The curriculum

Four bands, read in order. Each track states what you will be able to do at the end of it, and each band says plainly who should skip it.

Introduction

The map of the territory: what this industry is, who is in it, and where the money moves.

Skip if you already work in media and can name the parties in a supply path.

What this industry is, who is in it, and where the money moves. Three articles, about twenty minutes.

The fundamentals everything else is built on — the ad server, the arithmetic, and how inventory is actually sold.

Skip if you can calculate eCPM from spend and impressions without thinking.

How advertisers think about buying attention, starting with the funnel every media plan is built on.

The machinery: auctions, supply paths and identity. This is the working knowledge of the job.

Do not skip. Most people working in adtech have gaps in exactly this band.

OpenRTB, first-price mechanics, bid shading and floors — the 300ms in which the money is actually decided.

Header bidding, Prebid, ads.txt, SPO and curation: how an impression finds its way to a buyer, and who takes a cut.

What survived the privacy decade: universal IDs, clean rooms, consent signals and contextual’s return.

Where the arguments are: proving effect, channels with different physics, and building the systems.

Read in any order — these stages depend on the earlier bands, not on each other.

Attribution, incrementality, MMM, viewability and fraud — separating what happened from what was reported.

CTV, retail media, audio and DOOH: four markets that took programmatic and changed its economics.

Bidder architecture, latency budgets, pacing, pipelines, and the agentic protocols arriving in 2026.