Travis Lusk, a writer for ADLINGO.org, with 19 years of experience in marketing and advertising transformation.
The ad tech sales season is wrapping up for 2026. AI dominated everything the market responded to this year, and it was the most predictable trend ever. All we had to do was pay attention to what the agencies were asking.
Can RAMP still be independent if it is owned by a major holding company? {insert awkward silence here}
Supply is outpacing demand. Scarcity has collapsed into sports. And the most useful phrase in the market right now isn't volume or price. It's "the shape of the deal."
Prebid now owns the sell-side agent code for AdCP. A natural outcome that I think all of us expected to see.
If you feel like your brand is in an AI adoption doom-loop where nothing is meaningfully taking hold, reframe the challenge. You do not have a technology problem, you just lack brand knowledge architecture.
None of the most famous SaaS sales frameworks hit the mark when it comes to ad tech sales. I've been trained on dozens of them. They each have some great ideas, but nothing that pulls it all together. Until now. The FvF Framework is a mashup of the best sales frameworks for ad tech sellers.
Over the past few weeks, I've been thinking about "focus" for 2026. What do I want to focus ADLINGO on next year? What deserves more attention and coverage, and what deserves less? What tech deserves immediate attention, and what can we afford to set aside for now?
Clearly, the advertising agencies are consolidating. Hard. Every couple of weeks we see new headlinges about workforce optimization and efficiencies. The "Rule of Three" is what's next.
I've spent the last few days engaged in my own career search, but I also took the time to see if any of the Q1 conferences have something to help this crowd. Specifically, I looked at CES, IAB ALM, Marketecture Live, and POSSIBLE. Here's what I found.
15,000+ agency jobs are gone. The legacy publishers are hemorrhaging. Yet the demand for marketing hasn't dropped. It just moved. So, where to point your career?
The ad tech world loves a standards war, and for those of us in the tech trenches, the last thing we need is another one. Two AI ads standards were publicly released within a few weeks of each other, but there’s one that should matter slightly more to advertisers.
