Return-on-ad-spend – or ROAS – has solidified itself as an industry standard for measuring campaign effectiveness. There’s no doubt that ROAS is useful, but an ultra-heavy focus on the metric can be deceptive when determining the overall health of your campaigns. Is the Marketing Efficiency Ratio, or MER, the solution to the problems ROAS creates? Let’s dive into the details: MER vs. ROAS: What’s the Difference? ROAS is calculated by dividing the cost of ads from the revenue those ads produced: (Revenue from ads) / (Cost of ads).

2025 will likely be remembered as the year when all the predictions, noise, and media shifts became too big to ignore. For years, advertisers heard about looming disruption – AI, streaming, creator economies, consolidation – but this past year is when those forces fully materialized. We’ve seen the integration of AI into virtually every workflow, dramatic shifts in how consumers discover and relate to brands, and the early warning signs of potential issues as mega-corporations continue to grow and consolidate their power.

Netflix Closes a Deal to Buy WBD; Paramount Steps Up On December 5th, 2025, Netflix announced a deal to purchase Warner Bros Discovery (WBD), including all the IP rights, studios, and streaming audience of about 128 million subscribers. The announced $83 billion buyout equates to about $27.75 per share, but does not include Warner-owned cable channels like CNN and TNT. The questions and discussions were ongoing when, on December 8th, Paramount complicated matters with a hostile takeover offer of $30 per share, coming out to an all-cash deal of $108 billion.

Winter is coming, and now is the time to prepare for the biggest consumer spending season of the year. There are many factors that go into creating a successful holiday campaign, and Genius Monkey is here to discuss three high-level strategies that will prepare your business to thrive throughout the next year! Let’s dive in: Prepare Your Fuel Early As the temperature goes down, competition for ad space and attention heats up.

As tools and technologies evolve, so too do the methods of bad actors looking to make a buck off advertiser’s honest work. Enter SIVT, or Sophisticated Invalid Traffic. This term describes the next generation of MFA and – as the name suggests – they can be complicated to detect and avoid. Let’s take a look at some examples of SIVT and discuss how Genius Monkey advertisers can beat the new Bots.

For a small business, marketing isn’t just about growing profits, it’s about survival. One of the biggest challenges small businesses face is getting the most out of a limited advertising budget. Luckily, there’s a smart solution. Programmatic advertising helps stretch every ad dollar for maximum impact. By using data and automation, it helps small businesses compete with much larger ones. Let’s take a look at how programmatic can help small businesses grow:

One of the many draws of programmatic advertising is the promise of efficiency, but there are plenty of examples of businesses taking “efficiency” too far. In this week’s blog from Genius Monkey, we’re taking a look at another way some advertisers cut out too many steps with the issue of programmatic “black boxes.” Let’s dive in! What is a Programmatic Black Box? A black box is a system where advertisers spend ad money with little control as to how, when, and where ads are placed.

The first of two lawsuits against Google has finally reached its conclusion; found guilty of antitrust behaviors, it’s now time for the tech giant to face the music with a ruling on the Search case. Did the DOJ get its wish to have Chrome sold? How will this actually help Genius Monkey’s programmatic targeting, and what can users expect to come from the government’s required remedies? Let’s dig in and find out what advertisers need to know about this landmark ruling:

It’s been a couple years since Genius Monkey dove into the Flexibility of Modern Audio Ads, and it’s time to check in with programmatic’s most underrated medium. In the last two years, the audio industry has experienced explosive growth and consumers are eating up audio in all new ways. The audio advertising landscape is evolving, and it’s time for advertisers to keep up or get left behind. Let’s look at the current state of audio ads and see how advertisers can best embrace the channel.

The last year has seen many shake-ups to the advertising world; big platforms shutting down, Google losing multiple advertising-related court cases, and the ever-evolving machinations of MFA. One thing that doesn’t change is the Genius Monkey platform’s ability to reach your audience: any audience! Genius Monkey users represent a vast variety of verticals across multiple programmatic channels. We’re always talking about following the data; let’s see what the data has to say!