Follow the incentives.
Programmatic’s waste, fraud and opacity persist because the supply chain is paid to tolerate them, not because the technology is missing.
22 pieces · 8 authored · related work since 2020
The argument
Early in my career, on the ad tech vendor side, I watched audiences get swapped or dropped to hit budgets without the client ever knowing. The performance metrics didn’t move, so nobody asked. That stuck with me. Fifteen years of audience-first buying trained a generation of marketers to chase cheap, hypertargeted impressions, and the people who benefited most were made-for-advertising sites and vendors whose incentives never matched their clients’.
You don’t fix that with another tool. You fix it with contracts and structure. At Rain, our SSP agreements prohibited resold media and MFA sites, required ads.txt compliance and restricted delivery to our inclusion list, and when a partner missed, we required make-goods. We broke tech, audience and platform fees out of working media. Look at curation markups, certification bodies losing ground or the FTC’s case against Amazon through the same lens and you see the same thing. Opacity isn’t a bug. It’s a business model.
The same goes for privacy. I’ve been saying for years that addressable advertising was a strategic mistake. An ecosystem built on broadcasting granular identity was always going to create exposure no one could control. The critics we waved off as zealots were right. In our industry, what people are paid to do beats what they say every time.
The full trail, oldest first
22 pieces- Jul 2020The Future of Ad Tech
Five companies building a sustainable, value-driven digital advertising future.
- Aug 2020The Digital Marketer’s Manifesto: Why Our Industry Must Embrace Disruption to Survive
Essay on why digital advertising has to embrace disruption, written with a contribution from Robert Webster.
- Oct 2023Fighting & Winning the Battle Against Made for Advertising Sites
Practical strategies for keeping programmatic budgets out of made-for-advertising sites.
- Feb 2024The Trade Desk is rolling out OpenPath to CTV
Quoted as the Associate Director of Digital Video at Rain the Growth Agency, providing media buyer perspectives on the performance-yielding benefits of OpenPath for Connected TV (CTV).
- Apr 2024Embracing the Untapped Potential of News in Digital Video
Picking up a Trade Desk Forward ’24 discussion on quality journalism: how embracing news in digital video opens new opportunities for brands.
- Oct 2024Buyers Can Now Target High-Attention Inventory In The Trade Desk
Quoted on Rain’s beta test of Adelaide attention scoring in The Trade Desk, and how attention metrics help avoid MFA sites and outstream video.
- Oct 2024The evolution of the great ‘curation’ tussle in ad tech
Quoted on the questions buyers should ask of companies built specifically for curation.
- Nov 2024Are All Media Incentive Programs Bad?
Co-authored with Stasia Fulginiti: when vendor incentive programs bias agency decisions, and how they can be handled transparently and ethically.
- Nov 2024The Race To The Bottom Is Over. Advertisers Care About Quality Again
Data-Driven Thinking column on how “following the audience” let low-quality sites thrive, and the shift back toward quality.
- Mar 2025Marketers rethink cheap programmatic as ad waste mounts
Quoted on enforcing quality through SSP contracts that prohibit resold media and MFA sites, require ads.txt compliance and mandate make-goods.
- Mar 2025Advertisers put SSPs and curators under the microscope in sell-side push for ad tech fee transparency
Quoted discussing how his team separates tech, audience, and platform fees from working media spend to ensure dollars are actually making it to publishers.
- Aug 2025Critics Say The Trade Desk Is Forcing Kokai Adoption, But Apparently It’s Up To Agencies
Quoted as SVP of Digital at InterMedia Advertising: Kokai features like OpenPath are a net positive for advertisers, but the UI adds enough friction to outweigh them.
- Feb 2026The Cost of Keeping Quiet: Ad Fraud, Incentives & The Silence Protecting Billions
David joins Sarah Caputo to discuss the persistence of media waste and why ad fraud isn't just a technology problem, but an incentive problem.
- Mar 2026The Privacy ‘Zealots’ Were Right: Ad Tech’s Infrastructure Was Always A Risk
Data-Driven Thinking column arguing that government interest in digital ad infrastructure for surveillance is exactly what critics long warned about.
- Mar 2026Ad-tech is fascist tech
Cory Doctorow discusses David’s AdExchanger column “The Privacy ‘Zealots’ Were Right” at length.
- Apr 2026The Trade Desk Is Quietly Phasing Out Its Signature Periodic Table
Quoted on the buyer experience as The Trade Desk lets advertisers customize which Kokai tiles they see.
- May 2026Ep. 134: Why Programmatic Advertising Needs a Reset
Featured guest breaking down the realities of programmatic advertising, CTV transparency, and how lessons from traditional linear TV buying still apply to modern digital environments.
- Jun 2026TAG Loses Ground as P&G Drops Mandate and Google, Trade Desk Ditch Certifications
Quoted on certification and media quality as one of adland’s most influential accreditors shows signs of strain.
- Jul 2026Ad Tech Briefing: Corporate America finally buys into soccer as a mainstream sport; shadier elements of the ad industry are obliging
Quoted on CTV sports inventory: supply is not meeting demand, high-value inventory has always attracted bad actors, and CTV’s lack of transparency gives them room.
- Jul 2026Three Advertising Industry Myths The Market Has Already Debunked
Data-Driven Thinking column co-authored with Irina Dzyubinsky on three industry storylines the market has already disproven.
- Sep 2026The FTC’s Amazon Lawsuit Is Ad Tech’s History Of Opacity Repeating Itself
Quoted on transparency and industry accountability, as buy-side experts frame the case as another Big Tech platform exploiting the opacity built into programmatic auctions.
- Sep 2026We Measured Everything, Except Whether We Got What We Wanted: A Practical Playbook for Media Accountability
Session with Bayer’s Gary Guarnaccia on the gap between what the supply chain declares, what platforms report and what is delivered, and why verification, fraud detection, supply path reporting and inclusion lists are necessary but not enough.