Why Medium Said No To Easy Ad Money

Tony Stubblebine became CEO of Medium in 2022 and turned the struggling, loss-making platform profitable by cutting costs, improving content quality and refusing to rely on advertising.

Marketing often gets unfairly pegged as a cost center. But that wouldn't happen if marketers had access to better measurement that gave them clarity on what truly drives business growth, argues Henry Innis, CEO and co-founder of MMM platform Mutinex.

Anne Coghlan, co-founder and COO of Scope3, on why cutting carbon in ad tech isn't just about saving the planet; it's about eliminating inefficiency and financial waste at the same time. Plus: Using AI to automate and optimize digital media buying at the impression level.

Online advertising's privacy problem isn't just about bad actors – it's about bad metrics, says Marc Guldiman, CEO and founder of attention startup Adelaide. "I think a lot of the invasive behaviors in the ad tech space can be traced back to a lack of a shared understanding of quality," he says.

In the Google search case, a forced spin-off of Chrome was never gonna happen, but a court-ordered divestiture of GAM isn't beyond the pale in the ad tech case, says Geoffrey Manne, president and founder of the International Center for Law and Economics.

The fundamental shift from traditional search to AI chatbots has major implications for the entire marketing organization, says Bluefish CEO Alex Sherman. If brands want control over how they appear in AI search results, they must think about the content they feed to large language models.

As the newly appointed CMO of Genesis Motor America, it's Amy Marentic's job to raise awareness for the luxury auto brand, which is fighting for market share against more well-known incumbents in the US market. To do it, she's analyzing the data and working on a growth strategy to reach a largely untapped demo: women. Plus: Marentic's unique origin story, from astronaut hopeful to chief marketer.

HyphaMetrics had barely taken its first few steps as a new startup before drawing the ire of measurement juggernaut Nielsen. Four years and several lawsuits later (including one jury trial win for Hypha), CEO Joanna Drews is more than ready to get the company moving forward again.

When Google reversed its decision to deprecate third-party cookies, the first word in ID5 CEO Mathieu Roche's mind was an expletive. But it doesn't really matter what happens with cookies on Chrome anymore. "Most of the industry has moved past the notion that cookies were good enough to target and measure advertising on the web," Roche says.

Enough with the ROAS obsession. It's time for a smarter approach to measurement that focuses on more than short-term objectives, says Melanie Babcock-Brown, VP of media and monetization for Orange Apron Media, The Home Depot's retail media network.