This week, adtech outdid itself — turning fraud, privacy theater, and corporate reinvention into a single tragicomedy. A $100 Raspberry Pi fooled the entire CTV supply chain, CleanTap’s spoofed smart TV serving as Exhibit A that “premium inventory” is often just smoke in 4K. Meanwhile, Rewarded Interest promised to pay users for surrendering privacy, Index Exchange decided it’s tired of being an SSP and started cosplaying a DSP, and PubMatic declared that latency, not integrity, was the problem all along. Even The Trade Desk joined the parade, slapping retail media into its empire while Amazon quietly ate Microsoft’s DSP business like a midweek snack.

Across the board, the message is the same: everyone’s reinventing themselves without fixing anything. The open web is shrinking, the walls are getting higher, and the industry’s best innovation remains explaining away its own mess. AI is now a sales term, not a solution; “consent” means “click here to sell your data,” and “trust” is a line item on the invoice. Call it progress, call it survival — just don’t call it transparency.

CleanTap, a curation startup with a soldering iron and a death wish for programmatic bullshit, just blew a hole in the connected TV façade. Using a fake HDMI port and off-the-shelf code, they turned a Raspberry Pi into a pretend smart TV — and ad platforms fell for it. Hard. Every single spoofed impression? Accepted. Bidded on. Delivered. Real money. Fake screen.

Verification vendors flagged it. The ads still ran. Nobody stopped it. Because apparently, “CTV fraud is hard” — unless you’re a startup with $100 and zero faith in the system. But sure, keep charging those premium CPMs. Let’s all pretend this is the future of TV while bots rack up views on your fridge.

Here comes another ad tech Frankenstein — this one from a former Google exec and a Microsoft security guy. Rewarded Interest wants you to install a Chrome extension that sets your privacy preferences for you… then quietly becomes an ad ID sold to the highest bidder. You get a cut — about enough to cover one Uber ride a year. Maybe.

They’re calling it win-win. It’s more like opt-in blackmail with a cashback program. The ad ID plugs directly into OpenRTB pipes like any other identity vendor, except now you’re a stakeholder in your own exploitation. It’s slick. It’s legal. And it’s everything that’s wrong with this industry, wrapped in a pitch deck and priced at 10%.

Index just launched its “Data Vendor Ecosystem,” which sounds like a dystopian zoo but is actually their version of a DSP-style data mart. Now curators can pick from every data broker under the sun — Experian, Audigent, Weather Channel, whatever — and build their own Frankenstein audiences, all from the comfort of the sell side.

And here’s the punchline: Index isn’t charging extra for access. Just trust them. No hidden fees, they swear. Because what better way to earn trust in ad tech than by promising not to skim off the top?

While every other publisher alliance died from inertia or infighting, Ozone somehow survived and even thrived — so now it’s coming for America. They’ve got CNN, WSJ, BBC, and a plan: stop begging Big Tech for scraps and start pooling power.

The pitch is simple. Publishers, together, can track audience behavior across sites and actually compete for budgets. Alone, they’re just herbivores waiting to get eaten. Ozone’s model is part ad network, part data co-op, part therapy group for news orgs who got disintermediated into irrelevance.

One exec put it best: “Either you grow teeth, or you gang up and bite back.” Damn right.

Podcasters are now using AI to edit episodes, remove filler words, and translate hosts into other languages — sometimes using their own cloned voice with a different accent. Totally not creepy at all.

The IAB says maybe — maybe — we should disclose that to listeners. But don’t worry, nobody’s enforcing it. For now, if a podcast suddenly sounds like your host just got back from Duolingo hell, that’s just the future calling. In your own voice. Without your consent.

PubMatic says its AI-fueled platform, built on Nvidia tech, is now five times faster and burns less energy. Great — because if there’s one thing the open internet needed, it was a more efficient way to serve ads nobody asked for.

Performance? Better. Revenue? Recovered. Transparency? Still MIA. But sure, let’s all pretend latency was the big problem and not the opaque fees, endless intermediaries, and fraud. Go off, PubMatic.

The Trade Desk is integrating with Koddi to let you buy retail media — like sponsored listings on Gopuff — directly through their platform. Full-funnel campaigns, unified analytics, and plenty of buzzwords. The goal? Turn every ad impression into a product shove before you even know you’re hungry.

It’s smart. It’s scalable. It’s also the next battleground for brand dollars, because apparently, everyone’s tired of funding Meta’s yacht payments. Retail media is the new frontier, and The Trade Desk wants to be your compass.

Paramount’s big idea? Guarantee the same ad slot in a show premiere across its first seven days. It’s like old-school TV, but with more control and a streaming sheen. Ad buyers love it. Viewers will hate it. But this is less about UX and more about price control.

Because if you can’t beat programmatic chaos, carve out a little premium fiefdom and make brands pay through the nose for it.

Microsoft is shuttering its Invest DSP and handing the keys to Amazon. That’s right — advertisers transitioning out of Microsoft’s ad stack are being pointed straight into Bezos’ belly.

Amazon’s DSP now touches Netflix, Spotify, and a whole lot of high-end inventory. Meanwhile, independent DSPs watch another door close. AI is the excuse, consolidation is the result. The open internet? It’s becoming a cul-de-sac.

Colossus SSP launched a program to help small publishers and content creators get up to speed on programmatic. The upside? Better monetization. The downside? Learning to love the same broken system that’s been exploiting big media for years.

But hey, someone’s got to teach them how to survive in this industry without getting eaten alive. Welcome to the jungle.

The ad industry loves to pretend that CTV fraud is hard. It’s not. It’s just expensive — for everyone except the fraudsters.

CleanTap, a scrappy curation startup armed with a soldering iron, some open-source code, and a death wish for programmatic nonsense, just humiliated an entire industry. With a $100 Raspberry Pi and a fake HDMI port, they tricked ad tech platforms into believing they were buying premium connected TV inventory.

Every single fake impression? Accepted. Bid on. Paid for. Real money went to a fake screen — a literal plastic box pretending to be a smart TV.

So much for “brand safety.”

Let’s be clear: CleanTap didn’t need AI, data clean rooms, or blockchain verification. They needed a Raspberry Pi, a YouTube tutorial, and basic Python. That’s it.

Their Frankenstein device spoofed the digital signals of a real smart TV — making DSPs and exchanges believe they were targeting your cozy living room. In reality, they were streaming ads into a ghost screen sitting on a lab bench.

Brands paid premium CPMs to reach a non-existent family watching “Ted Lasso” on a pretend Roku. The only thing connected here was the Ethernet cable.

And it worked — perfectly.

Here’s the part that should make every CMO choke on their artisanal cold brew: verification vendors actually caught it. They flagged the traffic as invalid.

And then?

Nothing happened.

The ads still ran. The bills still went out. The money still changed hands.

Detection without prevention is just theater — and in this case, it’s an off-Broadway tragedy.

Ad tech platforms looked at the red flashing warning lights and said, “Yeah, but the quarter’s almost over, so let’s just roll with it.”

It’s the equivalent of hearing the smoke alarm and deciding to finish your Zoom call before checking if your house is on fire.

Advertisers pay through the nose for Connected TV inventory. Why? Because they’ve been told it’s premium — high attention, low fraud, “real living rooms.”

Except CleanTap just proved you can fake that “premium” for $100 and an afternoon at Best Buy.

CTV fraud isn’t sophisticated. It’s opportunistic. The industry just refuses to fix it because the illusion of quality is more profitable than the truth of accountability.

Every player in the chain — from exchanges to verification vendors — benefits from volume, not integrity. The fraud is a feature, not a bug.

Let’s run the receipts:

Detection means nothing if the fraud still gets paid.

And here’s the kicker — this wasn’t some nation-state cyberattack. It was a curation startup with a soldering iron. If they can do it, so can anyone.

To be fair, Roku at least tries. According to Pixalate’s Q2 2025 data, Roku’s global invalid traffic (IVT) rate sits around 12%, compared to 39% for Samsung and 21% for Apple TV. That’s like bragging your tap water only has a little lead in it.

Even with watermarking tech and encrypted bid requests, device spoofing still leaks through. Non-CTV devices pretend to be Rokus just to score higher CPMs. Android phones masquerading as 65-inch TVs — because apparently, a fraudster’s imagination is limitless when money’s involved.

So yes, Roku’s better than Samsung. But “less fraudulent than the other guy” is hardly a marketing slogan.

For years, the industry’s been preaching that CTV is the future of TV. What CleanTap just proved is that the future of TV looks a lot like the past of banner ads — full of bots, spoofing, and plausible deniability.

If your “connected” strategy can be taken down by a $100 hobbyist board and some open-source code, maybe it’s not that connected.

So no, CTV fraud isn’t hard. What’s hard is admitting that the billion-dollar fraud detection apparatus built around it is a very expensive illusion.

Welcome to the future of television: real budgets, fake screens, and everyone pretending not to notice.

What you’re missing in ADOTAT+: the part where we stop calling it “streaming strategy” and start calling it what it is — corporate nostalgia with a buffering problem. The real story isn’t Paramount’s midlife crisis or Index’s “transparent” power grab — it’s how both represent an industry trapped between data and delusion. ADOTAT+ breaks down who’s actually winning the control game (spoiler: not the studios), why SSPs are quietly eating DSPs’ lunch, and how the sell side just turned into the new buy side without anyone noticing. You’ll either read it now — or be quoting someone who did.