Industry Insights

Introduction On April 25, 2026, an AI coding agent called Cursor deleted the entire production database of PocketOS, a software company serving car rental businesses. One routine task, one credential mismatch, one autonomous decision to “fix” the problem without asking anyone, and an entire company’s data was gone in nine seconds flat. If you work in advertising and your first reaction was “that’s a tech problem, not my problem,” we’d encourage you to think again.

Targeted advertising has solidified itself as the king of digital marketing. Approximately 87% of all digital ad spend is devoted to programmatic, and nothing can get that popular without a few alternatives rearing their heads. To the crux of the issue: self-service vs. fully-managed programmatic platforms. There are many qualities that separate these two distinct tools of targeted advertising, and this article is going to take a deeper look at a key element that divides them: customer service.

Pour one out, friends; Universal Analytics is no more. Unless you’re using 360, then Google Analytics 4 is now your current and only option from Google for tracking data and stats for your website. There is some good and some bad that comes along with any change, and we’re here to break down what you need to know about GA4. The Good Tracking Across Multiple Devices Universal Analytics focused on desktop interactions with your site; when a user hopped on, UA tracked the “session” as a group of user hits on your site.

Digital marketing often feels like a guessing game, but it doesn’t have to. The promise of programmatic marketing is turning a broad announcement into a hand-delivered letter straight to those who could use it most – no guesswork needed. That personal approach is achieved through gathering copious amounts of industry data and, most importantly, knowing what to do with it. In our latest article published on AP News, Yahoo! Finance and MarketWatch, we recently pulled statistics from 30 of our top performing users, focusing specifically on the ones that yielded the highest return on ad spend (ROAS) for their digital efforts.

Why are so many marketers talking about the cookie? Didn’t Google wipe out cookies this year? Well, not quite. There’s a lot of talk in the digital advertising world related to cookies, privacy, and restrictions, and we’re here to give you all the updates and info you need. Goodbye Cookies The word “cookie” usually refers to the data saved online that can store and remember information about you. When you visit a website, cookies could track your online activity.

When we entered 2020, nobody could predict what was going to happen. And nobody could foresee that the next two years would be full of immense change, online pandemonium, and masks. Don’t worry, this won’t be yet another pandemic article. Instead of focusing on COVID-19, Omicron, and worldwide effects of the virus, we want to focus on how the pandemic has affected marketing and advertising specifically. As the world changed, so did consumer habits.

The downfall of linear and traditional marketing has given way to new marketing mediums, such as CTV and Programmatic audio, which continue to rise. Television, streaming, YouTube, and other online media platforms continue to get more use as our lives become more diverse, which has allowed marketers and media companies to reach, track and target audiences in new and exciting ways. We are excited to bring you quarterly insights into significant marketing mediums and vertical trends Genius Monkey data has shown.

As a leader in programmatic advertising, Genius Monkey knows that a well-rounded strategy includes display first and then other programmatic services added on to complement display. In fact, data shows that display campaigns are the backbone of almost every successful digital marketing media plan. Genius Monkey recently conducted a study in which we took a large sample of clients who were running multiple programmatic mediums (display, video, audio, OTT/CTV, etc) at once to analyze how each medium yielded conversions working together, and the results were no surprise to us!

The Internet came to life 38 years ago. The first iPhone was released 14 years ago. The first television advertisement was a 10-second video during a baseball game in 1941, 80 years ago. It may seem like many years have passed, but all of these developments, from TV to cell phones, appeared in the last 100 years and have changed our lives forever. Soon after these inventions came advertising on these devices.