Below is a roundup of last week’s notable industry news, with summaries and our opinions. Lightning round format for this edition. Q2 earnings started to trickle in! But let’s start with The Trade Desk’s hiring spree…

Uber's top ad exec Kristi Argyilan joins The Trade Desk as chief commercial officer🔒 - Argyilan joins the independent demand-side platform (DSP) from Uber, where she led global ad efforts and helped the business hit $2B in annualized revenue. She previously held leadership roles at Target, Albertsons, and IPG and will report to CEO Jeff Green starting later this month. Days later, The Trade Desk added Vinny Rinaldi as VP of client strategy and growth, bringing Rinaldi's deep experience from Hershey, Amazon, Google, GroupM, and Dentsu. The Trade Desk also brought on Ron Lamprecht, a 25-year business development veteran with stints at Amazon and NBCUniversal, as chief business development officer and added former Google and LinkedIn exec Penry Price to its board.

Opinion: The hiring spree comes after a string of high-profile departures🔒 and a stretch as the worst-performing stock in the S&P 500 in 2025. The Trade Desk is doubling down on commercial leaders with commerce & CTV experience (NOT ad tech experience), both key growth areas for the business. CEO Jeff Green is under a magnifying glass and clearly has some rebuilding to do. This new leadership team will need to show it can rebuild fast. 

Fox's Red Seat Ventures strikes programmatic ad partnership with Amazon - Amazon will let advertisers buy Red Seat's podcast inventory programmatically through its DSP. Red Seat, which is home to conservative talent like Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, and Bill O'Reilly, represents more than 40 creators across genres like true crime, comedy, news, sports, and entertainment. The deal follows a string of similar alliances Amazon has struck over the past year with Disney, Roku, and Netflix. Red Seat's SVP of sales Jeremy Price said the partnership makes creator-led media more measurable and ties it to real business outcomes. The bigger idea: content companies want a single venue where advertisers can buy inventory at scale, cut duplication, improve targeting precision, and enable their customers to measure performance.

Opinion: Another step in Amazon's quest to become the go-to buying platform for premium and creator-led ad inventory. Amazon’s ability to attribute tangible value to media makes it irresistible to all sides of the ecosystem. While convenient for buyers and sellers, it hands Amazon (even more) leverage over how ad dollars flow across the industry. Everyone’s playing with fire! (pun intended)

EU Commission orders Google to share anonymized search data with rivals - The order comes under the Digital Markets Act and requires Google to give eligible third-party search engines and AI chatbots access to the same anonymized data it uses for its own services, such as ranking, query, click, and view data. The Commission says the move levels the playing field for competitors. Google can still evaluate whether sharing data with a specific third party poses cybersecurity or privacy risks before handing it over. The ruling also requires better interoperability on Android, giving rivals of Google's AI services equal access to device features by January 2027. (This order is separate from Google's US search antitrust case, which Google lost and was also ordered to share data with rivals as a remedy; is appealing the judgement.)

Opinion: Google being able to judge which third parties pose a "risk" before sharing data is a convenient loophole. Even if Google fully complies with the order, don't expect it to reshape search competition very much. Anonymized aggregate search data somehow leveling the search playing field is … laughable.

Apple’s continued interest in ads🔒 - Apple rolled out updated advertising guidelines covering News, Stocks, Sports, and, for the first time, Maps, signaling its Maps ad product is getting closer to launch. Apparently Apple Maps ads will be off limits for home service businesses like plumbers, electricians, locksmiths, and pest control companies, which is interesting considering that this category is a major revenue driver for Google's Maps ad business. Apple is also keeping out bail bond services and crypto ATMs entirely, while medical ads will need individual sign-off instead of automatic approval. The restrictions fit Apple's long-standing pattern of keeping its ad ecosystem small and controlled rather than opening the doors wide open. Apple hasn’t said exactly when Maps ads will launch, but publishing this level of detail suggests Apple is further along than people thought.

Opinion: Maps is the fifth Apple surface being turned into ad inventory, after the App Store, News, Stocks, and Sports. Apple is quietly building a walled-garden ad platform using valuable first-party data that they’ve boxed everyone else out of because “privacy”. Watch for Siri or Apple TV next. That’s when we’ll know Apple is getting serious about ads!

Study finds CTV ads frequently land in the wrong location - Research from identity vendor Adstra and agency InterMedia found that residential IP addresses correctly pinpointed a viewer's location just 23% of the time. CTV device IDs stayed linked to the same person over time far more reliably than IP addresses. Adstra's chief data officer Andy Johnson said a core problem is that many identity vendors don't disclose how their matching actually works (usually IP is the key identifier), leaving buyers unable to judge tradeoffs between reach and precision. Separate research from Truthset backs up the larger findings, estimating that close to 40% of CTV ad dollars spent through open auctions gets wasted on bad identity matches (because IP is the key identifier). Adstra is now pushing a scoring system that grades how trustworthy a given identifier is.

Opinion: Say it louder for the people in the back; IP is not a reliable signal!

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