commerce-media
(11)
Dreamday Put a Cash Register Behind the Press Clipping
Lauren Kleinman saw two agencies chasing the same editor and asking different questions. Dreamday’s answer was to make a press hit carry both a story and a sales receipt.
Maven PR Wants the Press Hit to Ring the Register
Most small brands buy publicity too soon and measure it too vaguely. Jess Windell built Maven around a sharper question: can a story earn trust and help sell the thing?
George Popstefanov Built an Agency With $960. Now He Is Selling a Better Operating System for Growth
A Commodore 64, a German manual and a teenage leap from Macedonia to Wisconsin shaped a founder who treats change as raw material. Fifteen years after starting PMG with $960, George Popstefanov is trying to turn marketing intelligence into action - without losing the culture that made the company work.
Conner Sherline Is Building the Cooperative Internet He Once Wished Brands Had
He watched digital advertising become expensive, saw independent storefronts leave valuable attention unused, and built Disco around a stubborn idea: brands can grow faster when their data and distribution work together.
The $8.7 Billion Media Buyer Betting Its Edge Is an Open Door
Horizon Media became one of America’s largest media agencies without joining a global holding company. Now it is trying to prove that independence can be more than an ownership detail - it can be a product strategy.
Tinuiti Wants to Find the Money Your Marketing Is Wasting
The independent agency built its name buying digital ads. Its next act is harder: proving which dollars actually caused growth, and exposing the ones that did not.
dentsu
Dentsu began by selling newspaper ads to fund a news service. Today, the 125-year-old Japanese group is trying to make creative, media, data and AI behave like one machine - without sanding away the human judgment clients still pay for.
PubMatic
PubMatic is an independent, publicly traded ad tech company that runs a sell-side platform connecting digital publishers with advertisers through real-time programmatic auctions. Built on its own cloud infrastructure rather than rented servers, PubMatic processes trillions of ad impressions and is pushing into connected TV, commerce media, and agentic AI tools that automate ad buying and selling.
Lynne Kjolso
Lynne Kjolso is VP of Global Partner and Retail Media at Microsoft Advertising, where she leads the company's retail media strategy and global partner ecosystem. A philosophy PhD turned digital advertising executive, she has spent over 15 years at Microsoft shaping search, retail, and commerce media. Named to Ad Age's Tech Power List 2024 and The List 2025, she is a leading voice on retail media standardization, gaming as an advertising frontier, and the intersection of AI and commerce.
Moloco
Moloco is a Redwood City-based machine learning company that helps app developers, retailers, and streaming platforms turn their first-party data into performance advertising. Its DSP, Commerce Media, and Streaming Monetization products use deep neural networks to make billions of bidding decisions every day for customers like Wayfair, StockX, Costco, Netmarble, and Yogiyo.
Ikkjin Ahn
Ikkjin Ahn is the co-founder and CEO of Moloco, the machine learning-powered advertising platform he built from scratch after spotting a gap at Google: 90% of apps in the Play Store weren't making money. Armed with insights from building YouTube's monetization engine, he launched Moloco in 2013 to democratize access to the kind of AI that only tech giants could afford. Thirteen years later, the company is a $1.5B+ unicorn with 700+ employees across 12 offices, over $200M in annual revenue, and profitable for five consecutive years - a rare combination in Silicon Valley. As of early 2026, Moloco is weighing an IPO.