There’s a ritual in agency land.

A big partnership gets announced. Someone screenshots it into a WhatsApp group. Three people say “interesting” and one person says “we should look at this.”

Then nobody looks at it.

The Expedia Group Advertising × Magnite deal (announced 16 April 2026) is going through that ritual right now. In three hundred different agencies simultaneously.

The numbers, since apparently those help

$758 million in ad revenue in 2025.
Up 19% year-on-year.

Expedia built a proper media business and most of the industry was too busy debating cookie deprecation timelines to notice.

Until now, almost all of it was on-platform.

Sponsored listings.
Display units.

Catching a traveller on Expedia.com while they were already mid-booking... at the precise moment they needed your ad the fuc*king least lol.

Magnite changes that.

Expedia’s audience data leaves the building. It goes off-platform, into CTV, streaming audio, display, online video... reaching the same consumers while they’re doing something entirely unrelated to travel.

200 petabytes of first-party intent data.
Not modelled.
Not a dodgy lookalike built from someone’s expired cookie pool.

Real behavioural signals from real booking activity across Expedia, Hotels.com, and Vrbo.

Yep.
Destinations.
Dates.
Hotel tiers.
Flight classes.
Frequency.

It’s unreal data.

It’s been locked inside Expedia’s ecosystem the entire time. And the industry’s response, thus far, has been to put it in a Slack thread.

The non-endemic opportunity that everyone is about to ignore

Right. Pay attention folks. This is the part that actually matters.

Someone who books business class regularly is not merely a travel customer.

They are a high-income, high-intent, high-spend consumer profile that half the financial services, automotive, luxury, and technology sector would do genuinely embarrassing things to reach at scale.

Historically, Expedia’s data was largely accessible only to travel brands.

• Airlines targeting frequent flyers.

• Hotels targeting people who’d already stayed in hotels.

• An entire ecosystem of travel advertisers reaching travel audiences and congratulating themselves on their relevance stupidity

The Magnite partnership blows that open.

Non-endemic advertisers... financial services, automotive, luxury retail, tech... can now reach Expedia-defined audiences while those consumers are watching television, listening to a podcast, or reading the news.

Not on Expedia.
Not in a travel context.

Just... there. Available. Targetable.

Yet most agencies will file this under “travel partnerships” and forward it to their airline account. It’s un-fu*king believable, really.

The architecture, for those who like to understand things before activating them…

• The integration is DSP-agnostic.

• Deal IDs through Magnite’s SSP layer.

• Works inside whatever platform an agency already uses.

• No new login.

• No proprietary interface.

• No six-month onboarding process with a dedicated success manager who only replies to emails on Thursdays at 2:57AM your time.

Magnite brings the premium publisher supply... CTV, video, display, audio, brand-safe environments.

Expedia brings the audience intelligence.

• Pre-negotiated.

• Curated.

• Fewer bidding wars.

• Better match rates.

• Cleaner targeting than anything you’d get fumbling around in the open auction hoping for the best.

The supply path is curated specifically to reduce the chaotic, wasteful, self-competing mess that open auction buying produces at scale.

It’s a better structure.
It exists right now.
Agencies are already explaining why they need another quarter to “evaluate” it.

The broader context, briefly, because it’s important

Amazon figured this out.
Walmart figured this out.
Kroger figured this out.

The entire retail media sector spent five years proving that first-party purchase-intent data, routed through programmatic infrastructure, is more valuable than almost anything else in the advertising stack.

Travel data is just better.

A supermarket loyalty card tells you someone bought semi-skimmed milk.

Expedia tells you someone booked a first-class flight to New York, a five-star hotel, and a rental car... three times this year.

The difference between this and retail media walled gardens is that Expedia routes through an independent SSP.

Agencies keep transparency. They keep attribution portability. They don’t get locked into a proprietary reporting environment that conveniently makes everything look brilliant.

Some people in this industry have been burned by walled gardens before. They know exactly what I’m talking about. The rest will find out.

What to actually do, since apparently that needs spelling out

The launch timing is deliberate.

Peak travel planning season runs from April to June.

Intent signals on Expedia’s properties are at maximum volume and recency right now... not in Q3, not post-summer… right now!

Wait three months and you’ll be presenting a “Q4 opportunity” to a client who needed it in May. Don’t be that person.

1. Non-endemic first. Financial services, automotive, luxury, tech…

Any client who’s spent the last two years asking how to reach wealthy, high-intent consumers at scale... answer the question. Brief it in this week.

2. Activate inside your existing DSP.

There is no blocker here. The deal is DSP-agnostic. If someone in your agency says “we need to onboard first” while spitting their tuna sandwich at you... they are describing a process that simply does not exist. Push back.

3. Test the cross-channel reporting properly.

Multi-format campaign. CTV, display, audio. Actually stress-test the attribution output rather than nodding along at the case study and copy-pasting the numbers into a credentials deck 18 months from now.

4. Keep it away from endemic clients initially.

Travel brands will find this themselves. The strategic value is in walking into a financial services or luxury retail brief with an audience proposition that nobody else has brought them yet.

That’s the conversation worth having right now.

This took me ages to research and write. All I ask is that you hit subscribe if you found value.

k, thanks, bye

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What’s Actually Happening (Plain English First)

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It Always Starts With a Slack Message

“Anyone else seeing video fill down this morning?”

No panic. No urgency. Just a vague feeling something’s off.

Someone checks GAM. Someone else pulls SSP reporting. A few screenshots get shared. Theories start flying. Seasonality. Buyer pullback. Maybe a deal dropped.

Nobody says “infrastructure failure” like they’re responding to “what coffee do you want?”

Because nothing looks broken. That’s the risk.

The Endpoint Nobody Talks About

April 30th 2026 looks like a completely normal date.

No big industry event. No loudly announced deadline. Just a quiet switch off of something most people have never heard of.

prebid.adnxs.com/pbc

If you recognise that string of characters, you’re already slightly concerned. If you don’t, there’s a decent chance it’s sitting in your setup right now, doing a job you didn’t know it was doing.

Over the last few years, this piece of infrastructure became quietly standard across the industry.

It came out of AppNexus, got absorbed into Xandr, and eventually ended up inside Microsoft’s stack. It was fast, reliable, and it was free.

So naturally, the entire industry started pointing at it.

Worryingly, more than 60% of Prebid Cache endpoints are still routing through it.

Not a niche tool.
Not an edge case.

It has been the default path for video ads in header bidding.

Now it’s being turned OFF.

Why This Failure Hits Different

Infrastructure gets deprecated all the time. That part isn’t unusual. What is unusual is how this particular failure behaves.

When this stops working, nothing obvious breaks.

Auctions still run.
Bids still come back.
Winners still get picked.
Every dashboard says everything is fine.

Then the player tries to fetch the ad from cache. That cache no longer exists. So it gets nothing back. And so quietly moves on.

No creative. No impression. No revenue. Just an empty slot where money used to be.

Everything worked. Except the part where you actually get paid.

If you’re only monitoring auction metrics, you won’t see it.
If you’re checking revenue a day later, you might, but by then you’re guessing.

Maybe seasonality.
Maybe demand softened.
Maybe it’s just a bad week.

It’s almost never “that endpoint we forgot existed got turned off three weeks ago.”

This is where it breaks. You have been warned.

This Isn’t Really a Publisher Problem

Most publishers didn’t choose this setup deliberately.

It was added years ago through a wrapper, an SSP integration, or a vendor template.

It worked, so nobody touched it.

The person who originally set it up was probably let go when COVID happened and now lives off grid in Norway dealing with their PTSD.

They are not coming back to fix this.

Whatsmore… there’s no invoice for it. No contract renewal. Nothing to remind you or anyone it exists.

Until it doesn’t.

SSPs can actually see this across all their supply, at scale.

They can scan configurations, identify which publishers are still pointing at this endpoint, and understand exactly who’s exposed.

Publishers can’t easily do that across everything they run simultaneously.

So when revenue drops and buyers start asking questions, guess who the call goes to first…

The Fix Isn’t the Hard Part

There are three options. None perfect, all workable.

Local caching stores the ad directly in the browser and removes the external dependency entirely. Clean solution, but it doesn’t fully work with Google AdX demand yet, which is a real tradeoff for a lot of publishers.

Self hosted cache means running your own version of the service. Full control, proper independence. But you need engineering resource, which immediately rules out a significant chunk of the market.

Managed vendor solutions from companies like Shinka, Aniview and JWX offer hosted options. Some free at scale, some paid, all requiring setup, testing and validation before you go anywhere near live traffic.

And this is where people underestimate the actual problem. Not the decision. The execution.

Even if you choose the right solution today, you still need to:

• Update your Prebid configuration

• Test across desktop, mobile and CTV

• Validate that ads actually render end to end

• Update GAM creatives

• Wait for trafficking cycles to catch up

That takes time. Time a lot of people in AdTech no longer have.

If you’re starting this on April 25th, you are already in a whole load of shit.

The Second Wave Nobody’s Talking About

The first impact is obvious. Publishers lose video revenue.

The second impact is messier.

1. Buyers see campaigns underdeliver.

2. Frequency data goes strange.

3. Viewability shifts.

4. Performance looks slightly off across multiple sites at once.

5. Nothing dramatic enough to trigger an investigation immediately.

6. Just enough noise to cause confusion.

Because it’s spread across dozens of publishers, each slightly broken in the same quiet way, it’s almost impossible to trace in real time.

Weeks later Jeanette in finance joins the dots. By then it’s already been filed away as “market conditions”.

This is how money disappears in this industry.
Not in big public crashes.

In small, silent failures that look like normal variance until someone does the maths properly in a quarterly review and realises they’re about to lose their job.

Oh… if you actually want to understand how this machine works under the hood, I literally wrote the book on it — WTF IS PROGRAMMATIC — because this exact situation is what happens when something important becomes invisible.

Send This to Your Team ASAP This Week (you’re welcome)

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April 30 isn’t when things explode... It’s when they start quietly not working

And a decent chunk of the industry will only find out in May. When the revenue report looks a bit… off.

This took me ages to research and write. All I ask is that you hit subscribe if you found value.

k, thanks, bye

The first sign of trouble in adtech is rarely dramatic.

It is usually Lee in finance asking this very boring question on a Tuesday… or in this case an audit commissioned by Publicis.

“Can anyone explain this line item?”

Five tabs open.
One person says it is probably just reporting.
Someone else pops out for a coffee and never comes back.

That is normally the moment you find out whether your “clean commercial model” is actually clean, or just explained confidently enough that nobody pushed back.

Because for the best part of a decade, The Trade Desk has walked into every room like it was the only honest person at a party full of pickpockets.

We are transparent.
We are different.
We are not like those agencies.

It had a slightly familiar tone.

A bit like that Brexit bus that promised to save us £350 million a week.

Confident. Repeated. Sounds great in a room.

And to be fair, it worked…

Very well.

Right up until a FirmDecisions audit, commissioned by Publicis, found that The Trade Desk had applied DSP fees beyond agreed limits, enabled paid tools without clear client consent, and could not provide enough documentation to verify cost pass through.

Without asking…

That’s like a locksmith fitting an extra lock on your door, not giving you the key, and invoicing you afterwards.

Not helpful. Expensive. Completely uninvited.

This is where it stops being a commercial disagreement and starts being a credibility problem.

Because they chose to be the transparent one.

Nobody forced that.

It was the strategy.

And it paid off for a long time.

Right up until someone asked to see the inner workings.

You do not get to spend ten years building a business on openness and then get vague when someone asks for the numbers.

If the numbers are clean, you show them.

It is that simple.

Then came the response…

Jeff Green took to LinkedIn and decided the best move was to point out that agencies are not exactly transparent either.

Which is true.

Also completely beside the point.

It is the corporate version of getting caught speeding and explaining that other drivers do it too.

Accurate, yes.

Irrelevant, also yes.

And slightly insulting to everyone listening.

Because this is not a morality contest.

This is a billing question.

And yes, the agency world has its own problems.

Principal media has created plenty of fog.

• Margins hidden in efficiency.

• Inventory dressed up as strategy.

• Commercial models that look very different depending on who is asking.

The whole thing is a glass house. Just ask WPP.

Everyone throwing bricks.

Everyone acting surprised when the windows break and shocked when innocent people get cut by the shards.

But that does not change the core issue.

If you sell yourself as the clean one in a messy market, you do not get the same margin for error.

You get less. Much less, actually.

This was already under pressure before any of this became public.

Growth had started to slow.
Expectations had started to shift.
Amazon at the door.
The story was already getting harder to tell.

And then this lands.

The market reaction was immediate.

Not because one audit changed everything overnight.

But because it confirmed something people were already starting to whisper about in Ad Land.

The audit did not create the problem.

It revealed it.

That is the bit people keep missing.

• Amazon DSP has been getting stronger.

• CTV has been getting messier.

• Competition has been getting tighter.

The narrative was already wobbling.
This just switched the lights on.

And once the lights are on, everything gets looked at properly.

There are also signals this is not isolated.

Multiple holding groups stepping back.
Similar concerns appearing in different places.

One exit is politics… three? Well that starts to look like a verdict.

This is the part the market has been turning a blind eye to for years.

DSPs have not been scrutinised nearly as hard as they should have been.

Everyone loves talking about optimisation, supply paths, identity, AI, all the clever bits.

But fees?

Those get treated like background noise.

Accepted.
Assumed.
Rarely challenged.

A client would never accept mystery fees on an IO.

But wrap it in a polished interface and suddenly it feels normal.

A lot of adtech is just well presented confidence.

This is where buyers need to get more serious.

If you are spending serious money through any DSP and cannot clearly explain:

1. how fees are applied

2. what tools are active

3. who approved them

4. what you are actually paying for

…then you do not have control.

You have risk.

Same goes for automation.

The Trade Desk has been pushing further into AI driven optimisation with Kokai and Performance Mode.

In another week, that would be the headline.

Automation. Efficiency. Smarter buying.

Instead it lands in the middle of a transparency issue.

Which makes it harder to sell.

Because automation only works when trust holds.

If buyers are already questioning fees and permissions, handing more control to the system is a tougher conversation.

It really feels like it’s upgrading the autopilot while people are still asking how the brakes work.

There is also the OpenAI angle…

Potential new inventory.
Potential new growth story.

Fine.

But more inventory does not solve accountability.

It just gives you more places to be questioned.

This is not just about The Trade Desk.

It is about an industry that treated transparency like a slogan instead of a system.

Something you say.

Not something you prove.

Until someone asks.

So what should actually happen now?

• Review contracts.

• Tighten audit rights.

• Make cost pass through explicit.

• Document tool approvals properly.

• Benchmark performance against at least one alternative.

Not because multi DSP is automatically better.

But because dependency feels very different when questions start getting asked.

If you actually want to understand how this machine works under the hood, I literally wrote the book on it called WTF IS PROGRAMMATIC?

Because eventually, someone checks.

And when they do, everything has to survive contact with a spreadsheet.

That is where most of the storytelling ends.

I genuinely like TTD and the good people who work there (I actually do) and this will certainly not kill them… only Amazon wants to see that happen!

But it does remove the luxury of being unquestioned.

And once that goes, everything gets a bit more real… for everyone.

k, thanks, bye

In the last few months three things have happened that, taken together, tell you exactly where Amazon (and retail media?) is going.

1. Netflix inventory is being integrated with Amazon DSP audiences.

2. Amazon has rolled out a new signal based attribution model.

3. Its Podcast Audience Network is now fully integrated into the DSP.

On their own these look like incremental product updates.

Together they reveal a very different strategy.

Amazon is turning its commerce data into the operating system for premium media.

Not retail media.

All media.

This is where the industry conversation should probably start.

Instead most people are still arguing about CPMs.

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Netflix inventory inside Amazon DSP is not the story people think it is

Let’s start with the Netflix announcement because that is the one that made headlines.

Beginning in Q2 2026 in the United States advertisers buying Netflix programmatically through Amazon DSP will be able to apply Amazon Audiences to those campaigns.

Those audiences are built from Amazon’s data signals.

Search behaviour.
Product views.
Purchase history.
Prime Video viewing.

In other words, the entire Amazon behavioural graph.

And Amazon is not shy about the scale of that graph.

The company describes it as being built from trillions of signals.

For a planner this means you can now target segments like:

People currently researching kitchen appliances.
Recent buyers of baby products.
Shoppers browsing premium skincare.

And you can deliver those ads inside Netflix.

That sounds simple.

But the implications are not.

Because Netflix is not just another streaming app.

It is one of the most premium brand safe environments available anywhere in digital media.

Historically, CTV buying in those environments has relied on fairly blunt targeting.

Age.
Gender.
Household demographics.
Broad contextual signals.

That works for reach planning.

It is less useful when someone asks the inevitable question.

Did this actually sell anything?

That is the problem Netflix is trying to solve.

This is where the problem with CTV measurement starts

CTV has always looked fantastic in a media plan.

Large screen.
High completion rates.
Premium content.

It feels like television.

But the measurement story has always been messy.

Many CTV buys still rely on view through attribution models that are extremely generous.

1. An ad appears on a television screen.

2. Two weeks later someone buys something online.

3. The ad claims credit.

Whether the ad actually influenced the purchase is another question entirely.

That gap between perception and proof has held back a lot of performance budgets from flowing into CTV.

Retail media changes that dynamic.

Because retail media has something television historically never had.

Purchase data.

Amazon knows when someone searches for a product.

It knows when they view it.

And it knows when they buy it.

Connecting that data to advertising exposure is incredibly powerful.

That is exactly what this Netflix integration is designed to do.

Netflix impressions can now be connected to Amazon shopping behaviour.

Which means planners can begin to ask more serious questions.

Did exposure to a Netflix campaign increase product searches?

Did it drive incremental purchases?

Did it generate new to brand customers?

These are the metrics that performance teams actually care about.

And suddenly Netflix can start answering them.

But Netflix is only one piece of the machine

The bigger story is not Netflix.

It is Amazon DSP.

Because Amazon is steadily turning that DSP into the backbone of its entire advertising ecosystem.

Think about the surfaces that already sit inside that environment.

• Fire TV inventory.

• Third party CTV supply including Roku partnerships.

• Display across the open web.

• Streaming audio.

• Now podcasts.

All of these surfaces can be bought through the same platform.

And all of them can use the same audience signals.

Those signals come from the one dataset most ad platforms do not have.

Commerce behaviour.

This is where the strategic shift becomes obvious.

Amazon is not expanding retail media.

It is exporting retail intelligence into the rest of the media ecosystem.

That is a very different ambition.

The podcast move makes the strategy even clearer

At the start of 2026 Amazon integrated Art19’s Podcast Audience Network directly into Amazon DSP.

That network includes more than 1,000 podcast shows.

For advertisers this means podcast inventory can now be planned alongside video, display and CTV within the same workflow.

• The same audience segments apply.

• The same analytics apply.

• The same attribution framework applies.

Audio has always been a strange corner of the media world.

People spend a lot of time with it.

But the advertising market has historically underinvested.

Yet only around 9% of advertising budgets flow there.

That gap represents attention that is relatively cheap.

Amazon clearly sees that opportunity.

Podcast advertising also tends to score well on attention and recall metrics.

Listeners are often deeply engaged.

They are not scrolling.

They are not multitasking across five browser tabs.

They are listening.

Combine that attention with commerce data and the result becomes far more measurable than traditional radio advertising ever was.

Again the theme is the same.

Amazon’s data decides who you reach.

Amazon’s measurement decides what credit they get.

Attribution is quietly becoming the control system

At the same time Amazon has introduced a new signal based attribution model inside Amazon DSP.

Previously the platform used a fairly standard 14 day view through attribution window.

If someone saw an ad and purchased within that window the impression could receive credit.

The new model is more selective.

The system looks at the signals surrounding each exposure.

It decides which views are actually likely to have influenced the purchase.

And it assigns credit accordingly.

In practice this tends to compress attribution windows.

Fewer impressions receive credit.

Upper funnel placements are less likely to be over rewarded.

This aligns with a wider shift across the industry.

Platforms like Meta have already moved toward shorter view through windows for similar reasons.

Advertisers are increasingly sceptical of models that credit almost every impression with a conversion.

Amazon’s approach attempts to make view through attribution more defensible.

But it also introduces a new layer of complexity.

When the attribution model changes the historical comparisons become messy.

To address that Amazon introduced additional reporting metrics such as “Sales All Views” and “Purchases All Views”.

These replicate the broader attribution logic used previously.

In theory that allows advertisers to maintain year over year comparability while transitioning to the new model.

In practice it means every dashboard now needs careful explanation.

The real goal is not measurement accuracy

It is control.

1. Attribution frameworks determine which channels appear effective.

2. Channels that appear effective receive more budget.

3. Budgets determine which platforms dominate media plans.

That is incredibly powerful.

Because once budgets flow through the platform the dependency becomes structural.

Agencies optimise within the system.

Clients evaluate results within the system.

Over time the system becomes the default.

This is where retail media collides with television

Traditional television buying was built around reach.

• Ratings.

• Audience demographics.

• Frequency curves.

• Retail media is built around outcomes.

• Search behaviour.

• Product consideration.

• Purchase events.

Amazon is now merging those two worlds.

• Netflix inventory is no longer just about reaching households.

It is about reaching households currently researching products.

• Podcast ads are not just brand storytelling.

They are signals in a path to purchase model.

• CTV impressions become measurable commerce events.

This fundamentally changes how video budgets will be evaluated.

Guess which platform wins that conversation.

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Agencies are going to feel this shift first

For agencies the operational impact is significant.

Amazon DSP now sits directly in competitive conversations that used to be dominated by The Trade Desk or DV360.

Any time CTV appears in a media plan Amazon becomes part of the discussion.

Not because of inventory.

Because of data.

A planner can now ask a fairly simple question.

Would you rather target a broad demographic segment on CTV or reach people who have recently searched for the exact product category you sell?

In many cases the answer is obvious.

Which means the centre of gravity in programmatic video planning may shift toward platforms with deterministic commerce data.

• Walmart is already attempting something similar through Walmart Connect and its Vizio acquisition.

• Kroger is building its own ecosystem.

Retailers understand that their purchase data is the asset everyone else lacks.

But Amazon still has the deepest integration between commerce and media.

That advantage is not disappearing any time soon.

There are second order effects most people are not modelling yet

Once commerce data drives media buying the format itself begins to evolve.

Expect more interactive and shoppable experiences inside CTV environments.

• QR codes linked to product pages.

• Click to buy overlays.

• Voice assisted purchasing through connected televisions.

The line between advertising and commerce interface starts to blur.

What used to be a thirty second awareness moment becomes a transaction gateway.

• That has implications for creative teams.

• It has implications for measurement frameworks.

• And it has implications for how consumers experience advertising inside premium content.

The industry is still adjusting to programmatic television.

The next phase is television that behaves like ecommerce.

This is why the Amazon DSP strategy matters

It is easy to look at these product announcements individually and treat them as tactical updates.

• Netflix inventory available here.

• Podcast inventory available there.

• A new attribution model somewhere in the reporting stack.

But the pattern becomes obvious when you zoom out.

Amazon is building a unified advertising infrastructure where:

1. Commerce data defines audiences.

2. Premium media provides attention.

3. Algorithmic attribution determines value.

The same system then allocates credit across every touchpoint.

Display.

Video.

Television.

Audio.

And it is slowly absorbing more of the premium media landscape.

The industry will continue to debate CTV CPM and Amazon will continue wiring shopping behaviour into television screens.

One of those strategies feels slightly more future proof.

Oh, and if you actually want to understand how this machine works under the hood, I literally wrote the book on it called WTF IS PROGRAMMATIC?

k, thanks, bye

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I knew something was wrong the moment someone said the migration would be “seamless”.

Anyone who has worked in AdOps long enough knows that word is basically BS.

Seamless usually means someone has rebuilt the engine of the plane while it is still in the air and is now hoping nobody notices the turbulence and the oxygen masks hanging down.

That is roughly where we are with Kokai.

Over the last few months I have been quietly reading through trade press coverage, LinkedIn posts from traders, and some fairly emotional threads buried deep inside Reddit’s AdOps community.

And the pattern is… consistent.

Buyers are confused.

Operators are frustrated.

And the messaging around the transition from Solimar to Kokai has been, at best, “uneven”.

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The moment buyers realised something had changed

For months the message across the industry sounded reassuring.

Solimar would continue to exist.

Clients could move into Kokai when they were ready.

There was no immediate forced switch.

That narrative appeared across multiple trade publications. Even AdExchanger quoted sources close to The Trade Desk saying there were “no concrete plans” to deprecate Solimar any time soon.

Then something interesting started happening.

You could still manage existing campaigns in Solimar.

But you could no longer create new ones.

A LinkedIn post from a programmatic buyer summed it up when she pointed out that advertisers were suddenly discovering they were being pushed into Kokai simply because the option to launch new campaigns in Solimar had disappeared.

LOL

Not exactly the “indefinite access” some teams thought they had.

And once that shift started happening, the stories began appearing everywhere like those damn spiders in spring (you know, the really big ones FML).

The bugs people keep mentioning

Spend five minutes inside the AdOps subreddit and you will quickly realise something.

Traders are not shy.

One user clearly on the verge of a breakdown wrote that launching campaigns in Kokai had turned into “a disaster”, describing repeated failures when trying to activate campaigns.

• Another trader reported API connections breaking mid workflow.

• Someone else mentioned audience segments refusing to save.

• Another complained about being unable to add new ad accounts.

• Then there were reports of KPIs simply not appearing as selectable options in the interface.

If you do not work in AdOps those sound like annoying bugs.

If you do work in AdOps you know those bugs translate into very real operational risk.

Campaigns cannot launch.

Data cannot flow.

Optimisation stops.

And when that happens, someone is calling the agency asking why performance graphs look a 2-year olds drawing of a disabled elephant.

The deal issue that keeps coming up

One of the more interesting complaints has nothing to do with the UI itself.

It relates to curated deals.

Several operators have mentioned that certain deals which run perfectly inside Solimar either fail to appear inside Kokai or receive zero bid requests once activated.

One trader described setting up the exact same deal structure in both platforms just to test it.

Solimar delivered traffic.

Kokai produced nothing.

Again, this might sound like a minor configuration issue.

Except curated deals have become a major part of supply path optimisation across the industry.

Entire buying strategies are built around them.

If those deals suddenly behave differently inside the new system, buyers start asking uncomfortable questions… like… “WTF IS GOING ON?”

And rightly so.

Missing features are making things worse

The frustration is not just about bugs.

It is also about missing functionality.

AdWeek recently reported that several buyers have been raising concerns about feature gaps between Solimar and Kokai.

One example that keeps appearing is contract groups.

For anyone outside AdOps that sounds painfully dull. Because it is.

But contract groups are extremely useful for bundling multiple private marketplace deals together so they can be activated across campaigns efficiently.

If that structure disappears, the workflow becomes slower and more manual overnight which defeats the f**king point.

Programmatic guaranteed support has also been mentioned as an area where Kokai has not fully caught up with the Solimar environment.

Again, this is not a niche capability.

Large brand campaigns rely on these structures.

So when operators discover they cannot replicate existing workflows easily, migration stops feeling like progress.

It feels like rebuilding the same house but forgetting to put the roof on.

The pressure behind Kokai

From The Trade Desk’s perspective, the urgency around Kokai makes sense.

This platform is not just a cosmetic upgrade.

It is the foundation for the company’s AI strategy.

Kokai is designed to power optimisation, planning and measurement across channels, including CTV.

It also sits alongside broader initiatives like Ventura OS and other AI driven components inside the ecosystem.

Executives have openly tied Kokai adoption to the company’s long term performance.

In fact, during earnings coverage last year, trade press reported that around 85% of clients had already moved onto Kokai.

That number matters to investors.

But percentages do not tell the whole story because adoption statistics rarely reflect what operators actually experience day to day… as we’re seeing now.

This is where the tension appears

Product teams measure adoption in login numbers.

AdOps teams measure adoption in whether their workflows still function.

Those two definitions are not the same.

You can technically be using Kokai while also spending half your day figuring out why something that worked last night no longer behaves the same way.

And that is where frustration starts to build.

Because the people experiencing those problems are the same people responsible for delivering client results.

The communication problem

One of the more interesting aspects of this situation is how inconsistent the messaging appears to be.

AdExchanger reported that some restrictions around Solimar campaign creation may actually have been influenced by agency holding company decisions rather than a direct hard switch imposed by The Trade Desk.

Which may well be true.

But from the perspective of a trader sitting at their desk trying to launch a campaign, the nuance does not really matter.

All they know is that yesterday they could create campaigns in Solimar. Today they cannot.

And nobody warned them.

Agencies are quietly hedging

Another lame predictable reaction is diversification.

When a platform transition introduces operational uncertainty, agencies rarely panic.

They hedge.

Budgets are tested elsewhere.

Campaign structures are duplicated across multiple DSPs.

Contracts with alternative platforms suddenly become more valuable.

That does not mean anyone is abandoning The Trade Desk (yet) but it does mean agencies are protecting themselves while the migration stabilises.

Because the one thing agencies cannot risk is failing to deliver results for their clients.

The broader reality

Look none of this means Kokai will fail.

In fact the opposite is most likely.

Most major platform rebuilds go through exactly this phase.

• Early instability.

• Missing features.

• Frustrated paying operators.

• Eventually the system stabilises.

• Features return.

• Teams adapt.

But the transition always reveals something important about AdTech.

Traders.

Engineers.

Campaign managers.

And when those people start telling the same stories across LinkedIn, Reddit and the trade press, it is usually worth paying attention.

Because behind every beta test disguised as a “platform transition” headline there are thousands and thousands of underpaid operators trying to make campaigns actually run.

Oh, and if you actually want to understand how this machine works under the hood, I literally wrote the book on it called WTF IS PROGRAMMATIC?

This took me ages to research and write. All I ask is that you hit subscribe if you found value 🖤

k, thanks, bye

Subscribe now

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Here are my key source links related to the Kokai / Solimar situation so you know it’s not BS…

• Adweek – “The Trade Desk Pushes Buyers to Kokai Interface in Sign of Solimar’s Demise”
  https://www.adweek.com/media/trade-desk-kokai-solimar-migration-bugs/​

• Adweek – “Struggling Product Behind The Trade Desk’s Revenue Woes Angers Buyers and Publishers”
  https://www.adweek.com/media/the-trade-desks-angers-buyers-publishers/​

• Adweek – “The Trade Desk Posts Q3 Gains With 85% of Clients Now on Kokai”
  https://www.adweek.com/media/the-trade-desk-posts-q3-gains-with-85-of-clients-now-on-kokai/​

• Adweek – “EXCLUSIVE: The Trade Desk Partially Sunsets Controversial Kokai Feature in Latest Redesign”
  https://www.adweek.com/media/exclusive-the-trade-desk-sunsets-controversial-kokai-feature-in-latest-redesign/​

• AdExchanger – “Rumors Aside, The Trade Desk Isn’t Deprecating Solimar Any Time Soon”
  https://www.adexchanger.com/platforms/rumors-aside-the-trade-desk-isnt-deprecating-solimar-any-time-soon/​

• AdExchanger – “Critics Say The Trade Desk Is Forcing Kokai Adoption, But Apparently It’s Up to Agencies”
  https://www.adexchanger.com/platforms/critics-say-the-trade-desk-is-forcing-kokai-adoption-but-apparently-its-up-to-agencies/​

• PPC Land – “TTD forces Kokai adoption amid platform resistance”
  https://ppc.land/ttd-forces-kokai-adoption-amid-platform-resistance/​

• Reddit r/adops – “Solimar deprecation? Forced into Kokai for new launches”
  https://www.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/1mpckh1/the_trade_desk_solimar_deprecation_forced_into/​

• LinkedIn – Adweek post amplifying Kokai migration story
  https://www.linkedin.com/posts/adweek_the-trade-desk-pushes-buyers-to-kokai-interface-activity-7397359618013683712-ytkY​

• LinkedIn – Kendra Barnett post on Kokai interface changes
  https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kendrabarnett_the-trade-desk-pushes-buyers-to-kokai-interface-activity-7397346585061498881-EGS7​

• The Trade Desk Partner Portal – “Upgrade Solimar Campaigns to Kokai” (technical doc)
  https://partner.thetradedesk.com/v3/portal/api/doc/KokaiCampaignUpgrade​

Victoria McNally, writing for AdExchanger, published “Inside The Epstein Files: Tracing His Links To Digital Advertising.”

It is careful. Documented. Measured.

She does not allege crimes.
She does not imply guilt.
She traces connections that appear in DOJ released files.

That matters.

But once you move past the surface reaction, a more interesting question appears.

What does this actually reveal about AdTech?

And what does it change?

First, let’s be honest about what it is not

The article is not a smoking gun.

The Ad/Fin example reads like standard venture activity:

• $875,000 invested
• 4.29 percent ownership
• An instruction to exit at cost

That is not sinister. It is dull.

The Dstillery reference?

Minimal correspondence.
No financing.
A spokesperson confirming no engagement.

Again, nothing explosive.

Publicis?

A $1 million wire tied to a Clinton Global Initiative event.

Budget disputes.
Revenue breakdown requests.
Lawyers cc’d.

That is corporate workflow, not cinematic conspiracy.

Even the Havas adjacency, where a board level figure appears over 3,800 times in the files, centres on PR strategy and reputation rehabilitation.

Uncomfortable? Yes.

Illegal in itself? No.

So if we strip away heat, what are we left with?

Proximity.

And proximity is where the real story lives.

AdTech does not create power. It services it.

AdTech sits close to capital.

Capital sits close to power.

Power attracts reputational risk.

Therefore AdTech will always end up in the orbit of controversial figures.

Not because the industry is uniquely immoral.

Because it is uniquely useful.

If you want to:

• Influence search results
• Shape public perception
• Optimise visibility
• Clean up digital association
• Get access to emerging tech networks

You need infrastructure.

We built that infrastructure.

We built systems that determine what is seen, what trends and what gets buried.

That is literally the commercial promise of large parts of the ecosystem.

This is where the problem actually starts

Most operators like to frame AdTech as neutral.

But neutrality at scale is not neutral in impact.

• If reputation repair can be productised, someone will buy it.

• If perception can be engineered, someone will engineer it.

• If search visibility can be manipulated, someone will manipulate it.

The tools do not ask moral questions and the incentive model asks only one question.

Is it legal and paid?

And that is where things get interesting.

Because legality and ethics are not synonyms.

What proximity journalism does well

McNally’s article performs an important function.

• It documents.

• It connects dots.

• It reminds the industry that we operate in rooms shared with elite finance.

That reminder matters.

Too many people in AdTech pretend we are a scrappy optimisation layer.

We are not.

We are infrastructure for influence.

And infrastructure attracts power.

The article exposes adjacency without melodrama.

That is responsible journalism.

Where it stops short

But here is where I think the industry conversation needs to go further.

Listing connections creates heat.

But it does not interrogate structure.

The more uncomfortable questions are:

• What red lines do agencies actually have?
• Do platforms refuse certain forms of reputation repair?
• What governance frameworks exist when clients carry serious allegations?
• Do boards intervene or does revenue override?

Because that is where the ethical tension actually lives.

Not in who emailed who.

In how influence infrastructure behaves when capital seeks rehabilitation.

Proximity stories generate attention.

Structural analysis generates accountability.

They are not the same thing.

Nobody wakes up thinking they are doing something morally questionable.

They are:

• Taking a meeting
• Reviewing a deck
• Joining a board
• Facilitating a financing round
• Drafting a PR strategy

Every step feels commercially rational.

Reasonable.

Normal.

Until context shifts.

And history rewrites it.

That is how power embeds itself.

Not through dramatic villain monologues.

Through inboxes and calendars.

Through processes that look exactly like yours.

The second order effects

If AdTech continues to frame itself as purely neutral infrastructure, three things happen.

1. Governance remains reactive rather than proactive.

2. Ethics becomes a compliance checklist rather than a board level discussion.

3. The industry continues to be surprised when its tools are used in ways that feel uncomfortable.

And yet nothing changes.

Because the commercial incentive remains intact.

As long as influence can be monetised, influence will be sold.

The only question is whether we are honest about that.

The real value of this story

It forces operators to confront proximity to power.

And proximity to power always carries risk.

Not legal risk necessarily.

Reputational risk.

Strategic risk.

Moral risk.

If you are building tools that control attention, you are building leverage.

Leverage attracts people who need it.

That is the structural reality.

So what should the industry actually do?

Not panic.

Not perform outrage.

Be mature.

That means:

• Establishing explicit ethical guardrails beyond legal minimums
• Defining red line client policies
• Elevating influence risk to board level conversations
• Treating narrative engineering as a power function, not just a revenue stream

Final thought

Credit to Victoria McNally at AdExchanger for surfacing documented links clearly and without sensationalism.

But the real conversation is bigger than the names in the files.

AdTech does not sit at the edge of influence.

It sits in the middle of it.

And if we are honest about that, then the only serious question is not who appeared in an email thread.

It is whether this industry is prepared to accept the weight of the power it has built.

Because neutrality, when you control visibility at scale, is rarely neutral in consequence.

Oh, and if you actually want to understand how this machine works... I literally wrote the book on it — WTF IS PROGRAMMATIC?

I appreciate your attention.

k, thanks, bye.

I still remember the week before GDPR went live.

It was chaos.

Not strategic chaos. Not visionary transformation chaos. The bad kind.

• The kind where Janet in legal sent a panicked email at 9.47pm asking for a full data inventory by morning.

• The kind where Tayo in IT suddenly found itself in meetings it did not know existed.

• The kind where Jess rewrote privacy notices overnight while pretending everything was fine on client calls.

Databases shrank overnight. CRM lists collapsed. Performance dipped. Everyone blamed marketing. Marketing blamed legal. Legal blamed vendors. Vendors blamed interpretation.

People did not sleep.

Not because GDPR was impossible.

Because no one took it seriously until it was real.

The stress was not caused by the law.

It was caused by the lack of preparation.

Now swap data for AI.

That is where we are.

The EU AI Act Is Already Here

The EU AI Act entered into force in August 2024.

Bans are already live.

Oversight structures are forming.

Guidance is evolving.

August 2026 remains the enforcement inflection point for the bulk of operational obligations.

And yet the dominant narrative in advertising is comfort.

“Advertising isn’t high risk.”

Technically true.

Strategically irrelevant.

Because what caught people out with GDPR was not whether they were a data broker.

It was whether they understood their own systems.

The AI Act is doing the same thing, just pointed at decision making instead of data storage.

The Parts Advertising Cannot Ignore

Advertising mostly sits in limited or minimal risk tiers.

That is misleading.

The real exposure comes from three areas:

• Prohibited practices

• Transparency obligations

• Downstream obligations from general purpose AI models

Let’s break that down.

1. The Bans Are Already Live

The prohibited practices regime is in force.

AI systems that:

• Use subliminal or manipulative techniques that materially distort behaviour and cause harm

• Exploit vulnerabilities linked to age, disability or economic situation

are banned.

If you work in:

• Performance marketing

• Gaming or gambling

• High cost credit

• In app purchases targeting young audiences

• Aggressive behavioural optimisation

You should be paying attention.

Because the line between “smart personalisation” and “manipulative distortion” will not be drawn by your growth team.

It will be drawn by regulators.

And they will not use your terminology.

2. Transparency Is Coming for Creative

From August 2026, transparency obligations hit most operational use cases.

That includes:

• Informing users when they are interacting with AI systems

• Labelling AI generated or manipulated content

• Disclosing deepfake style content that resembles real people or events

This is not a cosmetic compliance tweak.

It affects:

• Tool selection

• Vendor due diligence

• Creative approvals

• Platform uploads

• Workflow design

• QA processes

• Legal sign off

If your team is using generative tools that cannot provide provenance metadata or watermarking, that becomes your compliance issue.

Not just a production shortcut.

3. The Digital Omnibus Is Not a Rollback

The Commission has proposed adjustments through the Digital Omnibus package.

Yes, there are discussions around:

• Simplifying certain obligations

• Centralising oversight under the EU AI Office

• Extending some timelines for systems already on the market

But simplification is not immunity.

This is the EU adjusting the runway, not cancelling the landing.

The core structure remains.

Enforcement powers remain.

The direction of travel remains.

A short extension does not equal long term safety.

It equals the temptation to delay again.

And we have seen how that ends.

4. The Role Problem Nobody Wants to Own

The AI Act distinguishes between:

• Providers

• Deployers

• Distributors

• Importers

In AdTech supply chains, this will be messy.

Adtech vendors offering AI driven optimisation tools may be providers.

Brands and agencies using them are deployers.

Resellers may sit somewhere in between.

When something goes wrong, everyone will suddenly care about that classification.

If you cannot explain your role, your obligations, and your controls, you are back in a 2018 GDPR meeting trying to reverse engineer your own stack.

What To Do Now

Not a workshop.

Not a slide deck.

Actual operational work.

Agencies

• Map every AI tool used across creative, media, performance and CRM

• Identify where outputs touch EU audiences or regulated sectors

• Review behavioural optimisation tactics for manipulation or vulnerability exposure

• Define how AI generated creative and chatbot interactions will be labelled

• Build a formal escalation process for sensitive AI use cases

• Stop assuming vendors carry all liability

Agencies sit in the middle.

That means exposure from both sides.

Vendors and AdTech Platforms

• Clarify whether you are acting as provider, deployer or both

• Prepare documentation explaining system functionality and risk controls

• Ensure outputs can support AI marking and disclosure requirements

• Review optimisation features for proximity to prohibited practices

• Update contracts to reflect AI Act obligations clearly

Vendor opacity will not survive this regime.

Brands and Advertisers

• Build a formal inventory of AI systems used in marketing

• Pressure test recruitment, credit, eligibility and sensitive targeting use cases

• Design a public disclosure strategy for chatbots, avatars and synthetic creative

• Tighten procurement requirements for agencies and vendors

• Train marketing leadership on AI risk exposure

Brands will absorb reputational damage first.

Even if the tech came from somewhere else.

Why This Feels Familiar

GDPR forced the industry to understand where data flows.

The AI Act forces the industry to understand how automated decisions are made and how synthetic content is presented.

It is not anti innovation.

It is pro accountability.

The panic last time did not come from the regulation.

It came from the realisation that people had been operating complex systems without governance.

The next time someone says, “We’re fine, advertising isn’t high risk,” remember the look on people’s faces in 2018 when they realised they were not fine at all.

The law did not cause the panic.

The lack of preparation did.

k, thanks, bye

As my colleagues and subscribers know, I don’t take sides. I don’t cheer for DSPs. I just sit back and watch the market eat itself while eating popcorn.

Which is why it was hard not to laugh when, on a call, someone said completely deadpan, “We’re still confident in the long term.”

LOL

That sentence is the corporate version of someone bleeding while insisting they’re just tired.

Because on the same day Bank of America downgraded The Trade Desk and chopped its price target, the CFO quietly left the building after six months.

Six. Months.

That’s not a tenure. That’s a Teams call where HR already knows the outcome.

• Second CFO gone in half a year.

• No real explanation.

• No dramatic exit statement.

Just a neat little press release and a shrug. Which in public markets is basically screaming.

1. The share price dipped.

2. Analysts started clearing their throats.

3. Agencies started asking questions they used to pretend not to think.

And suddenly the most confident platform in programmatic looks like it’s trying to hold eye contact while someone checks its pockets.

This is not about one exec leaving. This is about timing and...

The timing is brutal.

For years, The Trade Desk thrived on one very clever trick.

Make the platform powerful, complicated, and slightly painful to learn. Once your traders were trained, switching felt like setting fire to your own house.

That complexity was the moat. “Sure you can leave,” said everyone.

“But you won’t.”

Now along comes AI, calmly smashing that moat with a clipboard.

If every DSP starts looking usable through natural language prompts, suddenly being a power user platform stops being sexy and starts being inconvenient.

That is what analysts mean when they say switching costs are falling...

They are not being poetic.

They are saying your lock in strategy is being eaten by a chatbot.

At the exact same time, the macro environment decides to pile in.

Tariffs hit auto, retail, and CPG.

Which just happen to be the categories The Trade Desk is most exposed to.

Multinational brands do what multinational brands always do under pressure. They pause. They delay. They “review strategy”.

Which is business speak for “we’re not committing yet”.

Meanwhile the walled gardens are sat there like they always are. Smugly smiling. Measuring. Counting.

Amazon does not need to explain itself anymore. It just points at sales.

Google shrugs and mentions YouTube.

Meta quietly hoovers up performance budgets while everyone argues about transparency.

Digiday’s own numbers tell the story no one wants to headline.

Buyer usage of The Trade Desk fell off a cliff between early 2024 and 2025.

Amazon’s DSP usage did the opposite.

That is not a simple shift. That is a budget shift.

Which is why the CFO exit matters.

When everything is going well, leadership churn is “part of evolution”. When things get choppy, it becomes “strategic misalignment”.

Tahnil Davis stepping in as interim CFO brings stability.

Eleven years in the business ain’t nothing. But let’s not pretend an interim label doesn’t come with a giant invisible question mark hanging over earnings calls.

This is where agencies should stop pretending this is just stock market gossip.

Expect more pressure from The Trade Desk sales teams.

1. Longer commitments.

2. More Kokai positioning.

3. More AI messaging.

Not because the product is bad.

Because revenue certainty suddenly matters a lot more when Wall Street gets twitchy.

Also expect clients to start asking awkward questions.

Especially global clients already feeling tariff pressure.

Suddenly the intern asking “why don’t we test Amazon?” stops being naive and starts being sensible.

Thing is...

The Trade Desk built dominance in a world where complexity protected incumbents.

AI is dragging us into a world where data ownership and closed loops win arguments faster than elegant interfaces.

And when your moat is complexity, the future turns up with a smirk.

Oh, and if you actually want to understand how this machine works... I literally wrote the book on it — WTF IS PROGRAMMATIC?

This took me ages to research and write. All I ask is that you hit subscribe above^ if you found value.

k, thanks, bye

Back in October, I wrote a Diary piece on LinkedIn called OpenAI Just Declared War on Advertising.

At the time, it felt a bit like standing up at a dinner party and calmly explaining that the house was on fire while everyone else asked if you wanted another drink.

Plenty of nodding. A few likes. A lot of “interesting take” comments which, in LinkedIn language, means “this makes me uncomfortable so I’m going to ignore it.”

Fast forward to January and OpenAI has quietly done the thing everyone insisted wouldn’t happen.

They turned ads on.

Not loud ads. Not desperate ads. Not banners screaming for attention.

Calm, contextual, clearly labelled ads sitting politely at the bottom of a conversation people actually trust.

Which is worse.

Because this wasn’t a surprise. It was an inevitability.

October wasn’t wrong. It was just early. And in #AdTech, being early always looks dramatic until it suddenly looks obvious.

So wtf is going on?

This is not OpenAI casually launching an advertising product. This is OpenAI changing where advertising is allowed to exist.

For the past few decades ads have lived around intent.

Search results. Social feeds. Content environments.

You say something, then advertising waits nearby hoping to be relevant enough to be tolerated.

Conversational AI flips that entirely.

1. The interface is the experience.

2. The response is the value.

3. And now advertising has been invited into the same space as the answer itself.

It’s no longer inventory. It’s becoming very intimate...

OpenAI has been very careful to explain the rules.

• Free users see ads.

• Paid users don’t.

• Ads are contextual to the current query, not your entire chat history.

• No politics.

• No health.

• No kids.

• Clear labelling.

• Easy dismissal.

• Opt-out options.

All very sensible. All very reassuring. And completely missing the point.

Trust doesn’t care about policy documents.

People just don’t use ChatGPT the way they use Google.

They don’t “search.” They explain themselves.

They ask follow-ups. They admit uncertainty.

They test ideas.

They ask questions they wouldn’t type into a search box with someone walking past their desk.

That’s the contract.

So the moment advertising appears there, even politely, the burden on brands becomes enormous.

If the AI gets something wrong, your brand isn’t adjacent to unsafe content. It’s standing next to it like you agree.

That’s a very different risk profile.

Which is exactly why AdOps leaders should be paying attention now, not when a sales deck lands in their inbox.

If you’re agency side, this breaks a few comfortable assumptions.

You cannot treat this like another activation line item. There is no “we’ll test with 5% of budget and optimise later” safety net.

The first conversations your clients appear in will define how much trust they’re allowed in this environment.

Your job here isn’t buying. It’s governance.

You should already be thinking about who signs off conversational creative, how AI adjacency fits into existing brand safety frameworks, and what happens when a client asks why their brand appeared next to an answer they didn’t script.

If your response is “that’s just how the platform works” you’re already exposed.

You also need to prepare clients for the uncomfortable truth that performance metrics will lag behind reality.

• There will be influence without clicks.

• Impact without attribution.

• Senior operators who can’t explain that calmly are going to struggle.

If you’re brand side, the risk is different but sharper.

This is not a place to experiment with brands that don’t already have authority.

If your value proposition can’t stand up inside a conversation without shouting, it will feel invasive very quickly.

Before you even think about spend, you should be asking whether your product, your claims, and your tone make sense when surfaced next to a trusted answer.

If the AI is doing most of the explaining, your ad needs to add value, not repeat marketing copy.

This is also where internal alignment matters.

Legal, comms, and media teams can’t work in silos when the brand is appearing inside AI responses.

Someone needs ownership of the conversational risk profile, and right now most organisations don’t even know that role exists.

And for AdOps leaders specifically, on either side of the fence, this is the real shift.

Your job is no longer just delivery and efficiency. It’s interpretation.

You’re going to be the ones explaining why something “worked” without a clean CPA.

Why something “failed” without any obvious error.

Why a platform that technically behaved correctly still created reputational discomfort.

This doesn’t behave like search advertising, no matter how hard everyone wants it to.

• There are no blue links.

• No fixed placements.

• No comforting keyword lists that make planners feel in control.

Just fluid intent expressed in natural language, with nuance and emotion baked in.

Great for relevance. Awful for control.

And measurement?

We’re nowhere near ready. Not even close...

• There’s no meaningful bidding logic yet.

• No placement guarantees.

• No intent taxonomy anyone agrees on.

• No attribution model that can explain whether a conversation nudged someone forward or just nodded politely in their direction.

This is pre-programmatic and anyone pretending otherwise is selling a deck.

What makes this even more interesting is how differently everyone else is reacting.

Google is doing that thing where it says ads are coming, then says they’re not, then goes very quiet and watches carefully. That’s not confusion. That’s fear of getting it wrong in public.

Anthropic has opted out entirely. Subscription revenue. Enterprise clients. Clean lines. Predictable income. Boring, but safe.

Perplexity paused. And when publishers start asking awkward questions, the whole room changes temperature very quickly.

OpenAI, though, went first.

And going first means you absorb the user backlash, the buyer confusion, and the early mistakes so everyone else can learn quietly behind you.

That’s the real gamble.

Because if conversational ads work without breaking trust, this becomes the default interface for commerce.

If they don’t, the damage is reputational, not just commercial.

For media buyers, the instinct will be to rush in looking for cheap beta CPMs and screenshots for decks. That’s 100% the wrong move.

The advantage here isn’t scale. It’s learning.

1. Learning how creative works when the context is a sentence, not a keyword.

2. Learning how brand safety applies when tone and phrasing matter more than URLs.

3. Learning how to show up helpfully without sounding like you’re hijacking the conversation.

In this environment, authority beats optimisation every single time.

Which is why October mattered...

The direction of travel was obvious if you stopped thinking about ads as formats and started thinking about them as interruptions.

Conversational AI doesn’t tolerate interruption. It notices it.

So no, OpenAI didn’t suddenly declare war on advertising in January.

It just confirmed the battlefield some of us were already pointing at in October...

Oh, and if you actually want to understand how this machine works under the hood, I literally wrote the book on it called WTF IS PROGRAMMATIC?

This took me ages to research and write. All I ask is that you hit subscribe above^ if you found value.

k, thanks, bye

I was juggling two school runs in the rain and an 8 week old puppy’s obsession with biting my face when I saw the Criteo announcements popping up.

Three separate pieces of news. All dropped in the first week of January. All quietly telling us where commerce media actually thinks it’s heading... so I’ve broken it down here for you.

Let’s start with the corporate housekeeping that’s far more revealing than it sounds.

So... on 7 January 2026, Criteo confirmed it’s moving its legal domicile from France to Luxembourg, with a shareholder vote scheduled for 27th February.

It’s also scrapping the American Depositary Shares structure... which is basically the corporate equivalent of having someone else hold your wallet and charge you for the privilege, and listing ordinary shares directly on Nasdaq instead.

Cleaner, simpler, and cheaper... assuming shareholders sign it off by Q3 2026.

The official line from board chairman Rik van der Kooi is that this will “streamline our corporate structure, enhance our capital management flexibility and align our capital markets presence with our long-term strategic ambitions.”

Translation: they want more room to manoeuvre in a market that’s fragmenting faster than anyone predicted, and France’s corporate structure wasn’t giving them the agility they needed.

Thing is, nobody redomiciles to Luxembourg by accident.

It’s where companies go once scale, shareholders, and reality arrive. Less theatre, more spreadsheets, and lawyers who don’t flinch when the numbers get big.

Luxembourg offers capital flexibility, lighter regulatory friction, and a more investor-friendly environment. It’s the sort of move companies make when they’re preparing for either aggressive M&A or significant restructuring.

Either way, it signals that Criteo thinks commerce media is about to get messy!

But the bit that caught my attention wasn’t the Luxembourg move tbh...

It’s what Criteo published on the same day about where commerce is actually heading.

Agentic commerce isn’t going to replace existing shopping behaviours. It’s going to be incremental.

CEO Michael Komasinski points to Ark Invest’s prediction that 25% of ecommerce will be agentically driven by 2030. That sounds dramatic until you realise it only translates to just over 5% of total retail sales.

This is the bit most people miss when they start hyperventilating about AI agents buying everything for us.

Mobile didn’t kill desktop. Social commerce didn’t kill ecommerce. Every new channel adds surface area. It doesn’t consolidate it.

Agentic commerce follows the same pattern. It creates new opportunities by reducing friction rather than cannibalising what already exists.

That’s a far more realistic read of consumer behaviour than the “AI will autonomously manage all your shopping” narrative that some VCs are still flogging.

The data backs this up.

Criteo surveyed 10,000 shoppers globally in September 2025 and found that 40% of U.S. shoppers now use agentic shopping assistants regularly for product research. But 96% of them still use other channels along the way, including search engines, social platforms, and brand or retailer sites.

No displacement. Just more fragmentation.

Michael also dropped a detailed piece on agentic commerce in Decemeber that’s worth reading in full because it’s one of the more grounded takes I’ve seen from a platform executive... I’ll put the link in the comments.

Which brings us to the real tension in commerce media right now...discoverability across an increasingly fragmented ecosystem.

Komasinski argues that products need to be findable wherever consumers initiate queries, across retailer front ends, social platforms, LLM environments, and emerging AI-driven interfaces.

That’s not trivial.

It requires structured commerce data at scale.

1. Real-time inventory.

2. Accurate pricing.

3. Detailed product attributes.

4. Unified fulfilment.

Most LLM platforms simply don’t have this yet, which is why conversion performance is still poor.

He even admits it!

He describes spending nearly an hour inside an LLM platform trying to find puncture-proof city bike tyres, only to hit broken links, discontinued models, and incomplete product information. Eventually, he gave up and went to a local bike shop.

That’s agentic commerce today... impressive reasoning. Weak execution.

Even OpenAI ’s own analysis puts ChatGPT shopping research accuracy at around 64%. When you’re wrong over a third of the time, you’re not building trust. You’re burning it.

This is where Criteo’s positioning becomes genuinely interesting.

They’re not trying to build consumer-facing AI shopping agents. They’re betting on being the data and infrastructure layer that powers everyone else’s agentic experiences.

• They already sit on 720 million daily active users.

• 4.5 billion SKUs in their Universal Product Catalog

• Over one trillion dollars in annual ecommerce transaction data

That scale creates a continuously refreshed commerce intelligence layer. In a world where LLMs can reason brilliantly but can’t reliably tell you what’s in stock or how much it costs, structured data becomes the moat.

Retail media is the other half of this story.

Criteo’s President of Retail Media, Sherry Smith , published the company’s 2026 outlook on the same day.

And again, it’s unusually honest.

1. Self-service tools for brands and agencies finally have to work.

The current reality of juggling multiple retailer platforms with inconsistent data structures and reporting logic isn’t sustainable.

Criteo’s pushing towards unified execution, flexible measurement, and AI-powered optimisation without opaque black boxes.

2. Retailers need to stop managing ad revenue in silos.

Criteo is building software to help retailers align merchandising, media, and shopper experience goals through dynamic layouts, personalisation, and clearer control over the full journey.

This directly addresses a real, genuine pain point.

Too many retailers optimise ad yield independently from merchandising outcomes, which kills incrementality and long-term value.

3. Agentic AI will redefine discovery as shoppers shift from keywords to conversations.

That means sponsored placements inside retailer-owned assistants, AI-integrated retail apps, and commerce data feeds powering conversational interfaces. It also means monetisation inevitably shifting towards advertising.

• Google is already showing ads inside AI Mode search.

• ChatGPT has roughly 5% of users paying for subscriptions, which leaves advertising as the most obvious growth lever.

Advertising remains the most scalable digital monetisation model we have. In the GenAI era, it just rewards data quality, transparency, and relevance far more aggressively.

So what does this actually mean if you’re running campaigns?

The Luxembourg move won’t affect day-to-day operations in the short term, but it signals Criteo is preparing for bigger strategic shifts.

The agentic commerce positioning matters more.

If Criteo succeeds in becoming the structured commerce data layer behind AI shopping across platforms, it becomes essential infrastructure. If it fails, it risks being just another retargeting platform watching the ecosystem fragment around it.

The retail media roadmap targets genuine pain points, but the industry has heard self-service promises before.

The real test is whether Criteo’s unified approach actually reduces operational friction or simply adds another abstraction layer.

One thing is clear though... commerce media is fracturing across more surfaces than anyone expected even two years ago.

Retailer-owned assistants like Amazon’s Rufus saw sessions resulting in a purchase grow over 100% during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, compared to around 20% growth for non-assistant sessions.

That’s not noise. That’s a signal...

Conversational interfaces are creating incremental demand.

The platforms that control the data feeding those experiences are positioning themselves as the plumbing everything else depends on.

Whether Criteo pulls this off comes down to execution, not vision.

The vision is coherent.

• Be the commerce data backbone for agentic shopping.

• Unify retail media workflows across fragmented networks.

• Monetise through scalable advertising embedded in conversational interfaces.

The execution requires global data integration at scale, genuine interoperability across retailers and LLM platforms, and accuracy north of 95% ... IF... consumers are ever going to trust these systems.

Oh and if you actually want to understand how this machine works... I literally wrote the book on it called WTF IS PROGRAMMATIC? (it’s on Amazon, obvs...)

This took me ages to research and write. All I ask is that you hit subscribe above^ if you found value.

k, thanks, bye

8am. Coffee in one hand. Slack pinging like a fruit machine.

Then I read the AdTech news.

Not a chatbot. Not a fancy insight panel. Not a helpful nudge saying you might want to look at line item 3.

Actual AI agents running inside Yahoo DSP executing tasks autonomously.

And suddenly my coffee went cold... again.

Because this is the moment the industry stops talking about AI like it is a helpful intern and starts admitting it is closer to a junior trader who never sleeps.

Yahoo is rolling out THREE live capabilities straight away.

1. A campaign activation agent that lets you connect external AI agents via Model Context Protocol.

2. A troubleshooting agent that proactively identifies pacing and delivery issues.

3. And audience exploration that uses AI to discover and build audiences through APIs.

Pause on that for a second.

Troubleshooting. Proactively. Before a human even notices.

Every agency in the world is built on the assumption that someone spots something is broken. Then they investigate. Then they fix it. That entire loop has just been compressed into seconds by a system that does not need a status meeting to function.

This is not optimisation advice. This is execution.

And yes before anyone panics... Yahoo has wrapped this in something called the “Yours Mine and Ours framework”. Bring your own AI. Use Yahoo’s native agents. Or connect both together securely.

Which is a polite way of saying you are not forced into a black box but you are now responsible for what you plug in.

This is the line in the sand moment.

For years DSPs have talked about automation. Smart bidding. Algorithmic optimisation. Auto everything. But the human was always the bottleneck. Still pressing the button. Still debugging the mess when it went wrong.

That bottleneck is now being removed.

The real shift here is not speed. It is posture.

Programmatic has always been reactive. Something breaks. Someone spots it. Someone fixes it. Now we are moving to proactive campaign management where issues are identified and resolved before they ever make it into a report or a client email.

That is both brilliant and deeply uncomfortable.

Most agency time is spent on diagnosis not strategy.

We do not spend hours being clever. We spend hours figuring out why something that should work is not working. Why spend is stuck. Why delivery dropped. Why a deal is not matching. Why pacing is off. Why reporting looks wrong. Why the dashboard does not tie back.

If an AI agent can do that in seconds then a large chunk of what we call operational expertise just disappeared.

That does not mean people disappear. It means the job changes.

The most important line in the announcement was almost throwaway but it matters more than anything else.

Agency teams will need new skills around prompting agents through natural language and understanding agent decision logic to override automated actions when necessary.

Read that again.

This is not about learning a new DSP interface. It is about learning how to manage systems that manage campaigns.

Prompting becomes a skill. Oversight becomes a skill. Knowing when to let the agent run and when to intervene becomes the job.

If you cannot explain why the agent did what it did then you cannot responsibly use it.

This is where a lot of people are about to feel exposed.

The industry has spent years rewarding speed and execution. Who can build fastest. Who can traffic quickest. Who can juggle the most campaigns. That skill set does not map cleanly into an agent driven world.

In this model the best operators are not the fastest clickers. They are the best supervisors.

• They understand objectives deeply enough to encode them clearly.

• They understand risk well enough to set guardrails.

• They understand measurement well enough to sanity check outcomes.

• And crucially they understand how these systems optimise so they know when something smells off.

This is why I keep coming back to guardrails.

I took my kids bowling recently. They had the rails up. Without them the ball would have lived permanently in the gutter.

With them they could actually compete.

They could focus on throwing instead of constantly correcting failure.

They achieved scores they would never have hit otherwise.

That is exactly what AI should be in programmatic.

Guardrails up. Humans still playing the game.

Yahoo’s approach is interesting because it openly acknowledges this. The Yours Mine and Ours framework is essentially saying we know you will not fully trust us and that is fine. Bring your own brain. Plug it in. Let them talk to each other.

Partners like Newton and RPA have already built trafficking agents that have executed programmatic guaranteed buys.

Read that again.

Guaranteed buys executed by agents. No one manually building line items at 23:30 before launch.

That is not a roadmap slide. That is live.

But here is the bit people will quietly ignore until it hurts.

If an agent can activate. Troubleshoot. Explore audiences. Optimise. QA. Measure.

What exactly is the human accountable for when something goes wrong.

Because something will go wrong.

Not because AI is bad but because objectives are messy. Data is messy. Clients are messy. The real world is messy.

When an agent overshoots frequency. Or prioritises the wrong outcome. Or optimises away brand safety in pursuit of efficiency.

Who owns that decision.

You cannot just say the algorithm did it anymore.

You chose the agent. You set the prompt. You defined the guardrails.

Accountability moves up the stack.

That is why this announcement matters far more than most people realise.

It is not about Yahoo catching up on AI buzzwords. It is about redefining how programmatic teams actually operate.

• If you are an agency leader and your value story is still we manually optimise better than anyone else... you have about 11 months to rethink that if you’re lucky.

• If you are a trader and your main differentiator is knowing where the buttons are you need to start learning how these systems think.

• If you are a client and you believe humans touching every lever equals control you are about to be disappointed.

The smart agencies like SBS will lean into this.

They will build frameworks where AI handles boring repeatable diagnosis and humans focus on outcomes judgment and governance.

They will train teams to interrogate agent logic not just trust dashboards. They will stop selling effort and start selling decision quality.

The bad ones like... (you so wanted me to name one ha) will pretend this is just another feature update.

They will switch it on without understanding it. They will panic when something weird happens. And they will quietly turn it off while telling clients they prefer a human touch.

That will work for a while.Then the economics will catch up.

When tasks that used to take hours... now take seconds... clients will start asking why they are still paying for hours.

That is the real disruption here.

Not job loss. Not AI panic. Margin pressure.

Agentic DSPs compress time. Time is what agencies sell whether they admit it or not.

The only defensible position is to move up the value chain.

Outcomes. Governance. Risk management. Strategic judgment. Being the adult in the room when the machine gets too confident.

Btw.. if you actually want to understand how this machine works under the hood I literally wrote the book on it — WTF IS PROGRAMMATIC?

This is not the end of human media buying... but it is the end of pretending the job is about clicking things.

The future trader looks less like a pilot manually flying and more like air traffic control.

Watching systems. Intervening when needed. Making judgment calls machines cannot.

Yahoo just made that future very real indeed.

This took me ages to research and write. All I ask is that you hit subscribe above^ if you found value.

k, thanks, bye

Not watching.

Just because I needed something on that didn’t sound like a middle class child complaining about the lack of “champagne truffle” options.

Emails. Slack. Someone asking if we can “just quickly” add another line item.

Then Samsung Electronics started talking about Vision AI Companion.

And they were way too relaxed about it.

That’s what bothered me tbh.

Because once you actually listen, you realise they’ve quietly made the TV the boss of the house.

Not the biggest screen. The decision maker.

You watch a cooking show.

• The TV knows.

• The fridge knows.

• Your phone knows.

No prompts.

No buttons.

No “would you like me to”.

Stuff just appears.

1. Recipe.

2. Shopping list.

3. Suggestions.

4. Assumes intent and carries on.

That’s the shift.

This thing isn’t waiting for instructions. It’s making judgement calls.

And suddenly I stopped thinking about hardware and started thinking about data.

This isn’t smart home BS. This is behaviour being observed by devices that never leave the house.

That’s new.

The TV sits in the middle of it all. Obviously.

Samsung didn’t say “command centre” out loud. But that’s what it is.

It knows when you’re watching sport properly.

It knows when you’re half watching.

It knows when you pause a game...

That’s where their GameBreaks ads now live.

And now it’s programmatic...

Which is… mad.

We’ve spent years pretending we know when attention peaks.

Now Samsung lets the TV decide.

Then they showed the appliances.

This is where I actually stopped trusting my own reaction.

The robot vacuum knows if you’ve got a pet. Not because you told it. Because it cleans up after it.

The air con knows if someone’s in the room.

That’s not targeting data. That’s presence. Like... real presence.

No cookies.

No IDs.

No stitched graphs held together with hope.

• Someone is home.

• Someone is active.

• Someone is doing something.

And all of that feeds back into the same system.

If Samsung Ads gets to use even a sanitised, aggregated version of this, they’ve built something very few people can compete with.

Not because it’s clever.

Because it’s certain.

Retail media works because it sees behaviour close to purchase.

Samsung’s moved earlier.

Earlier than search. Earlier than scroll.

Right into the living room.

And people will opt into this because it feels genuinely helpful.

It feels like the house is on your side.

That’s why this is dangerous and brilliant at the same time.

For agencies, buying Samsung next year doesn’t mean “CTV”.

It means buying into a closed loop system where context, behaviour, and attention are built into the product.

For brands, this isn’t impressions anymore.

It’s moments. Actual moments in someone’s house.

The privacy conversation will come. It always does.

But commercially, this is obvious.

As signal dies everywhere else, value moves to places where behaviour is observed, not guessed.

Retailers did it in stores. Samsung just did it on the sofa.

Btw... I wrote WTF IS PROGRAMMATIC? because none of this makes sense unless you understand how these systems really work under the hood.

The industry keeps saying the future is coming.

Samsung didn’t say that. They just shipped it.

And acted like it was normal.

This took me ages to research and write. All I ask is that you hit subscribe above^ if you found value.

k, thanks, bye

I read the 𝐃𝐢𝐠𝐢𝐃𝐚𝐲 piece about AI buying agents and suddenly the industry behaviour made complete sense.

We’re not scared of AI. We’re scared of AI with a credit card.

Planning agents are having a lovely time right now.

They read briefs. They suggest audiences. They build keyword lists. They organise PMPs. They tidy up workflows everyone secretly hates.

Omnicom’s testing them.

Kinesso’s testing them.

SBS is testing them.

Everyone’s nodding along saying “this is great actually”.

Equativ’s Maestro is a perfect example.

It does the boring bit.

Reads the brief. Suggests deals. Packages inventory. Then it just stops.

Like a well trained intern. No spend. No execution. Just vibes and efficiency.

Forty percent planning time saved apparently... which checks out because half of planning is copy pasting logic you already know.

It’s the safe zone tbh... if it messes up, worst case you look stupid in a deck. No one gets sacked or shouted at.

Buying agents though… that’s where the mood changes.

Because now we’re talking about software actually spending client money.

Not recommending. Not suggesting. Executing.

Butler Till testing Scope3’s buying agent is where this gets spicy.

That agent talks directly to a publisher side agent via AdCP.

No DSP interface.

No comfort blanket UI.

No “just pause it if it looks weird”.

It’s proper machine to machine buying.

The promise is seductive. Cut out middlemen. Reduce fees. Strip waste. 40% cheaper execution...

And every media lead, including me, reading that immediately thinks “Cool… who’s responsible when it goes wrong?”

That’s the real blocker. Not the tech. The accountability.

Everyone’s happy trusting ChatGPT to help plan Christmas dinner. No one wants it actually ordering the food, choosing the shop, charging the wrong card, and delivering twenty turkeys because it misunderstood “feeds six”.

Hallucinations are funny until they show up on an invoice.

Then there’s governance.

If an AI overspends, misallocates budget, buys sh*t inventory, or just does something technically correct but strategically stupid… who owns that?

The agency? The vendor? The model? Good luck explaining that in a post campaign call.

And then there’s the bit no one wants to say out loud... but I will... obviously!

Buying is the last bit of the job that still feels human.

Planning has already been abstracted. Strategy decks, audience logic, channel splits… all ripe for automation.

Execution is where traders still justify their existence.

The second an LLM is trusted to activate spend, a lot of job descriptions quietly disappear.

So when people say “I don’t trust LLMs to buy media yet”, what they really mean is “I don’t trust anyone to explain this when it breaks”.

The protocols aren’t ready either.

AdCP is new.

Scope3 are keeping pilots tiny on purpose. Because one bad headline here doesn’t just hurt a test… it sets the whole category back years.

So here’s how I see it playing out... if you’re interested?

Agents that set the table become normal. Brief analysis. Deal creation. PMP organisation. Workflow automation. That stuff becomes boringly standard.

Agents that eat the meal… actually spending the money… stay human gated for a while.

Approval layers. Hard caps. Kill switches. Finance teams hovering like nervous parents at a teenage party.

This isn’t fear.

It’s just people who’ve been burned before remembering what happens when “set and forget” ... well... forgets.

Because anyone who’s ever left a campaign uncapped over a weekend knows EXACTLY why the Buy button is still sacred.

Oh btw... if you actually want to understand how this machine works under the hood… I literally wrote the book on it… WTF IS PROGRAMMATIC?

This took me ages to research and write. All I ask is that you hit subscribe above^ if you found value.

k, thanks, bye