Featured
The Rise of Retail Media Networks: Why Every Retailer is Becoming an Ad Platform
By Sarah Chen
February 20, 2026
8 min read
Retail media is projected to surpass $150 billion in global ad spend by 2027. From grocery chains to
ride-hailing platforms, companies with first-party transaction data are building sophisticated
ad-serving infrastructure to monetize their audiences. We explore how this shift is reshaping
the digital advertising landscape.
The concept is simple: retailers sit on a goldmine of first-party purchase data and high-intent
audiences. By embedding ad placements at the point of purchase decision, they can offer advertisers
something that walled gardens struggle to match — closed-loop attribution from impression to
transaction.
Amazon pioneered this model, generating over $46 billion in ad revenue in 2023 alone. But the real
story is what is happening outside Amazon. Walmart Connect, Instacart Ads, Uber Advertising, and
dozens of others are now building or licensing ad-serving technology to capture their share of
advertiser budgets.
AI & ML
Why On-Device AI is the Next Frontier for Ad Personalization
By Karim Benali
February 19, 2026
5 min read
As privacy regulations tighten and third-party cookies disappear, the industry is shifting toward
on-device inference models that personalize ad experiences without sending user data to the cloud.
This approach promises both better privacy and lower latency.
Cloud
Edge Computing Meets Ad Serving: Sub-10ms Decision Latency at Scale
By Amina Toure
February 18, 2026
6 min read
Modern ad servers are pushing decision-making to the edge, deploying lightweight Rust-based services
on Cloudflare Workers and Fly.io to deliver ad decisions in under 10 milliseconds. We benchmark
the leading approaches and their trade-offs.
Startups
Inside the Stack: How a 3-Person Team Built a Programmatic Ad Server in Rust
By Omar Hadj
February 17, 2026
10 min read
A deep dive into the architecture decisions behind Sawt, an open-source retail media ad server
built in Rust with Axum. From decision engines to encrypted tracking tokens, we explore how a
small team can compete with enterprise solutions.