Ad fraud and brand safety will still be issues even when third-party cookies are just a fond memory. The online ad industry Is building support for buyers.json, a proposed standard from IAB Tech Lab that lets ad sellers identify ad buyers and shut down the bad guys. Related: content classification vendor GumGum is enhancing its brand safety ratings to include news site quality scores from NewsGuard.  

Another day, another AI survey.  This one by Morning Consult for IBM offers a good overview of AI adoption and obstacles.  Key findings: adoption stalled during the pandemic but is set to accelerate; 51% of companies have a unified view of their data; and data issues trail only expertise as adoption barriers.  Fun facts: marketers invest less in AI than most other departments and 77% of companies with over 1,000 employees draw on more than 50 systems for AI and analytics inputs.

Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.