The Bakery Desk

The Bakery Desk, this is Jeff, may I help you?

Yeah, this is Bob Dobbs at Big-Ass Ad Agency. I need a dozen donuts for a client meeting tomorrow morning.

What kind would you like? Or would you prefer an assortment?

They’re for a client, I don’t care. Put 11 donuts in there. Or 10. Or rocks. Or turds, or poison mushrooms. The client will accept whatever.

Got it, one dozen fresh-baked artisanal donuts. See you tomorrow.

James Hercher covers Why Wall Street Turned Against The Trade Desk, which is basically the adtech version of that.

Once again, investors are increasingly dubious of independent, third-party ad tech, while their confidence grows in big, media-owning ad platforms.

The problem with The Trade Desk (TTD) is that they’re trying to run an honest business in a market where pretty much everyone is willing to accept crooked and shitty. Take a look back at the Adalytics research on how big brand ads end up in all kinds of God-awful places.

For example, Are ad tech vendors facilitating or monitoring ads on a website that hosts Child Sexual Abuse Material? The answer is yes, but not The Trade Desk. TTD was actually doing some adtech nerd stuff (SupplyChain Object Validation) that is freely available as open source and an existing industry best practice and that you have no good excuse to not do. And doing those fundamental checks got them to the point of not sponsoring CSAM. And see how far that got them with “Wall Street.”

Last year, in The Trade Desk’s Blue Ocean Moment: How The DSP Can Rewrite Ad Tech’s Rules, Danilo Tauro suggested,

Instead of chasing what competitors already own, TTD can own what they can’t: trust.

And trust does not seem to have been in demand.

Unfortunately, The Trade Desk is only one link in the chain that delivers an ad, so you can’t unblock just that one company and start seeing some legit subset of the ads. Google and others still have their sticky fingers on things. Is it safe to turn off your ad blocker? No. (I will update that if things change.)

Bonus links

Adtech company The Trade Desk lays off 15% of staff as it restructures into ‘smaller pods’ by Lara O’Reilly. The news comes on the heels of the company reporting disappointing quarterly performance last month. Revenue grew by just 3% year-on-year, and it missed Wall Street expectations on earnings.

LG TV flaws could let attackers listen in, even in standby mode by Pieter Arntz. (fwiw The Trade Desk is making a TV OS. Another attempt to differentiate with a clean contender in a dirty market?)

Anthropic Is Building a Huge Surveillance System to Spy on Anti-AI Activists and Predict Their Activities (look for the extra mentally healthy people and track them I guess?)

“This is the AI men actually use”: Meta ads pushed apps nudifying real teens by Ashley Belanger. More: Meta Failed to Catch Hundreds of AI Child Abuse Ads. Some Included Images of Real Kids

Instagram boss says users will be ‘overwhelmed’ with brand content in algorithm-free world by Josh Taylor. Instagram’s chief executive has said users will…spend less time on the app. (people already say they want to spend less time on Instagram, sounds like a win.) Related: How ‘hyperselection’ is making modern life efficient, pleasant – and boring by Jose Yong.

Open Letter: Civil society coalition urges EU to kill the cookie banner! (browsers can already do this—the place where regulators can help would be restricting dark patterns to rewrite a GPP string already overwritten by a browser or extension.)