What gets written next

Introduction

Describe the programmatic supply chain to a colleague without using an acronym they do not know.

• Advertising TechnologyWhat adtech means, why it exists, and the one question it answers.

Beginner

Place any tactic on the funnel and say what it should be judged by.

• The Marketing FunnelAwareness to purchase, what each stage is actually worth, and why the shape is a planning tool rather than a description of behaviour.

Intermediate

Read a bid request field by field and explain why a bid won, lost, or was never sent.

• How an RTB Auction WorksThe request, the bid, the win notice, and the 100ms they fit inside.
• Reading a Bid RequestA real OpenRTB 2.6 payload, field by field, and what each field is worth to a bidder.planned
• First Price and the Rise of Bid ShadingWhy second price died in eighteen months and what shading algorithms reconstruct.
• Floors, Deal Floors and Unified PricingHow a publisher sets a reserve, and how buyers probe for it.planned
• What Really Decides a WinThrottling, pacing, pretargeting and the filters that reject an impression before any bid is formed.planned
• The Economics of the Bid StreamWhy a bidder sees ten million QPS, bids on 2%, and still pays for the other 98%.planned
• How Auctions Get GamedBid caching, soft floors, last look, and the practices the industry had to name to stop.planned

Audit a supply path, spot a reseller hop that adds nothing, and argue for removing it with numbers.

• Header Bidding, and the Waterfall It KilledThe hack that became the standard, and the latency it moved into the browser.planned
• Prebid in PracticeWrappers, adapters, timeouts, and the config decisions that move real revenue.planned
• Client Side or Server SidePrebid Server, cookie syncing, match rates, and the trade you make for speed.planned
• ads.txt, sellers.json and the SupplyChain ObjectThree files that made the supply chain legible, and what they still cannot tell you.planned
• Supply Path OptimizationScoring paths by win rate, fee and fraud — and why the average publisher now has 25 to 30 SSPs.planned
• Curation and Supply-Side TargetingThe 2025–26 shift of audience decisioning from the DSP to the SSP, and what it means for fees.

Choose an addressability strategy for a given market and defend what it cannot do.

• What a Cookie Actually IsFirst party, third party, partitioned — and why one HTTP header caused a decade of argument.planned
• The Cookie That Did Not DiePrivacy Sandbox was retired in October 2025. What that reversal did and did not change.
• Universal IDs, HonestlyUID2, RampID, ID5: how they are minted, how they are matched, and what match rate really measures.planned
• Contextual and Seller-Defined AudiencesTargeting the page instead of the person, and whether taxonomies can replace a graph.planned
• What a Clean Room Can and Cannot ProveDifferential privacy, k-anonymity, and the questions a clean room will refuse to answer.planned
• Consent as a Technical SignalGDPR, TCF, the Global Privacy Platform and US state laws, as fields in a bid request.planned

Advanced

Tell a real lift from a reported one, and design a test that would change your mind.

• Every Attribution Model Is WrongLast click, multi-touch, data-driven — what each one assumes and where it breaks.planned
• Incrementality: the Only Honest NumberGeo holdouts, ghost ads, PSA tests, and why iROAS runs 30–60% below reported ROAS.planned
• Viewability, and the Attention Metrics After ItFifty percent of pixels for one second: how that definition was chosen and what it misses.planned
• A Taxonomy of Ad FraudDomain spoofing, SIVT, bots, and made-for-advertising sites — ranked by how much they cost.planned
• Why Two Dashboards Never AgreeTimezones, counting points, dedup windows: the five standard causes of discrepancy and how to isolate them.planned

Explain why a tactic that works in display fails in CTV or retail media, and what to do instead.

• CTV Is Not VideoAd pods, SSAI, app-level frequency, and why 94% of CTV spend is programmatic but barely competitive.planned
• VAST, VPAID and Server-Side Ad InsertionHow a video ad is actually delivered, and what stitching does to measurement.planned
• Retail Media: the Closed LoopOnsite, offsite and in-store, with the one structural advantage no other channel has.planned
• The Retail Media Accountability EraWhy iROAS can vary 6.5x on the same campaign, and what the IAB 2026 standard fixes.planned
• Audio and Digital Out of HomeTwo channels with no cookie, no click, and no individual — and how they transact anyway.planned

Design a bidder that holds a p99 latency budget and spends a daily cap without overspending.

• Designing a BidderThe 100ms budget, broken down: network, decode, lookup, model, encode.planned
• Pacing and Budget ControlSpending exactly a daily cap when you cannot see tomorrow — control loops, not schedules.planned
• Surviving Ten Million QPSPretargeting, sampling, and why throwing away most of the stream is the whole job.planned
• The Event PipelineImpressions, clicks, conversions: idempotency, late arrivals, and exactly-once as a fiction.planned
• Identity InfrastructureGraphs, match tables, and the cost of a join at bid time.planned
• Agentic AdvertisingMCP, AdCP and the IAB’s AAMP: what changes when the buyer is a model, not a trader.planned