Grant Eckert

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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Agency Perspective: We are seeing retailers going all in on their own retail media networks, and they’re not subtle about it. Amazon Ads, Walmart Connect, Target’s Roundel, Kroger Precision Marketing have become serious media businesses, fueled by first-party data, loyalty programs, closed-loop attribution, and increasingly sophisticated AI and programmatic tech. For retailers, this isn't just experimentation within their 4 walls, its a massive margin game. Brands need to know this... For brands, this is where mistakes get made as of late. Although retail media is incredibly powerful inside the four walls for: -Capturing demand -Winning the moment of purchase -Proving ROI in a way CMOs and CFOs both like It does not create brands, it extracts value from them. If your strategy is overly weighted to RMNs, you’re betting that consumers already know you, trust you, and prefer you. Most brands don’t earn that luxury. What’s happening now for brands is dangerous: Brands are optimizing for conversion while starving the very things that create demand. The strongest brands are doing both of these things, and doing so deliberately: -Using retail media to harvest intent, and -Investing outside the retailer to build it: brand platforms, storytelling, cultural relevance, PR, creators, and experiences that exist long before a shopper hits the shelf or the search bar. Retail media decides where the sale happens. Brand building decides whether the sale happens at all. The next wave of winners won’t be the brands with the biggest RMN budgets. They’ll be the ones that understand the difference between performance efficiency and brand power....and fund both accordingly. Written by a human, not AI. LFG ⚡

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Your perfect landing page is worthless if affiliates can't prove they sent the traffic. We were hemorrhaging conversions and nobody knew why. Partners swore they were driving signups. Our data showed "direct traffic." Every extra click between landing and signup was murdering our attribution. Users would land, explore features, check pricing, then sign up. By then, cookies failed, pixels misfired, and attribution windows expired. Mobile made it worse. App stores were a catastrophe. The fix was really simple. Split landing pages with embedded sign-up on one side and just enough context on the other. There was literally no navigation required. Everything users needed was in one place. ✓ Social proof ✓ Value props ✓ Trust signals That single change probably improved affiliate conversion rates by double digits. Our team became one of the best growth design teams in all of FinTech. The best converting page means nothing if partners can't prove they drove the conversion. Every extra click is money left on the table.

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When Dave Pickles and I started TTD, we wanted to create a platform that was more transparent and more aligned with buyers. We wanted to create closer alignment with brands and agencies. We were one of the few DSPs that didn’t focus on disintermediating the agencies. I stand by our choice to partner with agencies. I stand by our choice to be transparent, even though I think we at times have been too open (as I shared at Marketecture Media last week). Over the last year or two, things have gotten much harder for agencies. Lately it seems that there are those who want to wave the flag of transparency publicly, but run from it in practice as they arbitrage in the inefficiencies of programmatic. Or in the most ironic programmatic practice, principal-based buying. (More on this next week. I know…I’m such a tease.) It bothers me when leaders of non-transparent business models are critical of those of us who are setting the bar—especially when they advocate for moving dollars to more opaque platforms and transaction methods. As Terence Kawaja said to me last week as we sat backstage at Marketecture, the long arc of programmatic, like any market, will inevitably bend toward efficiency and competition. Those who succeed will be those who embrace transparency and offer clients competitive, objective value. Thankfully, almost all of our clients, including the world’s largest brands and agencies, share this point of view. TTD has not “failed" any audit ever. Ruben Schreurs, CEO of Ebiquity plc, assured me today that he was unaware (until after published) that his firm would be quoted or used in any articles about TTD. Relatedly, we will not disclose the bills of all of our clients and partners to one of them simply because they assert ambiguous audit rights.   Working with our clients, we always welcome objective and rigorous analysis of our processes, fees, and the value we deliver for clients.

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OpenAI just quietly turned the classic product feed into a battlefield. If you worked at Mercent or ChannelAdvisor (now both CommerceHub) - this is getting especially juicy... After nearly two decades in retail media, I’ve seen a $180B market built on one constant: the retailer owning the checkout/conversion. OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) challenges that assumption. ACP isn't just a conversational AI feature; it is a standardized infrastructure for structured feed ingestion, payments and orders integration. It allows ChatGPT to consume product feeds, compare options, and execute transactions entirely within the chat. This forces every retailer to confront the "Curation Question" regarding one of their most profitable assets (read: retail media revenue): Scenario A: The retailer syndicates their product feed into OpenAI and integrates orders via ACP. Near term, they look innovative, creating 'agentic' discovery and conversion with a key platform, but dilute the direct customer relationship and forego valuable retail media impressions/browsing traffic. Scenario B: The retailer blocks OpenAI access and syndicates no feed. In response, OpenAI builds its own ad network, taking direct feeds from participating retailers (and brands) and cuts the retailer out entirely. Scenario C: OpenAI and others expand ACP to be way more immersive, branded, and customized. You'll shop the Walmart Agent or Target agent in ChatGPT or Gemini and within those agents... see sponsored ads. OpenAI monetizes the rolled up engagement and a commission on the conversion, and Roundel captures retail media revenue published in their agent. If anyone played with the Target experience in ChatGPT - one could mark a vote for Scenario C being a not too unlikely evolution... In any case, no matter how you look at it, GenAI is driving a pivotal transformation that has the potential to upend the retail media and ecommerce space. You need a strategy for working with it or adapting to it. Ignoring it isn’t an option.

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If your brand’s Amazon channel is clean, but your Walmart listings are wild, you’re not in control. You’re seeing the symptom, not the source. You’re one seller away from a price war that spills across every channel. Most brands treat marketplaces like separate battles, Amazon gets all the attention, Walmart gets handled “later.” But that’s not control. That’s containment. The truth is, what happens on one platform doesn’t stay there. Amazon sellers pop up on Walmart. Feed syncs spread bad data. Algorithms follow the lowest price, not the right one. If you’re a 1P vendor, that loop can crush your margins fast. In CPG, per-ounce price matching can create weeks of downstream chaos. These are systemic issues. And they only get solved with systemic visibility. Control means consistency. The same truth everywhere your brand shows up. Not just compliance on Amazon, but connected enforcement across every channel. Because when you’re not clean everywhere, you’re just one slip-up away from a mess that hits right before, or right after a promo, when it hurts most. That creates a painful hangover effect... Focusing on one marketplace isn’t control; it’s tunnel vision. Consumers are searching everywhere now: Google, LLMs, and every platform in between. Your brand needs to show up consistently wherever the search starts. Your brand has to show up consistently wherever the search starts. Because channel control isn’t about managing a single marketplace...it’s about mastering the entire ecosystem of where your brand lives. #ThornCrest #BrandProtection #ChannelControl

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Big News: Nowspeed + Longview Launch the GEO Authority Builder to Help Brands Win in AI Search The way we “search” is being completely rewritten. At Nowspeed, we’ve been watching closely as generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews shift how people discover and trust information. The traditional SEO playbook isn’t enough anymore. If your brand isn’t cited by these platforms, you’re invisible — even if your site ranks #1 on Google. That’s why I’m thrilled to announce the launch of the GEO Authority Builder, a powerful new solution we’ve created in partnership with Longview Strategies to help brands earn visibility and credibility in AI-driven search. What is GEO — Generative Engine Optimization? GEO is a new discipline focused on helping brands appear in generative search results, where AI summarizes and cites information directly. Unlike SEO, which focuses on ranking web pages, GEO helps your brand become a trusted source that AI platforms want to reference. And that’s where the GEO Authority Builder comes in. The GEO Authority Builder includes three core services: 1. GEO Visibility Audit – We assess how your brand shows up in AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini. Are you being cited? Are competitors taking your space? 2. Source Influence Mapping – We identify which publishers, authors, and types of content AI platforms are citing — giving you a clear roadmap for increasing your visibility. 3. Credibility-Building Campaigns – Longview uses its earned media relationships and editorial strategy, combined with Nowspeed’s digital expertise, to build the authority signals generative engines rely on. Why now? As I said in the press release: “The game has changed. Brands that fail to adapt to AI search will disappear from the buyer journey.” We built the GEO Authority Builder to give companies a proactive path forward — one that aligns content, PR, and digital marketing for a new kind of visibility. What makes this different? This is more than an audit or a one-time SEO tweak. It’s a full visibility strategy built for AI-first discovery. You’ll get measurable insights into your current presence, and a real plan to improve it — including the articles, mentions, and sources that matter most. Ready to see where you stand? We’re offering a free GEO Visibility Audit to help you benchmark your AI presence and take your first step toward becoming an authority in generative search. 🔗 Request your audit and let’s build your authority — before your competitors do. Evan Zall #GEO #GenerativeSearch #AISEO #DigitalMarketing #ThoughtLeadership #Nowspeed #LongviewStrategies #AuthorityBuilder #MarketingInnovation #AIvisibility https://lnkd.in/eK7FSVgS

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Sooo... how can the same product, from the same company, with the same experience; suddenly grab market share from the market leader. No flashy launch, no innovation, no nothing. Change your brand positioning. How about if you are Anthropic (Claude), and you go up against a powerful government department like the DoW? Your intent was not brand position change; that'd be too pedestrian. There is of course, a lot of nuances in what happened; but the market does not care about the nuance - most of which I am most likely missing. The market cares about what they see and hear and feel. The Brand Positioning Deck on Amodei's laptop on never changed. Perceptions of the market changed of what Anthropic was. What it stood for, how far it will go for something as abstract, yet important as principles. As an aside: Amodei has re-engaged DoW and opened negotiations again as of late last week. Anthropic is still a business; and sometimes the market make a lot of assumptions, so you never know what is going on behind the scenes. But the users have made up their minds of what OpenAI and Anthropic stands for - rightly or wrongly. Both CEOs played a big role in this evolution. Speaking of CEOs and big companies and their 'products,'.... Nah, that'd be too easy. https://lnkd.in/gyfapkyF

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