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Publicis’ $2.2 billion acquisition of LiveRamp last month reawakened an old industry debate about neutrality.But I believe we’re having the wrong conversation. While neutrality gives advertisers and agencies comfort that their tech partners are fair and open, it doesn’t provide insight into how their data is being used: how audiences are built, how identity is resolved, where data flowed, or whether their first-party data is strengthening their own advantage or someone else’s. For years, the industry has treated independence as a shortcut for trust. If a company sat outside platforms, agencies, or media owners, it was assumed to operate as neutral infrastructure. That…

British fintech Revolut has quietly begun rolling out its services in India as part of a controlled beta program ahead of a broader launch, marking a significant milestone in its years-long effort to enter the country’s fast-growing digital payments market. Revolut started taking signups for its India app earlier this year, and some users who joined the waitlist have been gaining access to its services over the past few weeks, TechCrunch has learned. The company confirmed the rollout and said a few thousand customers in India are already using the platform. The rollout marks a significant milestone in Revolut’s years-long…

Over the decades, there has been no shortage of sites using clever techniques to covertly track visitors’ browsing histories, device fingerprints, and keystrokes and mouse movements in real time. Even Meta and Yandex were recently caught joining in the privacy-invasive free-for-all.Now sites have a new way to spy on their visitors: by measuring subtle interactions with their solid-state drives. The technique, named FROST (fingerprinting remotely using OPFS-based SSD timing), allows sites to monitor other sites a visitor is viewing and what apps are open on their devices.The technique, laid out in a research paper, exploits a side channel, a form…

As its traffic continues to climb, alternative search engine DuckDuckGo is leaning into anti-AI sentiment with the launch of new browser extensions that allow users to set its no-AI search experience, noai.duckduckgo.com, as their default search engine. Once enabled, users will be directed to the company’DuckDuckGo’s AI-free search page, where there are no AI-assisted answers, no chat prompts, and fewer AI images in the search results, the company claims. The extensions are currently available for Chrome and Firefox users. Meanwhile, people who have switched to the DuckDuckGo web browser already have their AI settings preserved, even if they clear their…

The US Food and Drug Administration regularly announces recalls. But it has recently issued a surprising series of alerts: Several brands of chocolate marketed for “sexual enhancement” contain undisclosed drugs prescribed for erectile dysfunction, according to lab analyses conducted by the agency.The flagged products—some of which are being voluntarily recalled—are sold online under names like Boner Bears Chocolate, DTF Sexual Chocolate, Lovion Chocolate With Ginseng for Men, and Rhino Choco VIP. Some are labeled “all natural” or claim to contain herbal ingredients such as pau de cabinda powder, which is used as a libido enhancer.The FDA is advising consumers not…

Customer data platform Hightouch has developed a new tool that allows advertisers bypass third-party identity providers to directly confirm which consumers saw their ads placed by The Trade Desk.Any advertiser transacting through The Trade Desk gets reports on each ad impression, click, and conversion, among other campaign performance data. But details specifying who actually saw or clicked on an ad are generally anonymized through privacy-safe identifiers like cookies, device IDs, or third-party IDs like The Trade Desk’s UID2. Without identity providers, there has historically been no way to directly match those anonymized IDs with customers in the advertiser’s own database.

Apple Watch Series 11 for $399: If you already have an Apple Watch Series 4 or later, you can use it to track your sleep. Between the heart rate sensor and the accelerometer, your Apple Watch can break your slumber down into four stages. Newer models can also measure blood oxygen and temperature. It feels like a general overview compared to some of the other sleep trackers I tried, and there’s no sleep score, though this is obviously by design (it’s debatable whether you need more data).Garmin Epix Pro (Gen 2) for $1,000: All of Garmin’s fitness trackers track sleep…

The average age of a soccer player debuting in one of Europe’s “Big Five” leagues is 21.7 years old, according to the International Centre for Sports Studies. That means tomorrow’s superstars are literally just kids right now. Who might they be? Hyundai has picked a few out of the crowd.In a new 60-second spot—the anchor for its “Next Starts Now” World Cup marketing drive—Hyundai and agency of record Innocean USA assembled five determined aspirants in a series of vignettes that spotlight their fancy footwork.“If you’re looking for the future of football, it’s going to be me,” 16-year-old Da’vian Kimbrough of…

AI companies have grown into data-hungry entities as their models require ever-larger datasets to train on. To meet that need, many AI startups defy long-standing internet conventions — like respecting robots.txt files, which signal to automated crawlers which parts of a website are off-limits — and scrape data aggressively. This has forced websites to restrict access to their data and, in some cases, strike licensing deals with AI companies. Fitness and social running company Strava is making a move in this direction by restricting its website and introducing fees for developer access. To stop scraping, the company is increasing security…

On March 31, I received an email from Norse Atlantic Airways. The $940 flights for my upcoming round trip to Rome had been canceled, it said, and I had 14 days to request a refund.At first, I didn’t panic. That began to change when the company’s refund request page wouldn’t load on two browsers across three devices. After Norse didn’t respond to several emails, I looked for a phone number. There wasn’t one. On Reddit, I found dozens of posts about Norse’s allegedly haphazard customer service.The same day, I filed a public records request with the Federal Trade Commission, which…

In this episode of Adspeak by ADWEEK, host Madeline Nelson sits down with Wyclef Jean and Jaeson Ma for a live conversation from Brandweek about the future of the creator economy. The discussion explores how OpenWav is helping artists break free from streaming algorithms and traditional gatekeepers by enabling direct ownership of fan relationships, data, and revenue. Wyclef and Jaeson explain why smaller, highly engaged communities are becoming more valuable than mass audiences, and how independent creators can build sustainable businesses through exclusive content, merchandise, and direct-to-fan experiences. The episode also examines what this shift means for brands seeking more authentic partnerships with…

In the fall of 2006, I decided emo was out and IDM was in. Fueled by the hope of becoming the next Four Tet or Aphex Twin, I marched into my local Guitar Center and purchased an audio interface to convert my guitar and vocals into ones and zeroes, then mangle them in Ableton Live.When I got home, I plugged a brand-new M-Audio Fast Track Pro into my Windows desktop and immediately hit a brick wall of audio driver configuration hell. I eventually got the thing to work after hours of troubleshooting, but latency—the gap between when you make a…

Lionel Messi is a busy man. While his left foot has been preoccupied securing Inter Miami trophies and preparing to lead Argentina into the upcoming FIFA World Cup, his face is dominating advertising around the tournament.According to data provided to ADWEEK by audience measurement platform System1, Messi appears in 18 of the 80 major World Cup campaigns currently being tested across the U.S., U.K., and Argentina.The figures put Messi in nearly a quarter (22%) of the biggest World Cup campaigns so far, including ads from top-tier FIFA sponsors Adidas, Michelob Ultra, and Lay’s.Messi proved his worth for brands during the…

As SpaceX counts down to what could be the largest IPO in history, the race to build the next generation of launch vehicles is heating up. Asia wants in. Startups across Australia, India, Japan, and South Korea are racing to establish themselves in a market long dominated by the U.S. and China. One of them is Unastella, a four-year-old South Korean startup that just closed a $24 million Series B, bringing its total funding to $44 million. The company launched its own rocket, the Una Express-I, from South Korean soil in May 2025. The Seoul-based rocket startup is developing its…

By 2025, most experts had adopted the same position. “I think everybody now agrees that long Covid is a biologic disease,” said Igho Ofotokun, of Emory University School of Medicine, in his concluding comments at the Long Covid International Conference. “It’s not in your mind. It’s real.” Ofotokun also offered an explanation for the lack of scientific progress. “The big elephant in the room is just that we don’t have a gold-standard definition for long Covid. So it really makes it difficult to do all the things we want to do. Makes designing of clinical trials extremely difficult, following outcomes…

Upfront week is over, but all the latest season’s trends are still the talk of the Ton.From publishers like Netflix bringing advertisers into the worlds of their shows, such as Bridgerton, to the continued shifting marketplace for sports—and whatever is happening with measurement—we’re keeping an eye on all the storylines brands and marketers should follow.At ADWEEK, we’ve spoken to ad leaders from all the upfront week presenters, including Disney, Netflix, Amazon, Warner Bros. Discovery, NBCUniversal, and more, and here are some of the top trends to watch as upfront season unfolds:Agentic is already impacting advertisingAgentic was a hot topic throughout…