When will ad tech measurement not be a mess of fraud?

I think the wildest thing about ad tech work is the industry talks a ton about transparency and accuracy and report-ability and then the bedrock of all of that is a bunch of blackbox vendors working on 20 year old tech with no proof anything works and every incentive to lie.

Yes a lot of money flows through the system and measuring stuff is incredibly important on deciding who gets paid but measurement vendors are fundamentally just saying 'trust us' and everyone basically does despite annual reports saying they're fking up.

I know I'm just repeating myself but every time this discussion comes up in some new context I hear about how important this is & how no one wants to stop using the shitty, broken, provably inaccurate system & would rather basically burn their money in tribute to measurement gods.

It's already broken. It's already proven to be broken. None of the metrics systems really work for what you are trying to do; and none of the organizations that run accreditation are trustworthy b/c their process is shit; so why not get behind trying to do something different?

The amount of money that goes into ad tech should be every reason why change is needed. If you are an ad buyer at a major brand you've already seen more than one company prove that basically every digital ad buy is pissing in the wind no matter how many numbers you have to check.

There are provably effective ways to do things differently. Not just alternative measurement in PATCG/WG, but partnering directly with supply, shortening the supply chain, throwing out the 10 vendors in every creative which give you different numbers, none of which are right!

I have this exact rant every few years and nothing changes but like... surely at some point some leadership on the buy side will wake up right? Like CAPI from Meta proves you can take up methods that trust supply and billions of spend goes in. Why not other supply?

Like if you can trust one of the most hated companies in the world to handle your conversion measurement and optimization, why not legit publishers and agents that are specifically there to serve them instead of take bites at every place the bidstream runs through?

Almost every major analytics vendor is, at some level, paid by the supply and the demand on every transaction, and usually the middlemen too. Why would you trust a company whose profit model works best when they lie to everyone and has every capability to magic the numbers?

It's profoundly broken! Why have I been tweeting basically this thread since 2011 and the buyers have never put their money behind an alternative approach? I've been doing publisher side ad tech for over a decade & I'm still having the same problems with the same metrics vendors

https://x.com/i/status/1934679237128044681

When will the people with all the money step up and do something? Billions of dollars flow into this system daily from advertisers, from ad buyers of all stripes, and you'd think a few hundred million might be used to improve something but nope.

The open web isn't dying. The measurement vendors of the world are out to kill it so advertisers move spend to platforms it is even easier to lie about.

https://x.com/i/status/1934680615095554448

record scratch you might be asking yourself, how did I get here, well... video tape rewind sound this thread.

(Also, ad tech crew, I'm begging you, please move to bluesky and stop making me come to the rapidly degenerating site that is X)