I can’t believe it took someone this long to lock up the defacto programmatic user id data asset. I kept wondering why all these companies searching for differentiation didn’t put a ring on it. Can you imagine the chaos you can cause for your competitors if you suddenly tank the id delivery for their campaigns?

If I had an article for every time I fixed something in an integration and didn’t make more money, I’d have at least 2 articles.

Sometimes, when I’m lying down next to my son, I think to myself “man, won’t it be great when the DOJ forces adx to bid into prebid and we can centralize adserving in prebid and go back to vickrey auctions?” It sure will be.

Fees that vary independent of delivery cost are inherently fragile, it’s a question of timescale not a question of sustainability.

I don’t know when Pepsi took over this longitude but I’m not happy about it

Brave doing ad injection brings up one of my favorite points once again — to what extent are content delivery chain intermediaries allowed to alter the content they’re delivering? This conceptually applies to bandwidth, software, and hardware providers. Is there a coherent legal precedent at all for this? It seems kind of fucking important for people to give so little of a shit about it.

I have a hot take for all of you. I don’t think yield management exists. Come argue about it with me and Adam tomorrow on our podcast if you disagree, and I’ll explain all the things you don’t understand to you. Psa, this doesn’t apply to CTV, because CTV is a hot mess and I can’t fit what needs to be done to fix it into a tweet.

If anyone is telling you not to buy a publisher because of the contents of their ads.txt file, that person doesn’t know what they’re talking about and you shouldn’t be listening to them.

I wanted to cross post this here as an "optimist" outcome for white collar jobs and AI -- One possible cause for white collar jobs not disappearing could be disaggregation. The economy right now is relatively centralized in large corporations because economies of scale enhance quality and efficiency. If ai democratizes those things (ie. you no longer require scale to do stuff, cuz AI), we could see a massive explosion of new enterprise — both production and tools to discover new production — that reshape the economy in the image of a massive number of lower scale but highly effective virtual businesses that still need humans. There could be a huge glut of higher quality products. The question is what skills are necessary in the new model for commerce -- and how well are skills that "white collar" folks have today adapted to the new zeitgeist.

How many of you people on here can tell me the difference between client side prebid and openpath?

I have a shower thought for all of you. I think that things are coming to a head because of misalignment -- namely around the word Transparency. To the ad tech layman, transparency means "i want to know every participant in the supply chain and how much they're taking." We have seen significant product development around this with middling efficacy or adoption. This interpretation of "transparency" makes assumptions about a desire for "efficiency" or "optimization." This is where I think we've gone awry. There's another interpretation of "transparency." The alternative interpretation is "I want to know what you're doing to the extent that it can make me look bad." Same word, radically different intent. The latter has nothing to do with efficiency -- in fact, a desire for inefficiency and lack of absolute transparency is not at all at odds with the latter definition, while those two things are quite at odds with the former. As is every product manager's nightmare, I fear our industry may have been building features for the former, when the desire is for the latter. I think this is an artifact of sanitized public discourse being at odds with product realities. I really don't mean to pass judgment here, but there seem to be a lot of surprised pikachu faces out there, and I can't say that I'm one of them.

im going to get everyone to say the word modular this year, just watch

News flash for those of you who don’t realize it — ssps and challenger dsps love adcp because it removes the human element from channel allocation. Which means all of those dinners spent wooing agencies to consolidate on 1-2 dsps get flushed down the toilet if it succeeds — because the whole “I don’t want to manage multiple dsps” reality gets turned on its head. An agent will manage 300 dsps if it drives superior results.

I’m 90% sure the artf adcp discussions are primarily because us ad tech talking heads are bored and want to beef with each other. The funny secret is that it’s actually a bunch of nerds debating two sets of apis and it’s virtually meaningless for your average publisher or marketer. Like, the net result is going to be better services for you. That’s it.

Sometimes I read people’s ai posts and am 99% sure if I had a call with them they wouldn’t know half of what they posted or why it was correct or incorrect. I might start requesting meetings with people’s agents soon.

Because my brain has been ruined by ad tech, I was lying next to my 3yo as he fell asleep and thought “since agentic primarily performs the role of an agency, which purely based on etymology should surprise precisely no one, we are building the most efficient system in the world at stealing what works from one brand and giving it to another. Every single brand working with anyone using anything agentic should be freaking the fuck out about keeping any results and effective strategies completely private from other accounts within the agency.” Don’t get me wrong, this cross pollination certainly happens today, but when an agency possesses an omniscient allocation engine, and not balkanized “Brand” teams with dedicated hires, the sharing of data goes from “something that kind of happens” to “the literal agency business model.”

Guys the concept of the emergency room waiting room is wild. “Oh, you’re so sick you feel the need to see a doctor as urgently as possible? Great, come to this building where you can sit in close proximity indoors with other people who feel similarly. How long you ask? We don’t know — hours? It depends on how sick everyone is - the sicker we all are on average, the longer you get to be around one another!” Like, $10 startup idea — A FUCKING PAGER SYSTEM WHERE PEOPLE CAN SIT IN THEIR CARS!

I just finished there is no antimemetics division, which I really enjoyed (it’s not “hard sci fi” treatise, but it’s great). It’s made me hyper aware of idea propagation — how many of you have used the term “surface area” in the past 6 months? How many times did you use it in the decade before that? We are impressionable creatures.