oppenheimer moment for marketing. It fundamentally collapses the time and cost of production. A $2.5 million campaign that used to take four months can now be delivered for $500,000 in four weeks. Legacy firms that charge based on hours with the 'time-driven' model are existentially threatened by this.

23

Excited to announce Magnite’s partnership with Genius Sports and their real-time Moments Engine, integrated directly into our ClearLine platform. Through this integration, buyers can layer authenticated live sports data into their campaigns, aligning messaging with pivotal game moments and capturing peak fan attention within their programmatic workflow. Big thanks to Josh Linforth, Sean Conroy and the innovative team at Genius Sports for their collaboration.

157

3 Comments

we've posted a couple of reports in the past - but I think that this one is the BEST and most interesting one we published (...so far...) this is a true comparison of "attribution" vs. incrementality - comparing the actual aggregated, weighted, and indexed results based for the clients who share attribution data with INCRMNTAL Super interesting - get it below!

13