Observations from a fed up ad tech supply side analyst.

Omaha, NE
The inevitable next step in the downfall of Sports Illustrated just happened. I don’t know if it was inevitable but selling to Minute Media made it clear that it was going to die. They were never going to be a good steward of a legitimate asset.
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Geez, are we going to get other people doing the post per day Twitter stuff now that Eric T won an award?
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Attention ad tech publishers. You sure were quiet on a day when a suddenly desperate DSP decided to dust off their Google playbook. Get your shit together Prebid. There’s time to make this announcement fall flat like it should.
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Pay Adweek for a couch in Cannes, get a free puff piece from them on the first day of the festivities. Never change ad tech.
Step. Repeat. Dominate.✨📸 Main Character Energy—Cannes edition.🛥️ Join us on the red carpet at the Viant Café in the @ADWEEK house.🥂 #CannesLions #Cannes2025 #DSP #Adtech #DigitalAdvertising #Advertising
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And still not be relevant enough for this:
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The ad-tech elite and a lot of others are in Cannes this week. Who pays for this? Brands! Where would this money go otherwise? Publishers. Can we fast-forward until the point where publishers finally understand that their only sane path forward is to have complete control 1/2
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of their own distribution. If they were in control there would be far fewer people at this and so many other revenue draining industry conferences. This industry works less than any other I’m aware of. Unless you count socializing as work.
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At least it won’t sue you when you misrepresent what it’s actually capable of.
This month marks the 8-year anniversary of ads.txt's launch, I believe. Feels like ads.txt has given some a false sense of confidence about media quality/supply. Also, Happy Birthday? 🎂
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So dumb.
NEW: @Comscore and @magnite have teamed up to launch Certified Deal IDs. Story below. 👇
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Don’t worry friends, I’ll keep posting here.
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So many posts this weekend about programmatic supply chain. What does the industry need more, SSPs or DSPs? We’re getting very close to not having both. There’s too much value taken out of the transaction by having both.
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Web publishers have tolerated it because they are gutless when it comes to owning their supply chain. In-app is pure garbage. CTV pubs won’t let 40-50% be taken out by the very low value add that SSPs (especially) and DSPs are charging largely for distribution and obfuscation.
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Read this thread and comment with what other class of business in ad tech this most reminds you of.
There are a lot more problems with the biggest PBMs than just price 1. They will tell your company they pass through the entire rebate. But they have intermediary companies called Rebate GPOs that have the contracts with big pharma. They keep a percent of the rebate amount. The smaller your company is under 50k lives, the more they keep.
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Curation is just a word that’s used to move decisioning to the sell side. It’s in response to all major DSPs having ever more direct connections to publishers. The root problem is that the industry can’t support the necessary margins to have publicly traded SSPs and DSPs. 1/x
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You can have one or the other but soon they won’t both exist. Intermediaries will have to aggregate both supply and demand and provide support to both sides. It’s inevitable.
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Agencies are going to have to figure out which feature set they want more and start to truly partner and not just use these intermediaries as negotiation.
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ALT Everything Is Fine All Ok GIF

Adalytics has established a track record of publishing inaccurate reports that misrepresent Google’s products and make wildly exaggerated claims. 🧵
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Not enough time to rip this apart today but a few things; 1 - Google must be getting shredded for them to do this follow-up. 2 - DV/IAS are putting their reputation at risk for putting out PR that makes it seem like they’re adding value here. They aren’t. 1/
Today, we shared additional facts that set the record straight about our Google Video Partners program. But don’t take our word for it. Yesterday, DoubleVerify and IAS published their own audits of GVP, with similar results. For more: blog.google/products/ads-com…
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Those last two are most interesting and key to the problem. DV/IAS count the same way; x% of imps are GVP and not all are billed imps. What Google needs to fess up to is when 20% of impressions are GVP, what % of billed imps are GVP? Everybody skips YouTube ads, 4/
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Nobody skips outstream ads. 20% GVP share of total impressions can quite easily become 80% of billed imps because of what gets skipped and what doesn’t. Google needs to answer to these accusations. They’re not going to. They are going to hide behind PR. Fin
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