Ari Paparo and Eric Franchi are joined by Erez Levin, a former Googler who focuses on media and inventory quality. They dig into what “quality” really means in programmatic advertising, why short-term outcomes can be misleading, and how incentive structures have pushed spend toward lower-value impressions.
Takeaways
- Quality is best understood through effectiveness, but most measurement overweights short-term signals.
- “Not all impressions are created equal.” quality varies by context, format, and goal.
- Video definition loopholes led to premium pricing for lower-attention formats and contributed to market confusion.
- MFA, SPO, and curation are connected symptoms of incentives that reward cheap scale and vanity metrics.
- Verification helps, but quality needs to be addressed across the full media workflow, including experimentation and MMM.
- Agentic buying could either improve quality controls or make it easier to optimize only to what’s measurable in the near term.
- Publisher traffic declines reinforce the difference between commoditized content and differentiated journalism or creator-led media.
Chapters
00:00 Welcome and introduction to media quality
01:29 Marketecture Live updates and announcements
04:18 Erez Levin on why advertising quality matters
06:00 Defining quality vs outcomes in digital advertising
08:30 Brand impact, long-term effectiveness, and mental availability
09:43 Lessons from Google AdX and DV360
10:58 Video misclassification, IAB definitions, and market fallout
14:03 Outstream video, pricing, and mobile gaming use cases
17:00 MFA, SPO, and the real causes of inventory quality problems
19:03 Tools, verification, and the role of measurement frameworks
20:30 Agentic buying, AI, and control over media quality
22:41 AI news: Google UCP, AdCP, and agentic commerce
30:13 Apple, Siri, and Google Gemini’s implications
34:16 Publisher traffic decline and the future of content
36:23 Agentic buying vs RTB and portfolio theory
42:34 AppleCart funding and influence-based advertising
45:04 Liftoff IPO filing and the mobile ad tech landscape
47:57 Google antitrust lawsuits update
49:03 Closing thoughts and wrap-up
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