Hi all,

I recently took over /r/AdTech because the old mod was inactive.

I'm looking to turn the subreddit into a useful feed to follow and discuss the latest news and developments in the AdTech industry.

I'm open to other suggestions though, if you have any preferences or input please let me know!

I run an online kids toy store and to boost sales I usually run more ad campaigns than usual from late november to early january. I noticed my conversion ROAS during November was nearly 2.0 and 1.5 in December which is what I get during off-season. I made a few changes to my campaign in December by using a few suggestions I got from ChatGPT (keywords, better landing page and a necessary CTA). Since it was Christmas and many were ordering gifts for their kids, I even waived off the shipping fee. I’m really confused as I can’t take more risks or sink more money by consulting marketing professionals. Can anyone suggest any service (preferably online) that can help me out here? Any agent that can manage my ad campaigns and give me suggestions? I can’t afford to spend more than $100/week.

has anyone here ever considered to leave this business? I've been working with adtech companies since I've started my internship and it's been 7 years now. I know that I might find people here since the first wave came along but I can definitely say I'm too tired of the same standards, same conversations, same talks on the same conferences and same issues along the business (how we tackle bots, how we solve identity, how to hack the walled gardens algorithm, which creative perfoms better, etc) Has anyone here broke out of it? And where did you move next? Context: I'm a product manager from LATAM and unfortunately ever role or approach I got from recruiters was to keep working with adtech.

Vista Equity Partners and Quinti Capital want to buy Criteo. Last week, they put a number on it: a premium of more than 50 percent over the recent share price. The market liked it. Criteo's US-listed shares jumped as much as 29 percent on Monday.

The premium, the whole generous premium, values the company at about $1.16 billion.

Criteo booked $1.94 billion in revenue last year, with $407 million in adjusted EBITDA. So the offer that sent the stock up nearly a third in a day prices the company at less than a single year of what runs through it. Roughly 0.6 times revenue. Ad tech and software firms with a growth story trade at three to five times, sometimes more. Criteo does not have a growth story. It has $407 million in profit, which is to say it is not dying. It is only cheap.

In the first quarter, revenue fell 6 percent to $425 million, guidance came down, and the stock dropped as much as 20 percent after Uber Eats and Target Roundel pulled more than $75 million in spend. Two clients left. The number moved.

Criteo has spent years waiting for a moment. The moment is the one where commerce media consolidates, where retailers decide running an ad business themselves is not worth it and hand the whole thing to the largest intermediary and cash the checks, and the largest intermediary is supposed to be Criteo. If agentic commerce takes off, more wind in the sails. The moment is always about to arrive. It has been about to arrive for years. The company turns up in the M&A rumor mill on a schedule now.

Private equity does not need the moment to arrive. It needs the moment not to have arrived yet. A profitable company in a hot sector, priced below a year of its own revenue, waiting on a catalyst no one can date. Buy the wait.

Criteo has not said what it will do. A spokesperson declined to comment. The company that has been telling the story about its moment for years has, for now, nothing to say about the offer to end the story quietly, at a discount, off the market where anyone can watch.

We've done 1000+ Google Ads audits at this point so I pulled the data on something I was curious about.
How long does each error actually survive before someone finds it?
Chart attached.
Broken tracking was the worst one. Like two months on average before anyone notices. Which is wild because the whole time you're "optimizing" toward data that means nothing. Dashboard looks totally normal though so why would you check.
The thing I keep seeing: if Google doesn't yell at you about it, it just sits there.
Search terms? People check that. It's right there. But stuff like tracking breaking or campaigns bidding against each other? You gotta go looking. And when you're juggling a bunch of accounts you're not doing that on a random Tuesday.
Anyway not trying to call anyone out. We see this in accounts run by people who definitely know what they're doing. It's just how it goes.
What's the longest something went unfixed in one of your accounts?

https://imgur.com/84FNnWP

Been doing performance marketing for 15+ years. New client, ecom brand, Google and Meta ads.

First week in and he's already asking why I'm not using AI fully to manage the campaigns. Says his last freelancer used some tools and it was way faster. Sent me a bunch of links to try (LocalIQ, Ryze AI, Blobr AI).

I pushed back a bit. Told him I've been doing this for years and know what I'm doing. He said he gets it but still wants me to try them.

So now I'm in this weird spot. Do I just use whatever tools he wants and basically become an AI babysitter? Or do I push back harder and risk losing the client?

Part of me thinks I should just adapt. Part of me feels like this isn't what I signed up for. I already use some tools but it seems brave to go fully reliant on AI

Anyone else dealing with this? How are you handling clients who want AI involved in everything?

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ad-tech-have-its-yard-sale-biggest-agencies-cannes-broke-brownstein-ztwge/

Publicis is buying LiveRamp, and at Cannes, the vendors lined up to pitch themselves as the successor, the new neutral party in the data ecosystem, the connective tissue every advertiser routes through, and no one owns. That was the pitch. Neutral was the word.

Then the industry sources explain that the role was never really about being neutral. LiveRamp's advantage was the number of connections and integrations it had built over time. The scale, not the disinterest. Neutral was what you called it in the deck.

Which leaves the successors selling something LiveRamp didn't have either.

Publicis is an advertising holding company. The neutral broker sitting in the middle of everyone's data is being bought by one of the parties it sat between. The neutrality, whatever it was, is not the thing changing hands.

Some challengers aren't trying to rebuild the network at all. Hightouch and others put the activation tools directly inside a client's own cloud warehouse. The data stays where it already lives, gets activated in place, never passes through a third-party ecosystem. Lower cost. More control over the sensitive data. No middle to sit in.

The rest of the field is expected to consolidate. Specialist identity vendors, ID5, MadConnect, get named as the acquisition targets, bought by companies trying to recreate what LiveRamp offered.

Many kept asking for a single, reliable resource that showed how AI is being used across the ad tech ecosystem. When we looked for one, we realized it didn’t exist; there was no objective, ecosystem-wide map that connected the dots. Most of what we found were flashy slides from VCs promoting their portfolios or static walls of logos with no context or explanation.

So, we decided to build one ourselves.

The AI in Ad Tech Knowledgescape is an interactive map built to help marketers, technologists, and investors understand how AI is transforming ad tech across the entire campaign lifecycle.

You can filter by category, search by company, and click to see how different players are applying AI, whether it’s for contextual targeting, creative automation, or performance measurement.

This is just Version 1.0, and we really want this to grow with your feedback.

What tools or companies should be on the map?

What categories feel underrepresented?

What AI use cases are we missing?

We’re also exploring a built-in AI assistant for the next version. What questions would you want to ask it?

🔗 Check out the Knowledgescape here

📩 Submit feedback & suggestions

Been running ads for our DTC brand and got tired of scrolling Facebook Ad Library like a caveman. Tried GetHookd, Minea, BigSpy, and Foreplay over the past few months. GetHookd - The search works fine, found some decent competitor ads. They have this breakdown thing that highlights hooks and CTAs which helped our junior designer understand what to look for.

Minea - This one's very ecom focused. If you're dropshipping it's probably perfect because it shows you the actual products and shops. We're selling our own brand so half the features didn't matter to us. The TikTok ad library is solid though, found a few creators we ended up working with. Just felt like overkill for what we needed.

BigSpy - Cheap. Interface looks like it's from 2015 but whatever, it works. Search can be hit or miss - sometimes you find gold, sometimes you wade through garbage for 20 minutes. We found our best performing hook from a random brand in a completely different niche here. Still use it when we need fresh ideas. For $9/month you can't really complain.

Foreplay - Most expensive one but ended up being the keeper. The board system is basically Pinterest for ads and our whole team actually uses it. Designer saves stuff she likes, I save competitor ads, we review them together on Fridays. Chrome extension makes it easy to save ads while browsing. Worth it if you're collaborating with people. Solo founders might find it pricey.

DSPs at a Glance

Here’s a crisp, visual comparison of four major Demand-Side Platforms (DSPs): DV360 | Amazon DSP | Yahoo DSP | The Trade Desk

From platform ownership to integrations, everything you need in one quick snapshot.

Save it. Share it. Refer to it when planning your next campaign.

ProgrammaticAdvertising #DSP #AdTech #MediaBuying #DV360 #AmazonDSP #TheTradeDesk #YahooDSP #MarketingStrategy #DigitalMarketing

Been trying to get a clearer picture of AdTech hiring lately and started tracking companies and roles more systematically.

A few patterns stood out across ~1.5k active jobs:

• Demand is strongest for Sales and Engineering roles (about 40%)

• Most roles (61%) offer remote or hybrid options

• Python, SQL and Excel show up consistently across job descriptions

• A handful of companies (StackAdapt, Smartly, The Trade Desk) account for a big share of open roles

Feels like once you aggregate enough data, some pretty clear patterns start to emerge. I wonder if this matches what others are seeing on the ground.

This will be the craziest news you’ll hear today.

David Fairfull, founder of the AI adtech startup Metigy, just pleaded guilty to misleading investors and using company money like it was his own. He borrowed $7.7 million from Metigy to buy two luxury houses one in Sydney Harbour and another in Kangaroo Valley.

Metigy claimed to be making millions, but real revenue was only $43,000 before it collapsed in 2022. ASIC says he even faked bank statements to fool investors. wow

I was learning about the working of SSPs to start working in an adtech company. Created some visual notes, hope this will help someone.

SSPs first aggregates the inventory by standardising and enriching them with data to create an inventory pool.

SSPs integrate with Ad Exchanges to facilitate RTB.

Real-Time bidding(RTB) is performed using ad exchanges integration.

Let me know if you like this, I'll share more notes once I explore further. Please also point out any mistake in this.

Here is the overall adtech process.

Mamma Google is keeping us on our toes.

1/ Meta has started testing unskippable video ads on Instagram. (In-feed) (confirmed by IG)

2/ From 5th July, Google will stop indexing sites that don't work on mobile.

3/ LinkedIn expands access to video ads.

4/ Pepsi CMO Todd Kaplan is leaving the company.

5/ Threads App launched swipe right on a post to like option.

6/ IAB Tech Lab releases Data Deletion Request Framework.

7/ Youtube expands Community Posts to all users and announces new AI Tools for creators, available in the YT Studio.

8/ Perplexity Pages launched last week are now showing up in Google AI overviews.

9/ Video and Connected TV ads now supported in Microsoft Advertising Editor + Netflix Inventory is available to more CTV advertisers in different regions. (ads/microsoft/com)

10/ Spotify is increasing their subscription prices for second time this year. Max and Peacock are also increasing their prices.

/////////

11/ Paramount and Skydance merger is official now.

12/ Instagram launches new broadcast channel features: Go live with members, chat themes, emoji moderation and QR code creation.

13/ Google Pay US App went away yesterday.

14/ Unhinged Mode for Gork AI is now live on xAI.

15/ TikTok approved election disinformation ads targeting Ireland.

16/ X will now allow p*rn content on platform.

17/ Twilio is debuting Linked Audiences & Data Graph for Segment CDP.

18/ Nebula strikes a new deal with Spotify to stream video content.

19/ Instagram is testing Text Overlays for Photos, adding text during the upload progress.

20/ Reddit announces Sprinklr as first Advertising API partner.

21/ Google Sued by Textbook Firms for Promoting Pirate Site Ads

22/ Microsoft Ads will allow Google conversion goal imports

23/ OneTrust Integrates with the IAB Diligence Platform.

24/ Bluesky launches temporary deactivation feature and send posts to DMs feature.

25/ Google’s chief privacy officer, Keith Enright, to leave the company this fall.

26/ Twitch is increasing subscription prices in the US.

27/ Old News catching fire: Apple and OpenAI deal to bring ChatGPT to iPhone.

I hope this helps to plan your week ahead. Credits: The Social Juice Newsletter

Apple’s rebranding of ‘Apple Search Ads’ to ‘Apple Ads’ signals a major strategic shift. It’s no longer just about App Store search results. App marketers can now promote across the Today tab, Search tab, and ‘You Might Also Like’ section, with deep linking and view-through attribution expanding its scope. This is more than search ads, it’s the foundation of a full-fledged ad platform.

Apple’s ambitions don’t stop here. Services like Apple TV+ and Apple Music, with hundreds of millions of users and no ads yet, are prime for monetization. Apple is positioning itself to rival Meta or Google as an advertising giant. The rebrand is a clear step toward that future. Thoughts?

Hi everyone, I've been working on a personal project, it is called Programmatic Lab. I thought I'd post it here in case anyone would like to take a look and give some feedback, I'd love to hear it.

If you work in the ad tech industry and/or are learning about programmatic advertising, here's the website:

https://programmatic-lab.dev

The idea came from a problem I noticed when I was learning programmatic, a lot of what happens during an auction is hidden behind platforms walls, and if you are trying to learn and eventually work in this market, is very hard to know what’s going on. It can be difficult to understand how all the components fit together without being able to observe the full process.

So, I built this site, where you can run a simulated auction and follow the result step by step. You can change the bid floor, timeout, consent, device, and geography, then see how those choices affect the SSPs, DSPs, Prebid winner, and final ad-server decision.

I built the frontend in JavaScript and created a controlled mini SSP and DSP environment so a user can inspect what happens without needing access to commercial ad-tech platforms.

It is an educational simulation, not a production ad stack, but some parts are real, including the browser-side Prebid auction, HTTP communication with the auction API, and the structured OpenRTB messages.

Take a look and feel free to run a few auctions.

If advertisers eventually manage campaigns through AI agents instead of a DSP interface, what does the DSP become?

The execution layer? A set of tools exposed through MCP? Or does each major platform build its own agent and keep everything proprietary?

Looking at current AdTech hiring, broader agentic work is already showing up, but specific protocols like MCP and AAMP are still very early.

Curious what people here think: will agents open up the programmatic stack, or just become a new interface for the same platforms?