You know the type. The pitch deck peacocks. The “strategic” consultants who can’t define CPM.

The media buyers who swear their campaign is “optimized” but can’t explain the funnel. They’re quoting ADOTAT+ on calls like they thought of it themselves.

Because we don’t just break news—we expose it, dissect it, and serve it raw with receipts. Vendor drama? We’ve got the texts. Ad tech fraud? We name names. Holding company whispers? We’ve already heard them scream.

This isn’t a newsletter. It’s a crowbar for prying open the black box of this industry.

If you’d rather skip the recycled LinkedIn threads and get to the part where you actually know what you’re talking about, join ADOTAT+. Or don’t—and let your competitor use our reporting to crush your next pitch.

🧠 Stay Bold. Stay Curious. Know More than You Did Yesterday.
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Let’s be honest: transaction IDs (TIDs) were never supposed to be sexy. They’re the plumbing bolts of programmatic—a UUID glued onto a bid request so machines could tell if they were looking at the same damn impression across multiple SSPs. Not exactly dinner party chatter. And yet, in late summer 2025, this obscure field turned into the industry’s version of a reality TV fistfight.

Here’s the headline: on August 27, Prebid.org quietly flipped the switch and broke cross-exchange TIDs. Instead of one consistent identifier for a single ad opportunity, every bidder now gets their own bespoke ID—like everyone showing up to a party with different invitations for the same event. Buyers lost their only flashlight in the cave. Duplication detection? Gone. SPO cleanup? Useless.

Programmatic in 2025 already looked like a data center on bath salts. Header bidding and refreshes were blasting out millions of duplicate requests per device per day. DSPs relied on the TID to dedupe that noise, keep their QPS under control, and stop wasting money on phantom “new” auctions that were really just the same impression wearing a fake mustache.

Strip out that common ID, and what happens?

Meanwhile, publishers are doing their best “who, me?” routine. Prebid says the move was about “privacy”—because buyers could, in theory, stitch together supply paths, reverse-engineer floors, or reconstruct deal terms. Translation: “Stop peeking under our hood; you might see how messy the engine really is.”

The IAB Tech Lab immediately cried foul, pointing out this flat-out violates the OpenRTB spec, which says TIDs are supposed to be shared across all bidders in a given auction. That’s the whole point. Fragmenting them breaks the one bit of interoperability buyers had left.

But don’t miss the subtext: this wasn’t just a technical tweak. It was a shot across the bow at The Trade Desk, who had been increasingly vocal about using TIDs to clean up the market. Publishers read that as “TTD dictating how they run auctions.” Scar tissue from the Google years runs deep, and the sell side isn’t exactly lining up for another round of “buyer knows best.”

This free column is just the trailer. Here’s what we aren’t giving away here:

All of that—and the blunt wargaming of who actually wins and who bleeds from this change—is sitting behind the ADOTAT+ paywall. Paid subscribers aren’t just getting color commentary; they’re getting the maps, the leaked memos, and the diagrams showing how your bidstream really looks when the TID rug gets pulled.

Stay Bold, Stay Curious, and Know More than You Did Yesterday.

👉 The free read ends here. For the full breakdown—the plumbing diagrams, the SPO fallout, and the survival guide—subscribe to ADOTAT+. Because this knife fight is just getting started, and you don’t want to be the one caught holding a butter knife.