6 stories that defined an unprecedented year in ad tech

It’s been a year of thrills and spills for ad tech. There wasn’t a month when some industry-shaping news didn’t make headlines, often in mainstream media publications.

The Current is taking a moment to reflect on some of the biggest ad tech news of the year. It was a year of firsts — from the largest ad tech trial and agency merger ever to programmatic’s first foray in the Olympics.

As with every year, there were some winners and losers. Google had a chaotic year with two trials and — who could forget — its backtrack on cookie deprecation; X continued to disenchant advertisers; and NBCUniversal, Omnicom and Walmart saw massive wins, thanks to new ventures.

Programmatic Olympics

Perhaps one of the biggest celebratory moments in ad tech came with programmatic’s entrance into the Paris Summer Games. For the first time, NBCUniversal (NBCU), the holder of Olympics broadcast rights through 2032, opened its Peacock streaming platform for ads to be purchased programmatically.

With that, NBCUniversal lowered the threshold for participation, making it more democratic for new advertisers, especially smaller and medium-sized brands, to ease their way in with cheaper and more targeted buys. In fact, NBCUniversal said 70% of advertisers that bought ads programmatically were new this year, and generated half a billion dollars. The move was a win for NBCU and showcased advertisers’ growing thirst for live sports on streaming. NBCU saw record ad revenue, securing more advertisers than the 2021 Tokyo and 2026 Rio Games combined, and doubled revenue from the Tokyo Games.

“In the past, accessing Olympics and other tentpole-event inventory has required working directly with a publisher, which often came with high minimums, long lead times and additional production hurdles,” Elizabeth Zupkow, senior director at Goodway Group, which is a media strategy partner for Tiger Balm, told The Current during the summer. “Accessing this opportunity programmatically means that we can connect the Tiger Balm brand with consumers quickly, easily and within our budget.”

Google trials and cookie fallout

Google’s 2024 could be labeled a chaotic one. The tech giant started the year by leaning into its Privacy Sandbox solution for advertisers with the expected sunsetting of cookies by 2025. The technology wasn’t exactly a hit. At the IAB Tech Lab’s event in April, Joshua Prismon described it as a deconstructed Big Mac. “Part of the thing we’ve had to do is try to pull those ingredients and make it a meal,” he said. “We’ve tried to do that with the gap analysis, but at the end, we’re still trying to figure out why there’s lettuce in the shake. It doesn’t quite work out there.”

An astonishing pivot came in July. After five years of flip-flopping, Google decided to abandon its plan to deprecate cookies in its Chrome web browser. James Rosewell, co-founder of the Movement for an Open Web, told The Current that the news “is a clear admission by Google that their plan to enclose the open web has failed.” Regardless, industry experts spoke about how the advances in ad tech knock third-party cookies out of the equation anyway.

It turns out that the cookies news was a measly crumb in the bucket, given the two major, historic ad tech trials that happened back to back. In August, Google lost a massive antitrust case brought by the DOJ when the judge found that its Search business was a monopoly in the marketplace. The DOJ is recommending that Google sell Chrome. The second antitrust trial surrounding Google’s alleged ad tech monopoly wrapped up in November, with a ruling expected to be issued soon.

Both cases may take several years to conclude as Google’s potential appeals wind their way through the courts. Regardless of the final outcome, the trials have tremendous implications for the ad tech industry, with the public court documents providing an inside look at how Google has managed its business to this point.

Omnicom and IPG merger and AI

As an end-of-year surprise, Omnicom Group announced it would acquire Interpublic Group in a massive deal that would potentially create the world’s largest advertising holding company. The merger could have far-reaching implications across the advertising industry, not least of which is ad tech. In a conference call, the agencies pointed to the need to invest in AI as one of the contributing factors for the merger. It’s a year when AI has really peaked in its presence across all areas of marketing as consumer data — and measuring it — grows ever more important.

“The threat of AI is part of the story. Agencies benefit from more scale to invest in resources, people and partnerships with providers of AI-based technologies,” said Brian Wieser, CEO and principal at Madison and Wall, a media and advertising advisory firm.

Walmart’s acquisition of Vizio

In one of the largest retail deals of the year, Walmart finalized its $2.3 billion acquisition of Vizio at the beginning of December. The move allows Walmart to match its shopping transaction data with Vizio’s streaming data to make ad targeting much more precise. It’s a merging of retail and connected TV (CTV) that positions the shopping giant to rival Amazon and its Prime Video offering, as Joel Cox, EVP of innovation and strategy at Strategus, told The Current.

“The shopping behaviors and habits combined with your viewing and your television-watching habits to offer something that is much more thoughtful, that is arguably much more scalable, or at a minimum, much more transparent in its taxonomy,” said Cox.

GARM shuts down after Elon Musk lawsuit

X owner Elon Musk started the year on shaky ground with advertisers (fallout from his "Go f--- yourself" comment directed at weary advertisers about hate speech on X). Musk appeared apologetic at Cannes Lions in June, but the sentiment didn’t last long. In August, the billionaire sued GARM (the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, created by the World Federation of Advertisers in 2019), alleging that the nonprofit led an advertiser boycott of X.

The brand-safety group had a goal to create standards for online advertising in order to provide advertisers more controls and transparency over where their ads run. Its latest work was introducing a new sustainability framework at Cannes Lions. But faced with the prospect of expensive litigation, the group quickly dismantled.

Many in the industry were shocked and alarmed. At the time, Arielle Garcia, director of intelligence at the ad industry watchdog group Check My Ads, told The Current that it “sets a dangerous precedent that could embolden Elon and others to launch more unwarranted attacks on advertisers.”

The presidential election became a podcast parade

This year showed that even political advertising is moving toward an omnichannel direction. During the 2024 presidential election, streaming audio — and especially podcasts — suddenly became the go-to channel to reach younger voters. Donald Trump appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience and Kamala Harris came on SiriusXM’s Call Her Daddy.

“2024 will be remembered as the Podcast Election,” said Steve Johnston, the former COO of FlexPoint Media, in a post on X. “Not because podcasts are new (they’re not), but because 2024 was the first time presidential nominees and their running mates leveraged them in a meaningful way.”

Experts had previously told The Current that audio was a growing channel for political advertisers that could complement CTV, a popular choice for political advertisers aiming to reach swing states.