Is AI Taking Over Search? What Advertisers Need to Know

Performance indicators are a vital tool in the digital marketing process, allowing advertisers to gauge the success of their advertising efforts through a variety of metrics. As consumer attention becomes more fragmented and ad blindness rises, traditional metrics such as CTR, impressions, or ad frequency are increasingly falling short of telling the whole story. Views, impressions, and clicks are important, but are often touted as the end-goal or evidence of ultimate advertising effectiveness.

We at Genius Monkey have been riding this horse for some time, shouting “CTV is coming, CTV is coming!” For the last few years, audiences have been flocking to the cheaper versions of streaming services that include advertisements, propelling OTT/CTV to the fastest-growing programmatic medium. The best time to get a CTV strategy was 5 years ago, but the second-best time is right now. Join Genius Monkey as we dive into how to build a killer CTV campaign and jump on the wave of ad-supported streaming.

The tech industry is barreling toward a future powered by AI, and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it at this point. What advertisers CAN do is make sure they’re using new technologies correctly and avoiding the pitfalls that can come with rapid adoption. Artificial intelligence has a lot of potential for good and ill, and Genius Monkey is here to explore a few of the possibilities the future is now offering.

The Google Antitrust Case Probably Shut Down AppNexus They say time ravages all; well, time and AI have now caught up with one of the first big programmatic institutions. AppNexus wasn’t the first to engage in real-time bidding, but it was perhaps the first major platform that basically created and popularized the concept of a DSP. In 2018, AT&T bought AppNexus and renamed it to Xandr, before selling it once again to Microsoft in 2021.

Like any career, digital marketing has its highs and lows with meaningful payoffs and its fair share of annoyances. This week, Genius Monkey is taking a look at some of the most common complaints that marketers have shared about the process of creating and running digital marketing campaigns. We’re not just looking to commiserate; there are steps you can take alleviate or outright solve some of these issues, so let’s jump in:

As reported by AdWeek on May 8th, 2025 – just a week after emailing publishers asking them to adopt the new product – Amazon has killed their privacy program that would allow advertisers to better integrate with Google’s new Privacy Sandbox. This would have allowed advertisers using Amazon’s DSP to target users based on Google’s retargeting data. What does this mean for the future of cookie-less advertising and user data?

Google Found Guilty of Antitrust Behavior… Again! In September 2024, the Department of Justice won their lawsuit against Google, alleging that the tech giant was exhibiting antitrust behaviors in their search advertising business. Google was declared a monopoly, but the punches didn’t stop there. The DOJ later took Google to court again over monopolistic actions in their adtech enterprises, and we now have a ruling on the side of the DOJ for this case.

It’s April, and that means it’s Brand Optimization Month! There’s always room for improvement and opportunities to grow your brand, even for the seasoned programmatic veteran. Whether your company is new to the Genius Monkey platform or looking to expand its services, here are some key principles that will help you make April a great month for brand growth! Make Split-Testing a Part of Your DNA Many advertisers look at split-testing as finding THE singular method for advertising to an audience, but that’s just not realistic; tastes and expectations are always changing, and individual members of any audience will react differently to different messaging.

Genius Monkey is a programmatic platform built for efficiency, but there are a number of ways to measure that efficiency. ROAS – return on ad spend – has long been an industry standard metric that doesn’t tell the whole story; could the Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER) be the hero the industry needs? This week, Genius Monkey makes an appearance on Adweek, where readers can download our latest white paper on measuring efficiency and its potential pitfalls.

The Genius Monkey platform is all about efficiency, but what happens when the “optimization” does more harm than good? Just as cutting out the DSP step leads to long-term loss, removing programmatic channels like display, audio, OTT, or video might cost less in the short-term, but weakens the overall advertising strategy and inevitably cuts into the bottom line. Programmatic ads work best when they work together, allowing the strengths of each medium to overcome the drawbacks of the others.