Industry Insights

It’s been a couple years since Genius Monkey dove into the Flexibility of Modern Audio Ads, and it’s time to check in with programmatic’s most underrated medium. In the last two years, the audio industry has experienced explosive growth and consumers are eating up audio in all new ways. The audio advertising landscape is evolving, and it’s time for advertisers to keep up or get left behind. Let’s look at the current state of audio ads and see how advertisers can best embrace the channel.

The last year has seen many shake-ups to the advertising world; big platforms shutting down, Google losing multiple advertising-related court cases, and the ever-evolving machinations of MFA. One thing that doesn’t change is the Genius Monkey platform’s ability to reach your audience: any audience! Genius Monkey users represent a vast variety of verticals across multiple programmatic channels. We’re always talking about following the data; let’s see what the data has to say!

AI continues to expand into every facet of the tech industry and life in general, but could the expansion eventually hurt some of its biggest proponents? A report detailed on Adweek suggests that Google’s Search Ad business has slipped slightly in the wake of AI barrelling its way into the search business and – incredibly – Google might be okay with it. Why? Because AI-powered ads have been proven to yield a 25% higher relevance compared to traditional search!

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.

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.

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?

Pew research reports that around 86% of Americans consume news on smart devices like phones and tablets at least some of the time, while 57% do so “often.” Though television, radio, and print media still have their audiences, they are significantly outpaced by digital platforms, which are typically ad-supported. Simply put, the advertising audience for news is huge. Many advertisers are concerned about placing ads next to news reports, fearing that contentious topics or other bad news will cast a poor light on any ads surrounding the content.

This week, Genius Monkey is taking a look at the trends that we expect to continue into this year so you can be prepared for what the industry is likely to become. From an emphasis on first-party data to a TikTok-shaped void in social media advertising, there’s a lot to dive into: The Increasing Importance of First-Party Data In 2024, Google announced that it would, in fact, NOT depreciate third-party cookies in Chrome.

Connected television (CTV) has stood out as the black sheep of the programmatic family for a while, featuring the lowest total ad spend and the trickiest audience tracking of all mediums. Early rumblings in the industry and consumer habits have convinced Genius Monkey for some time that CTV is a slumbering giant, waiting for the right moment to awaken and take the digital ad industry by storm. That day is quickly approaching, and it’s time for advertisers to take note.

MFA, or “Made For Advertising”, is the boogeyman of digital advertising, scooping up some $20 billion of wasted ad spend on bot sites, unviewable ads, or ad farms. The Association of National Advertisers reports that buyers have been spending less on MFA overall in the last few years, but it’s been on the rise in recent months. We all know MFA sites when we see them; so why are they so hard to circumvent?