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So I had virtual coffee yesterday with Bill Duggan and Julie Weitzner at the ANA (association of national advertisers), and as is usual when I get on a Zoom with smart people, I talked too much. I always do this. I have a problem with my neurodivergent mind. Bill, in his quietly devastating Boston-College-MBA way, let me run my mouth for forty minutes about the state of programmatic before he and Julie gently reminded me that I had buried the lede in my own report.

If those two names don't ring a bell, that's actually the entire problem and the entire reason I'm writing this.

Bill is the guy who's been quietly running the most important media transparency work in this industry for the last decade. He's retiring in June after 26 years, and the trade press will give him exactly the obituary the industry deserves: a polite paragraph buried under six press releases about whatever new acronym IAB Tech Lab, Yahoo, or some Series B "AI-powered curation layer" announced that morning. Julie runs the Media Practice. She came up through Dentsu, eBay, Dstillery, Razorfish.

We were talking about the Q4 2025 Programmatic Transparency Benchmark, the one that came out in February. And somewhere between the second cup of coffee and Bill explaining the TrueAdSpend methodology for the third time because I kept interrupting him (sorry, Bill), it hit me.

Not the IAB, which has spent two decades writing technical specifications that conveniently leave the fee structure opaque, while throwing the world's most expensive parties at Cannes funded by the very vendors whose extraction the specifications enable. Not the trade press, which I am part of, and which has built a business model on press-releasing every "AI-powered curation layer" and "next-gen identity graph" as if any of it has ever once moved the needle on the 56 cents of every dollar that disappears before an ad reaches a human being. Not the agencies, who Judge Brinkema had to publicly call out during the DOJ Google trial because they were the ones "with their hands on the tools" while the actual advertisers, the people writing the checks, didn't even get a seat at the witness stand.

Just the ANA. The advertisers themselves. The people who pay for all of it.

Think about that for a second. The trade body for the people writing the checks is the only organization in the entire ecosystem credibly working to figure out where the checks go. Not the trade body for the people cashing the checks. Not the trade body for the people building the rails. Not the trade press that gets paid to celebrate the rails. The advertisers. Alone. With a small team in New York, a partnership with TAG TrustNet and Fiducia, and a methodology that the supply side has fought tooth and nail because, as the ANA's own methodology documentation politely notes, "supplier resistance has made access to LLD feeds challenging in some cases, even when those suppliers utilize the same data themselves."

Translation: the platforms have your data. They use it to optimize their own businesses. They will not give it to you so you can audit them.

Now, here's the part I haven't told most of you. While Bill and Julie are doing the slow, methodical, evidence-based work inside the industry, I've been having a very different set of conversations outside of it. I've been talking to commissioners at the FTC. I've been trading emails with the head of their enforcement division. I've spoken with multiple state and city commissioners, with the New York State Attorney General's office, with the NYS Department of Consumer Affairs. And in many of these conversations, they are not asking me to explain the problem. They already know what is going on. They are asking me a different question entirely. They are asking me who should be sued. Who should be prosecuted. Who, by name, are the people at fault.

Let me be very clear about what that means, because the industry is going to pretend it doesn't until it does. The regulators are aware. The evidence is mounting. The ANA's Benchmark is producing the documentation. The FTC's 2024–2025 programmatic transparency investigations are open. State AGs are reading the same reports you're reading right now. And eventually, there will be actions. Names will be named. Companies will be served. The industry has been building this house of cards on the assumption that nobody with subpoena power was paying attention. They are paying attention. They are asking me who lives in which room.

This is the part where I'd usually tell you the rest is for paid members. And it is. But before the paywall drops, here's the thesis you're paying for, in one sentence: the adtech industry has spent 15 years convincing advertisers that the people fixing adtech are the people building adtech, when in fact the only meaningful reform work in the entire ecosystem has come from the buyers themselves, the regulators are now circling with a list of questions that the industry will not enjoy answering, and the trade press, mine included until today, has been complicit in pretending this is all fine.

The rest of this is for the people who pay attention. Hit upgrade. The fun is just starting.

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