The Trade Desk Tests AI Campaign Creation With Anthropic's Claude

The Trade Desk is running a closed beta that lets select advertisers build programmatic campaigns using Anthropic's Claude, signaling a major push toward generative AI-powered media buying. CEO Jeff Green, speaking at Marketecture Live, argued no industry is better suited to AI than programmatic, where the platform evaluates 20 million ad opportunities per second with millisecond decision windows. The move follows Green's $150M personal stock purchase and his prediction that AI companies will increasingly turn to advertising revenue as they struggle to justify massive capex and sky-high valuations.

Adweek: The Trade Desk Says It's Testing AI Campaign Creation With Claude

MadConnect Launches 'Intelligent Connectivity Layer' to Wire Agentic AI Into Ad Tech

Infrastructure provider MadConnect has made its Intelligent Connectivity Layer (ICL) generally available, giving enterprise marketers a drag-and-drop way to connect CRMs, CDPs, clean rooms, and DSPs so AI agents can operate across them. Built natively on Anthropic's open-source Model Context Protocol (MCP), the platform acts as a switchboard: if MCP is the USB standard, ICL is the row of ports on a laptop. Early adopters Dentsu and Omnicom's Credera are already testing agentic workflows, including buyer and seller agents exchanging inventory and handling reporting, with Dentsu tying agency fees to outcome-based commercial models made possible by smoother data access.

AdExchanger: The Boring Infrastructure That Could Make Agentic AI Happen For Ad Tech

MCP Explained: The 'Universal Adapter' Reshaping How AI Talks to Ad Tech

Model Context Protocol (MCP), the open-source spec developed by Anthropic, is quickly becoming the plumbing layer that enables AI models to connect to external tools across the fragmented ad tech stack, where a typical marketer juggles 80 to 120 platforms. Criteo is using MCP so marketers can query campaigns in natural language; Similarweb is plugging web traffic and keyword data into LLMs for planning; and Adverity is preserving conversational state across multi-step campaign queries. The catch: MCP solves the technical wiring, but the harder battle is political, since much of ad tech's margin comes from the opacity that a shared context layer threatens to eliminate.

AdExchanger: Understanding MCP, The 'Universal Adapter' For AI In Advertising

Publicis Acquires AdgeAI in Latest AI Shopping Spree

Publicis Groupe has snapped up Israel-based predictive creative analytics platform AdgeAI for an undisclosed sum, drawing from a $970 million deal budget earmarked for 2026. AdgeAI uses machine learning to forecast which creative elements are most likely to drive engagement, and will be folded into Publicis Production to give clients real-time measurement and predictive performance insights. The acquisition extends a buying spree that included Lotame and Moov AI in 2025, as CEO Arthur Sadoun pushes toward a model that is now 73% AI powered.

Adweek: AdgeAI Is the Latest Acquisition in Publicis' AI Shopping Spree

Viant Posts Strong Q4; Challenges Amazon and The Trade Desk in Earnings Call

Viant nearly doubled net income to $24.1 million in 2025 on full-year revenue of $110 million, up 22% year over year (28% excluding political ad comps), sending shares up more than 10%. CEO Tim Vanderhook took direct aim at Amazon's DSP, calling its bundling strategies a replay of Google's playbook, and warned major media companies like Netflix and Roku that partnering with Amazon risks self-serving attribution. On AI, Vanderhook declared that interfaces and dashboards are dead, but cautioned investors against premature excitement about chatbot ad formats until standardized inventory and data protocols exist.

AdExchanger: Viant Had A Good Q4, But Still Needs To Punch Up At Bigger Platforms

The Current: Why I spent $150M on my own company

The Trade Desk CEO penned a 10-point manifesto explaining his record $150M personal stock purchase, arguing that Wall Street's 'software is dead' thesis is wrong, that Amazon will exit its DSP within five years, and that 2026 will bring rapid measurement innovation with retail partners. Green also took a rare shot at the ad trade press, calling coverage more focused on drama than industry substance.

OMD / LinkedIn: WebMCP: When the Web Stops Being Guesswork for AI Agents

OMD's Rapid Response newsletter unpacks WebMCP, an early preview protocol that lets websites expose structured tools directly to AI agents instead of forcing them to navigate UIs with brittle clicking and scraping. The shift redefines discoverability: success moves from ranking on a results page to being directly invokable as a tool, with measurement evolving from click through to tool invocation as a truer proxy for intent.

OpenX Adds Attention Targeting for CTV Ads, Powered by TVision

OpenX has launched a CTV targeting option that lets advertisers aim campaigns at audiences more likely to be eyes on screen, powered by TVision's panel of 4,500 to 5,000 households that measure second-by-second attention. The feature is available through OpenX's Select curation tool and filters out the bottom 40% of programming by attention score, shifting CTV buying from pure quantitative reach toward verified qualitative engagement.

GEO Hype Busted: How It Differs (and How It Doesn't) From SEO

Digiday reports that SEO veterans say 80% of generative engine optimization (GEO) is simply good fundamental SEO, with vendors often repackaging existing tactics. The real differences lie in retrieval architecture for LLM queries, content chunking for AI ingestion, and reputation management across platforms scraped by AI models, though AI search citations currently drive less than 1% of referral traffic for even the most mentioned publishers.

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