Let me start with a confession: I’ve interviewed Anthony Katsur three times now, and every time he shows up, it’s like Groundhog Day — if Bill Murray were trying to debug a supply chain full of spoofed inventory and cookie consent banners written by Kafka.

So what brings us back to this rodeo? You guessed it: cookies.

Just when the industry thought it was safe to put third-party cookies on hospice care and move on to the shiny world of hashed emails and privacy-compliant delusions, Google pulled its most predictable move yet: another delay. Yes, the cookiepocalypse has been postponed — again. Chrome will keep cookies warm and toasty for the foreseeable future, like your uncle who still thinks AOL is the internet.

And Katsur, bless him, didn’t even flinch. “Third-party cookies have powered interoperability of the web for 30 years,” he told me, with the resigned tone of a man who's watched this episode more than once. “This is how advertising was able to function across the web.”

Which is a polite way of saying: if you thought we were ready to unplug the life support, you haven’t looked at your bidstream lately.

But it’s not just that the cookies survived — it’s what replaced them that should keep privacy advocates up at night. According to Katsur, “The deprecation of third-party cookies across other browsers has actually forced the industry to be more privacy invasive.” That’s right. You thought the cookie was creepy? Wait until your email address becomes the login passport to every reg wall this side of hell.

Here’s the thing: the cookie wasn’t perfect, but it was understood. It was delete-able, block-able, and at least lived in your browser like a well-behaved house cat. But the alternatives we’ve cooked up in the name of “privacy” would make Orwell ask for a timeout.

We're now chasing users around the internet with fingerprinting, which Katsur says people treat like “this nefarious, evil, dark thing,” but in reality, “it’s just an identifier.” And guess what? There’s “no legal definition of fingerprinting” anywhere, globally. So while everyone’s screaming “Big Brother!”, most companies are just quietly collecting enough probabilistic breadcrumbs to reconstruct your entire digital personality — and maybe your taste in hummus.

He added, almost too casually, “As long as consumers have notice, give consent, and can opt out, it’s perfectly legal.” Which sounds great, until you remember that most “opt-out” pages look like they were designed by a sociopath with a grudge against UX.

Now let’s wade into the sparkly swamp of Connected TV — which, depending on who you ask, is either the final frontier of storytelling or just traditional TV with better PR and worse targeting.

Katsur’s take? “CTV is absolutely transformative.” He was practically glowing as he described a moment watching Reacher on Prime Video, when the ad told him to open his Amazon app — and bam, the product was right there waiting. Seamless, relevant, useful. He called it “deeply engaging,” and I’ll give him this: that’s the kind of integration we’ve been promised since the Bush administration.

But for every futuristic Prime Video moment, there’s a sea of unskippable ads for tampons (his joke, not mine — apparently Amazon has some very confused household-level data on him). And worse: the industry still hasn’t figured out how to measure it all in a way that doesn’t make buyers weep into their dashboards.

Let’s get gross: fraud is still thriving, and nobody wants to admit it. Katsur put it bluntly: “Fraud follows the richest unit economics and the biggest budgets. You don’t get bigger than television.” Translation: CTV is a frog magnet — and not the kind that turns into a prince.

He tried to get brands to participate in a Tech Lab-led fraud study. Most of them politely declined — or just ghosted him altogether. “We tried for two years… and I don’t want to say we didn’t have any brands, but it was such a small sample size that we abandoned the initiative.”

You know why? Because no one in this industry actually wants to know how bad it is. As Katsur put it, “I wonder if subconsciously fraud is now unfortunately baked into the unit economics.” Or to paraphrase: if we really cleaned up the fraud, we might find out half the programmatic pie is filled with air.

And while he doesn't admire fraudsters — he made that clear — he does admire the folks “who continue to beat the drum on fraud being an issue,” even if some claims (like 90% of CTV being fake) are, in his words, “absurd.”

There’s something weirdly refreshing about Katsur. He doesn’t try to spin, sanitize, or sound like an NFT in human form. When I asked whether he’d ever regretted a day in adtech, he answered without blinking: “Nope. Never. Not one second.” And that might be the most radical thing anyone has said on The ADOTAT Show.

He still believes in the open web, in advertising as a force for good (yes, really), and in measurement standards — if we can ever get out of our own way. “We’re an industry filled with self-loathing,” he said, which is both depressing and dead-on. It’s like we know we built the infrastructure of the internet… and then we forgot to take any credit for it.

Look, if you made it this far, you're not here for clickbait. You’re here because you're tired of the fluff, the LinkedIn humblebrags, and the dashboards that light up like Vegas but tell you nothing real.

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This week? Kevin Krim drops the act and lays bare what's actually broken in ad tech—how even the outcome metrics we love are being gamed, and why most measurement tools are just mirrors with fog.

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