Shirley Marschall is back, and this week she's discussing the heatwave, and the ad tech hot air surrounding AI...

It is hot. Unbelievably hot. You probably heard (or felt it in Cannes) that a brutal heatwave has settled over Europe. And with it, for the first time in a very long while, conversations seem to revolve around AC far more often than about AI. Meanwhile, everything is melting and blurring… including LinkedIn feeds, Cannes summaries, product launches, partnership announcements. No one wants a hot take, but everyone will happily take an iced coffee. It’s simply too hot to focus, too hot to read, too hot to think and, occasionally, too hot to even care.

But the heat can’t be blamed for the entire blur as ad tech announcements do have a habit of not just sounding alike but actually being alike, especially this time of year. Everyone is back from Cannes, already preparing for next swathe of gladhanding, heading into H2 determined to prove they’re the ones leading the way. The product launches are landing and the partnership announcements are rolling in hot.

It all feels a bit like a public swimming pool. From the outside it looks immaculate. Crystal-clear water, clean tiles, cheerful signage. Everyone jumps in expecting a refreshing dip, only to discover the water is warm, not because of the weather, but because several hundred people have already been in there all day.

Ad tech’s announcement cycle has exactly this quality.

When one announcement's celebrations settle down, another announcement appears, and with it the exclusivity expires. "Exclusive", evolves into "strategic", then becomes "open ecosystem" and before long, everyone is swimming in the same water.

The whole "exclusive" mechanic is just one example of a broader ad tech habit: announcements that are technically true but commercially amplified, inviting readers to infer something much bigger. "First partner" is one version. "Exclusive" is another. "Preferred" yet another. They all describe a moment in time, a marketing window, a disappearing message, a snapshot, but are often communicated as though they represent permanent game-changer-level competitive infrastructure.

Take LinkedIn naming The Trade Desk as its first DSP partner for CTV. It was (and still is) a genuinely significant announcement. Professional audience data finally flowing into the open internet made for a compelling narrative. Until, a couple of months later, Amazon DSP received the exact same access. That announcement naturally arrived with equal warmth and just as first-partner-ish.

No, nothing unusual happened here. In ad tech speak, "first partner" loosely translates to "first announced partner", which is something quite different. The industry however has become remarkably good at communicating those moments as though they were destinations. Of course a business can genuinely be first, genuinely have exclusive access or genuinely launch a category-defining capability… but only for the rest of the market to catch up weeks or months later.

And the same is true for all the DSPs, SSPs, identity providers, retailers, publishers… everyone. It’s retail media networks that once insisted on keeping inventory tightly controlled, gradually expanding access. Identity companies that spent years differentiating themselves increasingly compete on interoperability. Premium publishers eventually plug into every major demand and supply platform. Same goes for all the "there won’t be ads" companies, which eventually all introduced ads.

It's the same mechanism throughout. "Exclusive", "first partner" and "preferred" belong to one family of announcements. "AI-powered", "privacy-first", "cookieless", "future-proof", and "industry-leading" belong to another. Both operate the same way: describing something narrowly true while encouraging the industry to infer something much broader.

The obvious question is why this keeps happening. The short answer is incentives. The longer answer is just as straightforward: companies are simply optimising for different objectives at different points in time.

Take Disney or Walmart, both started with their own ad tech, their own exclusive partnerships, their own principles about protecting their supply and data. But building their own tech and tightly controlling distribution wasn’t a philosophical commitment to in-housing. It was the optimal strategy at that moment. As the market evolved, opening access to more demand became the optimal strategy (be sides that revenue pressure has a way of dissolving principles). All the announcements were true, at a certain point in time, but neither one represented an immutable worldview. It’s simply how competition works in a market where everyone is building roughly the same puzzle from roughly the same pieces.

Still, the warm pool isn’t (necessarily) the result of companies mindlessly copying one another. It’s what happens when rational businesses respond to the same economic incentives. If one route proves profitable, capital flows there until the advantage disappears.

Perhaps that’s why so many announcements eventually sound the same. Yesterday’s "exclusive", "in-house" or "preferred" becomes today’s "open", "interoperable", and "available to all partners". Markets change, revenue opportunities change, and competitive advantages eventually get competed away. A temporary integration becomes a press release. A press release becomes market positioning. Six months later everyone has the same integration and the cycle begins again.

Maybe every announcement in ad tech should come with two dates: the publication date… and the expiration date.