Notes from the team.

Naledi Khumalo · Jun 2026 · 4 min

Ten Retail Media Terms Every Buyer Should Define Before Signing

IAB Europe's V2.1 Commerce Media Measurement Standards, published 22 January 2026, set the shared vocabulary for on-site, off-site and in-store retail media across Europe.

Naledi Khumalo · May 2026 · 5 min

Publishers Move From Licensing Deals To Joint Ad Products With AI Platforms

Three major European publishers signalled this week they will replace flat AI licensing fees with revenue-share ad inventory inside answer engines, starting Q3 2026.

Loyalty Data Emerges As The Strongest Signal In Retail Media

Kiri Masters argues in The Drum on 14 November 2025 that loyalty data is the defensible signal as RMNs face an AI-shopping reset.

Generative Engine Optimisation Becomes the New Front Door for Brands

Brand visibility inside ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews is now a measurable channel, with agencies building dedicated GEO practices this quarter.

IAB Says Consent Is the Hole in Every First-Party Data Stack

A new IAB report this week argues that most brand first-party data strategies are running on shaky consent foundations, undermining activation and measurement downstream.

Publicis Buys LiveRamp to Feed Its AI Agents

Publicis announced a $2.2 billion acquisition of LiveRamp this week to anchor identity and clean-room data inside its CoreAI agentic stack.

The Protocol War Between ARTF and AdCP Splits Agentic Adtech

IAB Tech Lab released its Agentic RTB Framework v1.0 for public comment on 13 November, weeks after the AdCP consortium launched a rival open standard.

Studio · May 2026 · 8 min

Note

The Information Regulator is not bluffing anymore.

Five years after POPIA came into force, the Information Regulator's enforcement notices have moved from procedural to substantive. The brands assuming the regulator was a paper tiger are about to be surprised.

Opinion

Every click is suspicious now.

Generative AI has industrialised the ability to fake a person browsing the internet. The old fraud stack was built for bots that behaved like bots. The new bots behave like humans.

Vincent Maher · May 2026 · 8 min

Vincent Maher · May 2026 · 10 min

How South African retail built its own channel.

Pick n Pay, Shoprite, Takealot. The South African retail-media networks are quietly catching up to Amazon Ads on closed-loop attribution. The brands building inside them are the ones who will own the category vocabulary in two years.

Note

The quiet death of the three-second floor.

Viewability told us a tab loaded. Attention tells us a brain engaged. The IAB's new measurement guidelines have made a metric that has been the floor of digital advertising for ten years suddenly feel obsolete.

Studio · May 2026 · 7 min

Vincent Maher · May 2026 · 9 min

When search stopped returning links.

Google’s AI Overviews finished rolling out and the answer engine has eaten the link list. Brands that built ten years of SEO playbooks are watching them lose efficacy in real time.

Vincent Maher · May 2026 · 8 min

The first AI buyers have arrived.

WPP, Publicis and a lengthening list of mid-sized agencies have started letting agents do more than optimise campaigns. They plan and launch them. The work that used to take a team a week now takes a system an hour.