The lead  ·  01

Prebid’s new chairman won’t pick a side in the agentic standards fight — and that’s the point

Prebid.org confirmed Joel Meyer, CTO of OpenX and a board member since 2023, as its new chairman on 24 August, closing a leadership vacancy opened in May when its president, chairman and director of product…

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The week in one paragraph

This was the week new supply showed up everywhere at once, and the platforms that already had it started taking the controls away from the people who buy it. A mall operator, a B2B newsletter network and an airport-screen company all launched programmatic supply this week — Simon Property Group, Workweek and Reach TV — proof that the auction is no longer just publishers and platforms; it’s anyone with first-party data and a screen. At the same time, Meta quietly stripped advertisers’ placement-exclusion controls in the name of automation, and The Trade Desk shipped Zuma, a Kokai update explicitly designed to make switching DSPs harder. The standards fight got a new referee: Joel Meyer, OpenX’s CTO, became Prebid’s chairman while still sitting on the IAB Tech Lab board, and immediately declared Prebid protocol-agnostic rather than picking a side in the AAMP/AdCP fight. USA Today joined the growing bloc of publishers reformatting pages for AI crawlers while blocking 99% of them by default — a bet that licensing has a floor — even as Anthropic kept proving the opposite: zero publisher licensing deals, zero publisher lawsuits, and no sign either number is changing. OpenAI priced ChatGPT ads at roughly $60 CPM, forcing the industry to argue over whether chatbot advertising is really a sixth channel. And Meta’s up-to-$18 billion state settlement over teen safety put a number on platform legal risk that every other platform now has to price against. The through-line: supply is diversifying faster than the rules that govern it, and the platforms with the most leverage are using this week to grab more of it before anyone can write the rules down.