Publishers get therapy for their ad-tech anxiety

Two sell-side veterans, Jana Meron and Scott Messer, have launched a consultancy called AdTech Therapy, and on the 500th episode of AdExchanger Talks they walk through what is actually keeping publishers up at night. Their readout starts with Judge Leonie Brinkema's decision not to break up Google Ad Manager, and their read is counterintuitive: Google may be deprioritising its ad-tech business anyway in favour of AI, which changes the leverage calculus for publishers. Messer is blunt about where publishers keep giving away margin: "Don't just give all your toys away and wonder why you have nothing left to play with. Start pulling things back from the auction." That lands on the deal-curation moment. Rather than relying on middlemen to curate their audiences, publishers can lead curation themselves, Messer argues. On AI, the threats are chatbots eating engagement, but also the counter-move: publishers integrating chatbots on their own properties, using AI agents to find underserved audiences, and building email businesses on touchpoints the chatbots have not reached.

The crux

The publisher-side anxiety is real but the response is within their control: pull supply back into direct and curated channels, and use AI on their own terms instead of ceding the engagement entirely to chatbot intermediaries.

Sell-side read

When veteran sell-side operators are telling publishers to stop giving curation economics away, it is a signal that a real window exists for publishers to take the curation margin themselves, not just the CPM.

Watch

whether publisher-led curation tools ship beyond the early adopters into the mid-market, and whether GAM's data co-op gains traction against publisher-led collectives.