I don’t go to the adtech conferences anymore.

Let’s be honest—they’ve become cosplay for corporate narcissists.

Rows of self-proclaimed “thought leaders” clutching seltzers and pretending they’re building the future. It’s not that there aren’t good people there—there are—but they’re drowned out by the noise of ego and empty jargon.

These events exist for one purpose: to defend the asshattery that has metastasized inside adtech. Panels on “transparency” delivered by the same people who profit from opacity. Roundtables about “trust” hosted by companies that can’t even spell it without a trademark symbol.

Somewhere between the stage lighting and the step-and-repeat banners, critical thinking flatlined, and the industry replaced it with vibes.

Adtech’s newest form of entertainment? Debating open-source governance through memes.

The latest Prebid fiasco—its decision to change Transaction IDs (TIDs) in version 10.9—should have been a sober technical discussion. Instead, it became the year’s dumbest gladiatorial match on LinkedIn.

The update made TIDs SSP-specific instead of global, breaking DSPs’ ability to detect duplicate bids and torpedoing transparency overnight. Prebid called it “a step toward publisher privacy.” Translation: “We didn’t think this through, but please clap.”

What followed was a digital dogfight—complete with performative outrage, recycled buzzwords, and meme accounts moonlighting as moral authorities. Suddenly, every “adtech influencer” who couldn’t define OpenRTB became an expert on governance. Engineers who hadn’t touched a line of code in five years were lecturing about compliance.

It was like watching a clown car burst into flames while the passengers debated who lit the match.

Here’s the truth no one wants to say out loud: we’ve built a professional class of noise-makers.

They’re the same faces on every panel, podcast, and press release—talking endlessly about innovation while contributing nothing but hot air. They’ve mastered the fine art of being “in the room,” not to build, but to brand themselves.

Adtech used to have real rebels—people who actually wrote code, fixed bugs, and argued about architecture instead of optics. Now we have LinkedIn gladiators competing for dopamine hits. Jargon is their currency. Outrage is their marketing strategy.

We’ve reached a point where open-source debates are settled by likes and retweets, not logic or technical merit. And the saddest part? Everyone plays along. Because in this industry, attention has replaced achievement.

The Prebid TID change isn’t just a technical issue—it’s an existential crisis for the industry. It cracked open the tension at the heart of adtech: transparency vs. control.

When a move meant to “protect privacy” ends up undermining trust, you know the system’s rotten. We’ve let the loudest voices shape the narrative, and now the infrastructure of the open web is being rewritten in real time by people who mistake branding for governance.

If this is the future of “leadership,” maybe we deserve SSP-specific IDs. Maybe we deserve the chaos we’ve cultivated.

What looks like incompetence on the surface is actually a power struggle—one that pits Prebid’s open-source idealism against The Trade Desk’s corporate pragmatism and the IAB Tech Lab’s bureaucratic grip on standards.

That’s where the real story begins.

👉 In ADOTAT+, we’ll go deeper into the Transaction ID Civil War—the forks, the feuds, and the quiet alliances reshaping who actually controls the web’s ad infrastructure.

Because if the open web is going to eat itself, we might as well document every bite.y.

You’re not paying for fluff — you’re paying for clarity.

ADOTAT+ isn’t another trade rag parroting press releases or pretending a sales deck is “thought leadership.” We actually read the 200-page industry reports so you don’t have to, rip out the marketing jargon, and leave you with the 10% that matters — the part that tells you where the money and momentum are actually moving.

No sponsored “research.”
No cozy “partnership content.”
No editors being taken to steak dinners to “soften the headline.”

You pay for one thing: access to truth.

We tell you what to watch, not what to buy.
We explain why a metric matters before an agency builds a slide about it.
We track who’s bluffing, who’s building, and who’s bleeding.

ADOTAT+ exists because the adtech press got lazy, the analysts got compromised, and the industry forgot how to read between the lines.

So while everyone else is reposting the same talking points, we’re the ones pulling the data apart, checking the footnotes, and finding the story buried under the NDA.

If you want the headlines, stay on LinkedIn.
If you want the real analysis — the kind that still gets whispered about at industry events — that’s what you’re missing in ADOTAT+.

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