There's an email. It comes from a platform you half-trust, about a system you barely understand, announcing the death of a thing you didn't know you were paying for. The subject line has a date in it. The date feels aggressive. And somewhere under the corporate throat-clearing sits the word "deprecate," which is industry Latin for "we are pulling the rug, please act surprised."

This spring's funeral was for pre-bid cache. Microsoft sent the email. April 30th was the date. And publishers did what publishers always do when a platform says jump: they panicked, opened a budget line, and started shopping for replacement technology they assumed they'd have to build, buy, or beg for. Nobody asked whether the corpse was actually dead. You don't interrogate the body at a funeral. It's rude

Enter Lotem Karmon, VP of Operations at Primis, who did the one thing this business pays no one to do. He looked.

He logged his own system. Every bidder, every auction, every response. And he found that one hundred percent of the creatives were already sitting right there in browser memory at auction close. The ad was already in the room. The cache was taking it on a road trip to an external server and back, for no reason, at a cost, with the occasional latency hiccup and outright failure thrown in as a treat.

The way Lotem explains it to his own kid is almost insulting. All the toys are in the basement, sure. But the toys are also already in the room. You don't have to go to the basement every single time. Somebody, years ago, built a beautiful expensive elevator to the basement, and the entire industry has been riding it ever since out of habit and fear and a vague sense that the elevator must be load-bearing.

So the apocalypse Microsoft announced? It was a server most publishers didn't need. The crisis was a chore they could simply stop doing. And when Primis turned the thing off, they didn't lose a dime. They gained about one percent, because the pointless round trip had been quietly leaking money the whole time, the way pointless things tend to.

That's the story. A scary email, a quarter-million-dollar habit, and a guy who picked up a flashlight while everyone else lit candles.

But the cache is just the crime scene. The real subject here is the question this entire industry is engineered never to ask out loud: how much of ad tech is necessary, and how much is just complexity wearing a lab coat so you'll feel too dumb to ask for an itemized invoice?

Lotem has theories. About why we feel safer when things are hard to explain. About the difference between the middlemen who grow the pie and the ones who just tax it. About whether Google is a utility or a toll booth. And about what happens to everyone whose entire job is execution, now that a tool like Claude Code can build almost anything you can imagine before your coffee gets cold.

That's where this gets good. That's also where the paywall lives.

Below: the complexity confession, the value-extractor problem, the names Lotem actually said out loud, and why "execution is free now" is either the most exciting sentence in ad tech or a layoff notice with excellent branding. Subscribers, keep reading.

Behind the paywall is where this story stops being about a cache and starts being about an industry.

Anyone can read the interview. ADOTAT+ subscribers got the forensic audit. We walk through why Prebid Cache existed in the first place, why Microsoft's shutdown of its free service triggered panic, and why that panic may have been aimed at a cost many publishers no longer needed to pay. Then we follow the money. ISBA's infamous "unknown delta." The ANA's estimate of billions wasted in programmatic. Jounce's framework for separating real supply partners from glorified toll booths. Even Lotem's deceptively simple line, "A clean, efficient system has nowhere for errors to hide," becomes a blueprint for understanding how complexity quietly turns into margin. Free readers got the conversation. ADOTAT+ members got the receipts, the data, and the uncomfortable question hanging over every vendor in adtech: if your company disappeared tomorrow, would anything break besides the invoice?