digital-advertising
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Rumble’s Second Act Is Bigger Than Video
The free-speech video challenger is assembling ads, creator tools, crypto payments and AI infrastructure under one roof. Its wager is that independence - from algorithms to servers - can become a business, not just a slogan.
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.
Facebook’s Second Act Is Happening in the Places the Internet Forgot
The original social network is no longer the internet’s newest room. It may be something harder to replace: the noticeboard, video channel, classifieds section and community hall used by billions.
The Company Betting That the Next Great Streaming War Will Be Fought in Spanish
Univision and Televisa spent decades as rivals across the same language. In 2022 they merged into one $4.8-billion company - and bet the whole thing on a streaming app named ViX.
The Dealer Website That Quietly Became the Whole Dealership
Dealer eProcess started with a dealer's frustration over websites that looked finished but did not sell. Its answer is Everest - one connected system that remembers shoppers, merchandises inventory and follows the deal from search box to showroom.
Ink Found a Billion-Person Audience With Nothing to Scroll
For three decades, Ink has treated the passenger journey as a media channel - building the stories, screens and magazines that occupy the rare moments when travellers actually look up.
Madwire Built a Marketing Department Small Businesses Can Rent
The Fort Collins company bundles software, ad tools and human marketing help into one operating system for small business. The wager is simple: owners do not need another dashboard - they need fewer loose ends.
NBCUniversal’s Second Century Runs Through the Fandom Machine
The company that helped teach America to watch television now has to make broadcast, streaming, cinema and theme parks behave like one business. Its advantage is not a single screen - it is the loop between them.
Snap Is Building the Computer That Hopes You’ll Look Up
Snapchat made disappearing photos feel natural. Now Snap is using that private, camera-first habit - plus ads, subscriptions and an army of Lens creators - to finance a much stranger bet on what comes after the phone.
Saga Communications
Saga Communications built a public company out of local radio, then discovered its next act hiding in the same relationships. Its bet is that a familiar voice can make an advertiser wanted - and digital tools can help that advertiser get found.
Reddit, Inc.
The self-described front page of the internet spent nineteen years as a scrappy forum before going public. Now its archive of human argument has become one of the most valuable training grounds in artificial intelligence.
YouTube
Twenty years after three ex-PayPal employees uploaded a clip from the San Diego Zoo, YouTube pays creators more than any studio and gets watched more than any TV network. Here is how the video site became infrastructure.
DoubleVerify
DoubleVerify turned a basic question - did a real person see the ad? - into a global measurement business. Now its software is moving beyond policing impressions to steering campaigns, just as Nielsen prepares to take it private.
Chris Schneider
From streaming's cord-cutters to healthcare's data-rich digital stack, Chris Schneider keeps returning to one practical question: are marketers reaching the people they think they are?
Stephen Nesle
A creative-writing graduate became the marketing operator behind Bob's national expansion by treating attention as something a retailer has to earn - one useful joke, clear price and watchable story at a time.
Amy Williams
Amy Williams built Good-Loop around a stubborn question: if advertising can buy attention, why can’t that attention fund something useful? A decade later, her harder project is proving that purpose belongs in the machinery of business, not at its margins.
Basis Technologies
Basis Technologies is a Chicago-based advertising software company that builds Basis, an automation and intelligence platform for digital media. Founded in 2001 as Centro and rebranded in 2021, Basis unifies programmatic, publisher-direct, search, social, and connected TV buying alongside campaign planning, workflow automation, reporting, and financial reconciliation - so agencies and enterprise marketers can run cross-channel media from a single system.
Decide
Decide is a St. Louis-based advertising technology company - the rebrand of LockerDome, founded in 2008 - that runs a machine-learning platform called the Decision Marketplace. Rather than relying on third-party cookies or intrusive identity data, Decide lets multiple ML models compete in real time to select and price ad impressions, powering a two-sided marketplace that connects publishers and brands across the open web. Its widgets and content-recommendation units have reached over 100 million monthly users, positioning the company as a cookieless, performance-focused alternative to legacy programmatic ad stacks.
Dstillery
Dstillery is a New York-based predictive AI audience-targeting company for the advertising industry. It builds custom, model-driven audiences that let brands and agencies reach the right consumers programmatically, including through its patented ID-free cookieless technology and its DS-1 agentic AI platform that turns audience building into a natural-language chat. It works across major demand-side platforms such as The Trade Desk, Yahoo, and Microsoft Advertising, and counts a large share of the Fortune 100 among its users.
Evocalize
Evocalize is a Seattle-based marketing technology company that builds a collaborative, AI-powered platform enabling local businesses - especially real estate agents and mortgage loan officers - to launch and optimize sophisticated digital advertising campaigns across Google, Meta, TikTok, YouTube and direct mail with push-button templates. Its software is typically embedded within the tools of enterprise partners such as Realtor.com, Rate and MoxiWorks, and it operates a patented Digital Co-Marketing Network that lets agents and lenders run compliant, cost-shared campaigns together.
Good-Loop
Good-Loop is an ethical advertising technology company that turns ad spend into a force for good. Its 'view-to-donate' formats let people unlock a free charitable donation - funded by the advertiser - simply by choosing to watch an ad, while its Green Media tools measure and cut the carbon footprint of digital campaigns. A certified B Corporation founded in Edinburgh in 2016 by Amy Williams and Daniel Winterstein, Good-Loop has raised more than $6M for charities including Save the Children, WaterAid and WWF, and works with brands such as Unilever, Nestle, Levi's and Asics.
Martini Media
Martini Media is an independent marketing firm that connects premium and luxury brands with affluent, high-net-worth audiences online. Founded in 2008 and incubated by Venrock, the company builds integrated campaigns that combine bespoke high-impact ad creative, a curated portfolio of 200+ passion-based publishers, and proprietary audience insights across display, mobile, and connected TV. Now operating as a unit of Evolve Media and led by CEO Vincent Krsulich, Martini Media has run more than 1,000 campaigns for over 300 upscale advertisers.
MediaGlobe
MediaGlobe is a Boston-based paid media company that gives online businesses access to enterprise-grade, whitelisted agency ad accounts on TikTok, Facebook and Meta - alongside media-buying tools, consulting and dedicated account management. Founded in 2020 by CEO Jake Vadeboncoeur, the company positions itself as a strategic partner that helps eCommerce, affiliate, lead-gen and info-education brands scale ad spend without the bans, spend caps and throttling common to standard consumer ad accounts.
Olyzon
Olyzon is an AI-native adtech company building an agentic decisioning and orchestration layer for Connected TV (CTV) advertising. Founded in 2024 and headquartered in Paris with offices in New York and London, its platform sits on top of the fragmented CTV ecosystem - agnostic across every DSP, SSP and direct publisher - and uses AI agents to qualify inventory at the program level, plan and activate campaigns, adapt creative to viewing context, and normalize measurement into unified outcomes. The company has powered hundreds of campaigns for global brands and agencies, and closed a $10M Series A led by Sir Martin Sorrell and Sanja Partalo's S4S Ventures in May 2026.
SelfMade
SelfMade is a New York-based AI creative company behind Skipper, a creative intelligence platform that scrapes customer reviews, Reddit threads, Amazon feedback and social comments to build audience personas and generate on-brand performance ads at scale. Originally founded in 2015 as an Instagram commerce app, the company pivoted through agency work before rebuilding around AI-driven creative production for e-commerce and direct-to-consumer brands.
The Brandtech Group
The Brandtech Group is a marketing technology holding company built to help the world's largest brands do their marketing better, faster and cheaper using technology - and, increasingly, generative AI. Founded by former Havas CEO David Jones in 2015 as 'You & Mr Jones,' it has grown through a string of acquisitions into a digital-only group of roughly 7,000 people across 40+ countries, spanning in-housing agency Oliver, performance-media group Jellyfish, and its flagship generative-AI ad platform Pencil Pro. Clients include eight of the world's ten largest advertisers, and after a $115M Series C in 2024 the group was valued at about $4 billion.
VideoElephant
VideoElephant is a Dublin- and New York-based video content company that sources, licenses, curates and programmes premium video for publishers, streaming services and screens worldwide. It runs a library of millions of rights-cleared video assets from thousands of content providers, and packages that content as single VOD assets, feeds and 24/7 FAST channels, layering on distribution, playout scheduling, monetization and advertising so content owners and buyers can operate video at scale without stitching together multiple vendors.
Jake Vadeboncoeur
Jake Vadeboncoeur is the founder and CEO of MediaGlobe, a Boston-based paid media facilitator that gives serious advertisers whitelisted, enterprise-class ad accounts on Meta, Google, and TikTok. The company positions itself as a partner for high-spend buyers in ecommerce, affiliate marketing, and lead generation, promising lower CPMs and no arbitrary spend caps. A Merrimack College business graduate who cut his teeth in media buying, Vadeboncoeur built MediaGlobe into a venture-backed operation that raised a Series A in 2023 and reports serving well over a thousand clients.
Pixis
Pixis is a codeless AI infrastructure company for marketing, giving advertising teams a suite of plug-and-play AI models that plan, target, optimize, and create ad campaigns without writing code. Founded in 2018 by three BITS Pilani classmates and headquartered in Burlingame, California, the company has built 200+ proprietary AI models and serves more than 1,000 customers, including 18 Fortune 2000 brands. It raised $209M across Series A through C1, backed by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, General Atlantic, Touring Capital, and others.
Michael Zacharski
Michael Zacharski is a strategic technology executive with more than 20 years in programmatic advertising and consumer AI. He is Interim CEO of Decide (formerly LockerDome) in St. Louis, following a career that includes CEO roles at EMX Digital / ENGINE Media Exchange, bRealTime, Balihoo, and Brand Engagement Network (Nasdaq: BNAI), plus advisory work through his own firm M2M5 Co and Progress Partners.