The hottest Ad Tech Substack posts right now

Most recommendation systems suck because the companies behind them aren’t actually trying to give genuinely useful suggestions, so feeds end up incoherent or just more of what you already did.
We already have the algorithms and the data to build much better recommendations — research like the Netflix Prize showed it’s doable — but firms rarely deploy those solutions at scale.
The root problem is incentives: recommendations are treated like ad space or a way to push owned products, and without competition or the right metrics platforms won’t prioritize what’s best for users.

Governments are ramping up regulation of social platforms and their recommendation engines. Some countries are even proposing bans for under-16s and opening investigations into AI tools.
Big tech ad businesses are still making record money, with Google, YouTube, Amazon Ads and others reporting big revenue gains. At the same time companies are pouring huge sums into AI and facing slower user growth or rising costs.
AI is rapidly reshaping advertising and product features, from AI-generated Super Bowl ads to agentic ad tools and chat assistants. That surge is creating new safety, legal and measurement headaches around deepfakes, moderation and publisher defenses.

AI is accelerating across platforms and industries, powering new models, agentic tools, and content features that are reshaping how content, ads, and products are made and delivered.
Platforms are putting more control in users' hands and experimenting with prompt-focused algorithms, letting people steer what shows up in Reels, playlists, and shared feeds.
The AI surge is raising big legal, safety, and quality problems — from copyright fights and low-quality AI 'slop' to harmful deepfakes and increasing regulator scrutiny, putting creators and platforms under pressure.

The digital ad industry may not be fully prepared for new privacy regulations in California.
Efforts such as clean rooms and first-party data may not be enough to comply with the law.
There is uncertainty whether current ad tech practices will be legal moving forward.

The media industry focused on the Streaming Wars, but there are also battles in CTV Ad Tech and TV OS.
Roku is quietly challenging The Trade Desk, while Google is making moves against Roku in the TV sector.
The podcast 'Next in Media' has been relaunched with new partnerships and sponsor MiQ.

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Byron Tau's book 'Means of Control' examines the evolution of data brokers aiding US counter-terrorism.
Tau highlights covert practices like using consumer apps for intelligence by US Special Operations Forces.
The book delves into how a few people in high-tech companies shape significant counter-terrorism programs.

A small SEO side hustle turned into a major ad-tech player after building its own header-bidding system, which sharply increased ad revenue and shifted the business from publisher to platform.
The company now powers thousands of independent publishers and prioritizes serving creators over legacy media, operating at scale with a mid-sized team.
The programmatic ad ecosystem is fragile and rapidly changing, with ‘made-for-advertising’ sites and Google’s AI-driven features able to shift traffic and wipe out publisher income quickly.