Cookies, Blockchain, and Coconut Companions: Paul Bannister on Ad Tech’s Eternal Dumpster Fire

Table of Contents

• Cookies, Blockchain, and Coconut Companions: Paul Bannister on Ad Tech’s Eternal Dumpster Fire

  • Web3: Blockchain’s Skinny Jeans Moment

  • Ad Ecosystem: Like a Dating App, But Worse

  • Transparency: The Industry’s Flimsy Campaign Promi …

  • Publishers: The Goldilocks Dilemma

    • Key statistics comparing niche and general publishers

  • AI: Savior, Sidekick, or Overhyped Fancy Autocorre …

  • The Cookie Apocalypse: Are We Done Yet?

  • Metaverse: Still on Life Support?

  • Gen Z and the Death of the Web

  • Raptive’s Next Moves: Bigger Pies, Better Slices

  • The Cookie Apocalypse: Rebuilding the Internet fro …

    • The Alternatives to Third-Party Cookies:

      • Publishers Fight Back: 2025’s Playbook for Resilience and Growth

      • Technical Purpose of Sellers.json

      • Navigating the Adtech Jungle: Are Cookieless Solutions Like ID5 Predators or Prey?

      • By the Numbers

The internet isn’t a bold new frontier—it’s a midlife crisis wearing skinny jeans and trying to skateboard. Blockchain? Web3? The metaverse? All sound like the result of a Silicon Valley happy hour gone too far. Thankfully, Paul Bannister, Chief Strategy Officer at Raptive, stopped by The ADOTAT Show to help us separate the buzz from the substance.

Over the course of a hilarious and brutally honest conversation with Pesach Lattin, Bannister tackled everything from fraud and cookies to metaverse pipe dreams.

Web3: Blockchain’s Skinny Jeans Moment

Web3 was supposed to be the internet’s glow-up moment—decentralized, democratic, and free from Big Brother’s grasp. But instead of looking like the cool older sibling of the web, it stumbled out of Silicon Valley like your uncle at Thanksgiving, raving about blockchain and trying to make fetch happen. And Paul Bannister? He’s having none of it.

“Web3 is a weird brand,” Bannister said bluntly, cutting through the buzzword salad like a hot knife through… well, let’s call it tech bro tofu. “It has little to do with the web we all know—websites, browsing, and discovery. It’s a good marketing term, but beyond that? What’s been achieved? Nothing.”

Let that sink in. The internet’s supposed reinvention has delivered… drumroll, please… zilch. It’s like opening a beautifully wrapped gift box only to find it’s empty, except the box cost millions in venture capital funding.

And then there’s blockchain, the supposed savior of everything from advertising to avocado toast. Bannister wasn’t about to mince words here either. “The companies trying blockchain in advertising mostly flopped,” he explained, with the tone of someone who’s had to listen to one too many bad pitches. “It’s overhead solving problems that don’t exist.”

In ad tech terms, blockchain is the digital equivalent of a Rube Goldberg machine. Sure, it’s complex and mildly entertaining to watch, but at the end of the day, it takes way too much effort to perform a simple task, like connecting advertisers to publishers.

And we can’t forget the infamous Bored Apes—those overpriced, JPEG-fueled fever dreams that turned tech millionaires into art collectors overnight. Bannister summed it up perfectly: “Inflated egos and bank accounts. Web3 feels like the tech industry’s latest attempt to hype itself into irrelevance.”

It’s hard to disagree. Web3’s promise of decentralization and democratization has so far delivered little more than a handful of NFT scams, some mildly amusing memes, and enough cringe-worthy pitches to fill an entire season of Shark Tank. Instead of liberating the internet, Web3 feels like it’s trying to sell us back our own stuff—only this time, it’s stored on a blockchain and costs 300% more.

At the end of the day, Bannister’s take is refreshingly clear-eyed: Web3 is more sizzle than steak. It’s a flashy, overhyped idea that hasn’t proven its worth. And unless it starts delivering something tangible—something that actually solves a problem—it’s destined to fade into tech history as another overhyped fad that missed the mark.

Or, as Bannister might put it: “Nice branding. No substance.”

Ad Ecosystem: Like a Dating App, But Worse

If the ad ecosystem were a dating app, it’d be one of those sketchy ones your friends warn you about—red flags everywhere, sketchy promises, and the constant feeling that someone’s trying to catfish you. Paul Bannister didn’t sugarcoat it: “It’s a glorious dumpster fire,” he said, describing an industry where hidden fees, phantom impressions, and enough fraud to make Bernie Madoff jealous are the norm.

Imagine setting $1,000 on fire and watching $950 of it vanish into thin air. That’s essentially what happened back in 2016, when Insider ran a test buying $1,000 worth of its own inventory. The results? Just $50 made it back to the publisher. The other $950? Lost to fraud, misrepresentation, or buried somewhere in the labyrinthine layers of ad tech middlemen. “Things have improved since then,” Bannister acknowledged, but transparency remains elusive. “Most people don’t know where their ad dollars go.”

This is the kind of ecosystem where curation—the hot new buzzword of the moment—is both a blessing and a curse. “Curation’s a great example,” Bannister explained. “It’s not necessarily good for publishers, but buyers hold the money, and publishers are stuck at their mercy.” It’s like a bad blind date where one person has all the power and the other is left picking up the check.

The root of the problem lies in the complex, often opaque supply chain that has grown around programmatic advertising. Buyers think they’re paying for premium inventory, but in reality, their dollars often take a scenic route through a network of intermediaries, each skimming off their share. Publishers, meanwhile, are left wondering why their pockets are empty at the end of the day.

Despite the chaos, Bannister sees potential for reform. “If we can make the open internet more transparent, buyers might actually start trusting it again,” he said. But transparency isn’t just about knowing where your money goes—it’s about rebuilding an ecosystem where publishers and advertisers can thrive without getting nickel-and-dimed by every middleman along the way.