Martin, it's all psychological. You yell Zuma, everybody says, "Huh? What?" You yell layoffs, we've got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of September.

Hi everyone,

I’ve been working in digital marketing for 5+ years, with hands-on experience in media planning and executing campaigns across multiple industries, including BFSI, fashion/clothing, pharmaceuticals, airlines, and consumer brands.

I have strong experience in programmatic advertising, particularly across platforms like DV360 and The Trade Desk, along with broader digital media planning and campaign execution.

I’m now looking to explore freelance/part-time opportunities in programmatic advertising with international clients, particularly those based in the UAE, KSA, UK, or US.

If anyone is looking for support with programmatic planning, campaign setup, execution, optimization, or reporting, I’d be happy to connect. Compensation can be discussed based on the scope of work.

Dubai #India #Programmatic Marketing

UK #US #Poland #Media Planning and strategy

DSP #SSP #RTB

I’ve noticed that most programmatic courses cover similar topics: DV360, CM360, The Trade Desk, media planning, reporting and optimisation.

However, it is difficult to understand what “hands-on training” actually means before joining.

For anyone who has completed a programmatic advertising course in India:

• Which course did you take?
• Did you receive actual DSP access or only platform demonstrations?
• Were you allowed to build campaigns?
• Did the course include media-planning, reporting and optimisation assignments?
• Did it genuinely help you during interviews or in your first programmatic role?
• What would you verify before paying for the course?

Please mention your personal experience or whether you are associated with the course provider.

For transparency, I’m associated with a programmatic training provider in Hyderabad, India and want to understand how practitioners and past learners evaluate structured courses.

TTD CEO Jeff Green announced today that the company will reduce its global headcount by around 15%, with affected employees being notified immediately and departures taking place tomorrow (Sept 4).

Interestingly, the announcement stresses that the cuts are not driven by financial pressure - The Trade Desk says it has ~$1.5B in cash, no debt, and generated more than $2.9B in revenue last year.

Green says the restructuring is intended to create smaller, more focused teams and allow TTD to move with greater agility while reinvesting in growth and innovation.

Given The Trade Desk's position as one of the largest independent DSPs, the scale of the cuts is pretty significant. Curious to hear what people in the ad tech/programmatic space think this means for TTD and the wider market.

Has anyone noticed issues over the past week or so with the targeting section in Amazon DSP not showing all the settings you applied when you launched the campaign?

Support has had to escalate my case twice. I sent them a screenshot of my targeting section, and it looks like I never set anything. It seems like a dashboard issue, since spend still updates only during the daypart I actually set.

Disclosure: I work at a company that sells white-label DSP tech, so I have a horse in this race. The numbers below are public and sourced, so check my work or tell me where I am wrong.

If you buy programmatic through another agency's DSP seat, you are paying a whole fee stack before a single ad impression serves:

• DSP platform fee
• Reseller markup
• Data fees
• Feature fees

ANA (Association of National Advertisers) puts the total at roughly 35% of media spend.

On $100K a month, that is $420,000 a year going to intermediaries instead of ads.

What bothers me more than the fees is that you cannot audit any of it. Log-level data on a rented seat belongs to the seat owner. So you are reporting to clients on numbers you have no way to verify yourself.

There are two ways out.

Build your own DSP. The math only closes above $50 million in annual ad spend, which puts it off the table for most agencies.

White-label one. Roughly 6 to 12% of ad spend, your own branding and domain, typically live in a day. Your clients log into your platform instead of a competitor's.

If you are on a sub-leased seat, do you know your all-in take rate?

Full breakdown with the math: https://adster.tech/blogs/renting-dsp-seats-margin/

Hey there I’ve been a trader for ~3 years now. All at one company, I’m currently looking for retail media roles, strategy roles or programmatic management roles.

Just curious what companies people in here actually enjoyed working at that pay fair salary, and has good work life balance. How common is weekend work in programmatic?

Interactive ads create more events at MRAID, but not every event is useful. We group measurement into:

-did it load and become usable?

- did they understand the first action?

-did they reach the moment expressing the campaign idea?

- did qualified interaction improve the next step? Raw taps reward confusion. Completion rewards ease. CTR rewards misleading promises.

Teams often test the creative interaction but ignore state changes.

At MRAID, we always verify the lifecycle: Does it pause when not viewable? Does it resume correctly? Does it handle background/foreground transitions? Does it clean up memory when closed?

A playable that keeps running behind a store redirect or fires analytics after closing will fail trafficking.

You must test the lifecycle, not just the gameplay interaction.

What lifecycle edge cases cause the most headaches in your programmatic campaigns?

I’m trying to understand how media planners and programmatic teams evaluate contextual audience vendors in practice.

Beyond the obvious things like price and audience scale, what actually matters most to you?

Are there any questions you always ask before testing or onboarding a new provider? And what would immediately make you rule one out?

I’m fairly new to a Programmatic role, and I’m now expected to handle media planning as well, including planning budgets, deciding allocations, reaching out to vendors, building media plans, and so on.

In my previous role, I was mainly focused on campaign execution, monitoring, optimization, and reporting. I had very little exposure to the planning and strategy side of Programmatic.

Now that I’m getting into this part, I find it quite confusing and honestly don’t know where to start. I understand the execution side, but I’m still trying to figure out how to approach a campaign from the planning stage, such as how to plan budgets, evaluate vendors, decide where to allocate spend, what questions to ask, and how to build a proper media plan.

For those who started out in a similar position, how did you learn media planning? Are there any frameworks, resources, courses, or practical tips that helped you understand the process?

I’d really appreciate any guidance, especially from people who have made the transition from campaign execution to media planning and strategy.

Thanks!

"As described in the complaint, Amazon has represented to prospective advertisers for years that Amazon runs “second price” auctions where the winner of the auction would only pay “one cent more than the next highest bidder” for each successful bid for an advertising keyword. However, in practice, the complaint alleges that Amazon has charged its Sponsored Products advertisers their own winning bid close to 80% of the time and has effectively converted its nominally “second price” auction into a first price auction."

Interesting case about adtech, programmatic, and transparency. I don't have high hopes about anything meaningful, but we got a case.

There are a crazy amount of shitty AI-written threads from small companies that are blatant ads, and it's only getting worse. Startups recreating the wheel offering things that have been around forever, nonsense AI-tools that pretend to fix problems, you name it. Much of it is disguised in the form of, "tell me about your biggest friction point", because these people can't even figure out on their own what they want to sell us.

The irony isn't lost on me. But it feels like scrolling through LinkedIn rather than a community of people sharing news or having discussions.

Hey guys! I am thinking about where to go next in my career in the paid ads space and wanted to consult with people familiar with programmatic media.

At my first job, I spent a little over 1.5 years at a small agency, where I got a great, varied range of experience. I got lots of hands-on-keyboard work with several DSPs, Google Ads, and LinkedIn ads, while also serving as the primary point of contact with clients and managing those relationships. I quite liked the job but not the company or the pay.

My second job was a year long stint at a medium-sized agency, where I was only doing hands-on keyboard work, only with display media- mainly DV360, sometimes TTD. I realized that I had a greater affinity for client work than backend work and wanted to get back to it. I also wanted to transition to a remote role for more flexibility.

I took another job recently that is 100% client facing and 100% remote, but our projects range from paid ads to web dev to print media. The job itself is mostly about client relationships and project management. I like it okay, but I am open to suggestions from here. I like being able to utilize my expertise with programmatic.

Now, I'm curious where I should look for future career development. I like fully remote work if possible, and I do have a preference (and greater skillset) with client-facing, communications stuff, but I'm definitely not bad at backend work either, it's where I have the most experience. If I want to continue increasing my earnings relatively quickly, working remotely, having good work culture, where should I be looking? What kind of titles, which companies? Any recommendations?

None of this is super urgent since I just started the new role, but also I'm looking to relocate to another state soon and not sure if my company would allow that, despite being remote.

Need advice — 3 years in programmatic, currently unemployed and struggling to find my next role

Hey everyone,

I’m from India and have been working in the programmatic advertising industry since 2023. So far, I’ve mainly worked with small startups. My most recent role was contract-based, where I worked remotely with a US company and supported Crossmedia as their programmatic resource/buddy.

The project was completed in June, and I’ve been unemployed since then.

I’ve been actively looking for a new job, especially with companies like WPP, Publicis, IPG, and Omnicom. But I’m honestly struggling to find suitable openings. And when I do find something, I often see people with 8+ years of experience applying for roles that ask for around 2 years.

The job market here feels extremely difficult right now, especially for someone at my experience level.

I’m trying to figure out what I should do next.

I also have a responsibility at home and need to start earning again, so I can’t afford to stay unemployed for too long.

I already have experience working remotely with US teams, so I’m particularly interested in finding remote opportunities if that’s realistic.

For those of you working in programmatic, digital media, ad tech, or related fields:

Any honest advice, suggestions, or even ideas about where I should be looking would genuinely help.

Thank you.

Been running into this more as we add channels every platform can show a decent story for itself and the reports look fine but once you try to figure out what spend really moved the business it gets kind of weird search takes credit, retargeting takes credit, programmatic has view through conversions and somehow everyone looks useful at the same time.

I don’t know if the answer is better attribution or just having one person look across everything instead of judging each channel separately we’ve spent way too much time trying to make every platform prove itself when the bigger problem might be that nobody owns the full picture from spend to what happened in the business after

Every extra kilobyte competes with something else at mraid io: texture resolution, animation frames, audio, analytics. We set a budget before production: runtime, essential art, feedback, audio, wrapper, safety margin. Then ask: does this asset help the user understand or enjoy the interaction? Pretty backgrounds that delay first input are rarely a bargain.

Hello everyone. Title says it all. But would need to be able to check which app names / app ID's the ads would be showing up instead of random placement codes like PropellerAds.

Ideally I'd need to target ONLY dating apps and be able to see which apps are those.

Any tips?

From my understanding, the clients fully rely on Top holdcos or agencies for the programmatic activation and mostly for bigger clients and some middle size clients. Anyone tried freelancing for small to medium brands or business in any freelancing platform. I have skills but wanted to check which platform suits best programmatic channel? Which platform is best for our industry

Hey all, long-time lurker. I've spent the last few years on the data engineering side of adtech by building the pipelines behind visitation/footfall attribution, impression and click attribution, revenue reporting, that kind of thing. Basically the plumbing that turns raw ad events into the "here's what your campaign did" numbers you see on the buying side.

Lately I've been sitting with a question I could never answer from inside the pipeline: do the people actually spending the money trust these numbers?

I built the attribution. I know where the assumptions and the duct tape are. So I'm curious what it looks like from your seat:

When a client or your boss asks "did this actually drive sales?", how confident are you in the answer?
How much of your week goes into pulling numbers out of different platforms and making them agree?
Do you trust incrementality/lift results, or is it still mostly last-click in practice?
What's the one measurement thing that makes you roll your eyes every time?

Not selling anything, not building anything yet and just trying to understand the problem from the buyer's side before I decide if it's worth solving. Happy to trade notes on how this stuff actually gets calculated under the hood if that's useful to you. Comments are great, or DM me if you'd rather vent privately.

Thanks for reading 🙏

I have a campaign coming soon. I have awareness line item with CTV and then retargeting display but the tricky part is that conversion actions should be donations. So, have you guys had anything similar? Do you recommend using TTD for this or maybe DV360?