Gavin Dunaway spent nearly a decade embedded in the ad tech trenches, first at Adotas, then as the agenda-wrangling overlord at AdMonsters. His job? Making sense of an industry that often makes no sense. If you were drowning in supply path spaghetti or wondering why your premium ad buys kept ending up sandwiched between fake celeb death hoaxes, Gavin was likely the one moderating a panel where executives awkwardly pretended to have a solution.

Essentially, he was ad tech’s therapist, nodding along while industry veterans spiraled into existential crises about CPMs and brand safety. "How many header bidding partners is too many?" was a question that got asked way too many times. Gavin listened, facilitated, and tried to steer the conversation toward something useful—while probably wondering how much of this would still be relevant in six months.

But there’s only so long you can be the guy in the commentator’s booth before you want to grab the ball and run. Gavin wasn’t playing the game—he was narrating it. And as the industry devolved into an overcomplicated Rube Goldberg machine of bad decisions, he saw the same patterns over and over.

"I just kept leading these panels about header bidding strategies and I was like, this is miserable. This is awful." The entire digital ad experience was turning into an unskippable, autoplaying video ad—annoying, intrusive, and completely unavoidable. And yet, the industry was still debating tweaks to a system that was fundamentally broken.

The moment of clarity hit: this wasn’t a technology problem. It was a trust problem.

So when The Media Trust came calling, pitching him on the radical idea that maybe, just maybe, consumers shouldn’t be bombarded with scammy ads, malicious redirects, and fraudulent nonsense, he didn’t hesitate.

Enough with the panel discussions. It was time to get his hands dirty.

He wasn’t going to be the guy moderating the endless debates anymore—he was picking a side. Instead of just talking about fixing digital advertising, he was stepping into the fight. The mission? Slay malvertising monsters, clean up the ad supply chain, and—somehow—restore a little bit of sanity to an ecosystem that had lost its way.

Because if the industry wasn’t going to fix itself, someone had to.

Gavin Dunaway didn’t sign up to be a digital exterminator, but here he is—wielding a marketing megaphone like a flamethrower, torching malvertising scams and exposing the cockroaches of the ad industry.

Once upon a time, malvertising used to be seasonal, a predictable infestation that crept in when the ad world let its guard down. Q1 and Q3 were peak hunting seasons for bad actors—post-holiday lulls, skeleton ad ops teams, a golden opportunity for hackers to test new scams. But even the cybercriminals are done playing by the old rules. "It used to be that malware invasions slowed down during Q4," Gavin said. "Not anymore." Now, it’s year-round chaos.

It’s not just the sheer volume of attacks—it’s the creativity of the con artists. Gavin recently had to deal with an outbreak where hackers basically built a cipher puzzle straight out of an Indiana Jones movie—locking in bits of repeating text across different ad servers so that the final payload only revealed itself when the conditions were just right. The result? Phishing redirects detonating across the internet, turning ordinary websites into booby traps.

But that’s just the surface-level stuff. The deeper problem? Zombie ad tech.

The ad industry, in its infinite wisdom, never really deletes anything. Defunct ad tech companies leave behind rotting digital infrastructure, their old domains sitting there like abandoned buildings just waiting to be squatted in. The original owners? Gone. The ad tags? Still embedded in publisher pages, serving who-knows-what to who-knows-who. "All a threat actor has to do is buy a defunct domain, and next thing you know, random sites are suddenly running malicious redirects—without even knowing it."

And then there’s Polyfill, the open-source JavaScript library that became the biggest cybersecurity disaster no one saw coming. It was embedded in over 100,000 websites, quietly doing its job—until it got hijacked by a Chinese hacker group. Suddenly, major brand advertisers (who Gavin very politely did not name) were serving stealth malware to millions of unsuspecting users.

"This was hitting kids’ sites," he said, still in disbelief. "Publishers, advertisers—it didn’t matter. They all had old code buried in their pages that got taken over. Next thing you know, data breaches everywhere."

It’s one thing to block a bad ad before it loads, but what about the ads that disguise themselves as something legitimate? That’s the next level of the fight. It’s not just about playing defense anymore—it’s about exposing the bad actors before they even get through the door.

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Let’s get one thing straight—Gavin Dunaway isn’t tilting at windmills. The malvertising crisis isn’t some abstract boogeyman cooked up by ad ops folks who just like to complain. It’s a billion-dollar industry of digital con artists, state-backed hackers, and opportunistic fraudsters who have figured out that the ad ecosystem is the Wild West and the sheriff’s been asleep for years.

And speaking of sheriffs—where the hell is Google?

Gavin has watched, with equal parts amusement and horror, as Google insists, time and time again, that it’s got things under control. Spoiler alert: It doesn’t. The same company that boasts about its AI-driven ad infrastructure, multi-layered fraud detection, and meticulous brand safety standards is somehow also the same company where a single typo in a search ad can send a user straight into the arms of a scammer.

"You’d think they’d have this figured out by now," Gavin says, shaking his head. But bad actors are getting smarter, and Google, for all its supposed omnipotence, is always a few steps behind. The playbook is simple: scammers copy an existing brand, tweak a letter or two, and boom—an army of phishing links disguised as legitimate businesses floods Google Ads overnight. If that wasn’t bad enough, some of the best-known brands on the planet have had their own ads hijacked by malware, sending users not to their products, but to credential-stealing hellholes.

And yet, Google’s response always seems to be some variation of: We’re monitoring the situation and making improvements to our detection systems.

Translation? They’re as surprised as we are.

If Google’s ineffectiveness is a slow-motion car crash, then the state of DSPs is a high-speed multi-car pileup on black ice. Every few months, a shady new demand-side platform pops up in some Eastern European country, flashing cut-rate CPMs and promising better audience reach while quietly funneling money into fraudulent traffic schemes.

“Lithuania’s been a hotbed,” Gavin notes, not even remotely shocked. “Latvia, too. They pop up, flood the market with sketchy inventory, run a few ‘campaigns,’ make their money, and vanish.” These aren’t real businesses—they’re digital smash-and-grabs, cashing in on the fact that ad tech is still alarmingly easy to manipulate.

And then there are the state-sponsored hackers, who aren’t just looking for ad dollars—they’re looking for chaos.

Remember when Russian military forces were amassing on the Ukrainian border? While analysts were watching troop movements, Gavin’s team was watching something else: a massive surge in malware attacks, phishing campaigns, and hijacked ad placements. And the timing wasn’t a coincidence.

“We saw an explosion of malware right before the invasion,” Gavin says. “It was state-sponsored, no doubt. We had an army of threat actors, probably sanctioned by governments, sowing digital disarray right before the real war started.”

Some of these actors don’t even bother to hide their affiliations. Others operate on a loose ‘wink-and-nod’ agreement with authoritarian regimes—as long as they don’t attack domestic targets, they can run wild. But the minute one of them gets too greedy and accidentally scams a Russian citizen? That’s when the government suddenly steps in with a show of force.

It’s a dark, messy, and deeply unregulated part of the ad world—and it’s getting worse.

Here’s the thing—none of this has to be happening at the scale that it is.

If the industry actually invested in proactive threat detection instead of reactionary cleanup, if DSPs weren’t so desperate for revenue that they’ll take money from literally anyone, if Google wasn’t too big to care until the PR disaster lands in their lap, maybe, just maybe, we wouldn’t be dealing with an endless loop of ad fraud, brand hijacking, and consumer exploitation.

Because right now, the bad actors have figured something out that no one wants to admit:

It’s really, really easy to steal money in digital advertising.

And until the big players stop treating trust and safety as a checkbox instead of a full-scale battleground, this industry will continue to be one giant playground for fraudsters, hackers, and opportunistic criminals looking for their next score.

Alright, let’s take a deep breath and talk about the heart of the matter: trust. It’s the thing that’s been slowly eroding from the digital ecosystem over the past decade, piece by piece, like peeling wallpaper in a neglected mansion. And surprise, surprise, the big tech companies and shady ad ops are part of the problem.

The industry may talk about brand safety and consumer trust in between panel sessions, but let’s be real—trust is not a commodity you can just slap a logo on and call it a day. No, trust is earned by keeping things transparent and honest—and there’s no greater hypocrisy in this industry than brands claiming to care about trust while simultaneously running malware-laden ads on their pages.

Think about the many flavors of “bad ads”—some are malicious and some are just… bad, but they all fall under the same umbrella. Gavin’s team deals with everything from malvertising to ads that simply suck at being ads. Remember the time when a toddler-focused TV site accidentally served ads for condoms? Or that time when a beer ad appeared on a kid’s website, and nobody stopped to think, “Hmm, maybe this isn’t the best fit for the audience.” That’s when Gavin’s voice cracks a little, as he tries to figure out what exactly makes a “bad ad,” which is, shocker—subjective.

“One site doesn’t want to serve beer ads to kids, another has a toddler-focused TV show showing up with ads for condoms. I get it, maybe the parents were the target audience,” he said. “But the definition of a ‘bad ad’ changes depending on who you ask.”

The problem isn’t just bad targeting—it’s that every site, every platform, every publisher is dealing with a myriad of unwanted ads, often from third-party vendors who don’t care to check if their ad creative is appropriate. What’s the solution? Transparency.

The media industry has been running a tight ship of smoke and mirrors when it comes to ad tech. “Publishers can’t trust the tech partners sending them ads. Advertisers can’t trust the ad tech companies or the publishers. And consumers? They’re so done with all of us.”

So how do we fix it? Give publishers control. That’s the real punchline. Gavin’s company is putting the power back in the hands of the publishers, allowing them to see exactly who’s in the driver’s seat. “It’s about giving publishers transparency into every single partner on their pages, showing them the exact behavior of each piece of code, the way each vendor operates,” Gavin said. That’s the first step to rebuilding trust—letting everyone see exactly what’s going on behind the curtain.

Let’s talk about something hot, and not just because it’s trending—retail media. Every big player, from Amazon to Walmart to every other retailer who’s decided to dip their toes into the media waters, is betting that the future of advertising lies in the ability to sell directly to consumers through their own platforms.

But retail media’s “shiny new toy” effect is starting to wear off. Sure, the potential is there—if you can crack the code, you can offer hyper-targeted advertising on your own turf—but there are growing pains.

Gavin isn’t exactly taking a victory lap about retail media just yet. He admits that despite the hype, the sector is still dragging its feet, especially when it comes to standardization and measurement. Every player in the retail media space is struggling with the same problems: how to standardize incrementality measurement, how to make sure the ad experience doesn’t suck, and how to keep the balance between monetization and user experience.

At retail media conferences, Gavin has heard the same complaints over and over, and it’s becoming a bit of a broken record. Advertisers complain about lack of clarity in measurement, retailers are pushing for more control over inventory, and everyone’s confused about whether they should be chasing incrementality or just selling more crap.

Retail media sounds so exciting, but it’s still grappling with some basic problems. There are too many players in the field, and trying to buy across all these fragmented networks is like trying to make sense of a broken Rubik’s Cube. And the retailers? Well, they’re less worried about being in the media business than they are about protecting their core business—selling products. "If an ad experience risks hurting their sales or their customer experience, it’s dead on arrival," Gavin said, and he’s absolutely right.

The core issue here isn’t that the industry is trying to innovate—it’s that it’s trying to innovate while strangling itself with bloated processes, legacy tech, and a lack of genuine accountability. Trust doesn’t just magically happen when you slap a brand safety label on a banner ad; it’s about getting the fundamentals right first.

Publishers need to get smarter about where their money is coming from and who they’re letting onto their pages. Advertisers need to push harder for transparency and stop accepting the status quo of poorly measured results. And as for consumers? They’ve already been burned too many times, and unless the ad industry wakes up to the fact that users are the ones holding the power, they’ll keep voting with their thumbs—and their ad blockers.

If you’re wondering why Gavin Dunaway hasn’t packed up his digital sword and shield to move on to something less chaotic, like, say, a quiet life in the Swiss Alps, it’s because he’s not done yet. Gavin’s got a mission, and it’s not just about killing malvertising or keeping consumers safe from digital snakes—it’s about turning this dysfunctional ad ecosystem into something that doesn’t suck for everyone involved.

"Why do I keep pushing forward?" Gavin asks, almost with a laugh, before delivering the cold, hard truth: "Because it’s the digital media industry’s responsibility to evolve. It’s been years since the ad tech world started to become its own Frankenstein’s monster, but we still have time to put it back together."

Gavin’s leap into the world of trust and safety wasn’t some hip new side project—it was a calculated move. He’s spent years listening to ad tech’s biggest complaints about fraud, brand safety, and the constant battle against bad actors. But instead of just complaining about the problem, he’s looking for solutions—solutions that are as much about rebuilding trust as they are about making the industry run better.

“If we don’t start putting the consumer experience at the heart of this ecosystem, then what are we even doing?” Gavin said, leaning into his position as the guy who actually wants to change things rather than just adding more complexity. He knows that it’s all connected—if we get rid of the shady players, focus on making better ads, and actually provide some real value, then maybe, just maybe, this industry can get back on track.

In the ever-evolving landscape of retail media, Gavin sees both potential and pitfalls. While the space has exploded, the promise of personalized advertising at scale is still being tangled up by slow-moving legacy systems and the overabundance of competing networks. As Gavin points out, retailers have a unique opportunity to dominate this space—but they can’t screw it up. If they think it’s all about cramming as many ads as possible into consumer faces, they’ll miss the point entirely.

The real opportunity in retail media, Gavin believes, lies in its ability to put consumers in the driver’s seat. If advertisers and publishers get this right—by being honest, transparent, and respectful—they’ll gain consumer trust and yield better results. But that requires effort and collaboration, not just tossing a bunch of inventory into a programmatic blender and hoping something sticks.

And don't think that Gavin's optimism is some soft, feel-good nonsense. No, this is a practical approach to an industry that needs a wake-up call. As Gavin sees it, if retail media can get its act together and start producing genuine engagement, real-time personalization, and transparent measurement, it will force the entire industry to level up. And if they don’t? Well, the same people who messed up display ads will mess up retail media, too.

So, if Gavin had to sum up where he thinks the industry is headed, here’s the deal: We can either innovate, or we can sink into the same old swamp of scams and shady tactics. And while some parts of the industry seem set in their ways, Gavin’s optimism is still burning strong—because innovation is still possible.

"AI might save us, or it might not," Gavin muses, "but it’s not about whether AI is the magic bullet—it’s about the mindset. Right now, we have the opportunity to finally fix the trust issue, to make things safer, more transparent, and yes—more profitable." And let’s face it, in the world of digital advertising, a little profitability doesn’t hurt anyone—as long as it’s not at the expense of consumer experience or the overall integrity of the system.

For Gavin, it’s all about staying in the game and pushing for change. No matter how many scams he fights off, or how many vendors refuse to evolve, his goal is simple: he wants a future where consumers feel safe, brands feel good about where their money is going, and the entire ad ecosystem isn’t drowning in fraud.

It might sound utopian, but in the world of digital advertising, a little hope goes a long way. And Gavin? He’s not about to let the industry go down in flames without one last fight.

The Demand-Side Platform (DSP) market is in a period of rapid growth, but not without its challenges. With a projected market size of $92.12 billion by 2029, up from $20.77 billion in 2022, DSPs are becoming a cornerstone of programmatic advertising. Yet, as this market expands, it faces increasing scrutiny from fraud, security concerns, and regulatory gaps. Here's a look at the numbers and the hurdles shaping the industry.

🔍 Gavin's Take
Retail Media Networks (RMNs) are the hottest thing since sliced bread—expected to hit $166 billion by 2026. But don't start popping champagne just yet. The potential is huge, but so are the obstacles. Legacy systems, oversaturated markets, and a sea of competing networks? Yeah, that’ll make scaling personalized ads a real headache.

Retailers have a massive advantage. First-party data? ✅ Direct access to consumers? ✅ This gives them the upper hand to run hyper-targeted ads that actually convert. But—yes, there’s a “but” coming—they can’t go full-on ad bombardment mode. Consumers aren’t here for that.

Gavin’s no-nonsense rulebook for retail media success:

Retail media’s success could push the entire industry to level up. If retailers nail it, expect:

But let’s not get too dreamy. The landscape isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. Here’s the reality check:

To make retail media more than just a buzzword, the industry needs to:

Retail media is the future, but only if we don’t mess it up like the last round of display ads. Get it right, and we could see a revolution in advertising. Get it wrong, and we’re just creating another marketing dumpster fire. No pressure. 💥