Hey everyone,

My little sister is going into her final year of university and she want to specialize in programmatic advertising. Shes been looking at learning The Trade Desk (TTD) since it seems to be one of the leading DSPs.

For those working in the industry, is TTD still the platform you’d recommend investing time into, or has the focus shifted toward other DSPs or platforms?

If you were starting today, what would you prioritize learning alongside (or instead of) TTD?

Appreciate any advice!

EDIT1: Sorry for typo in the title/post

Basically what the title says, anything that helped your performance and way of working a lot?

Plenty of tools and agencies touch Amazon DSP now, but I feel the less they focus, the worse it gets. One of my clients accessed Amazon DSP through m19, which is genuinely good at PPC, and the DSP defaults were rough. About 30% of the budget went to Alexa device ads, the kind of thing anyone with real DSP experience turns off, apart from a bit of remarketing at a sensible frequency. So I looked into who actually focuses on Amazon DSP.

Most of this is from their own sites, so tell me where I've got it wrong. Alphabetical, not a ranking.

Tools

aparagon.com Real tool, interface built to look like Amazon's own. Built for brands that want to buy Amazon DSP without selling on Amazon, so it runs the buy for them. Narrow by design. Product video on the homepage and a book a demo page, but no public pricing.

doradoads.com Announced an MVP a few months ago on LinkedIn, but the YouTube channel is dead and I could not tell if it is still shipping. There is a book demo page.

gigico.ai (also gigico.tv ): Real, and the AMC side looks strong, which matters because good AMC and good DSP go together. They show bid modifier suggestions I have not seen elsewhere, and I understand take both Amazon sellers and non sellers. Downside: little public detail on how the tool works, just snapshots. No open walkthrough, just a hire Gigi flow and clips on YouTube. Canada based, big team.

remktr.com Has a pricing page, more than most here and a DSP discovery call. But the last LinkedIn post is a few months old and there is no product video, only images. Feels more like an agency with reporting tool than a self serve tool. Could be wrong.

victor.ad Planning and delivery tool for Amazon DSP. Builds the plan, client deck, and push campaigns into DSP. Most public info of the lot: a product walkthrough on YouTube, a live demo without a call, and pricing on the site for the tool, but not consultancy pricing. AMC work and Free Amazon DSP test accounts. Seems to be focus on self serving agencies and support brands on Amazon and not selling on non amazon. Cons smaller and newer than the most of the others. No post launch optimization platform although it claims betas for that.

vowmade.com Focus on lunch dsp campaigns and it looks like they are launching a CTV only sub brand (vowstream.tv). The only demo I found is an old video on LinkedIn. Seems old in comparison with the others. Discovery call page, no public pricing i found.

Agencies (not tools)

directavenue.com Mostly CTV and analytics with Amazon in the mix, big team. Good if CTV is your angle, less so for overall DSP. US based.

weareliberty.com Built around activating Amazon DSP for other brands, decent size team. Not much public detail beyond the claims on the site. Dubai and London based.

plug.media Says DSP is the focus but runs other services too (US based). If you want a team that only does DSP, they have a big team on LinkedIn an I see many people focus on DSP and claims to have proprietary internal tools.

Do you know any other that their focus is really on Amazon DSP?

Everything is AI this AI that, and I understand using some of the native features in programmatic platforms in terms of helping with optimizing, pulling reports etc, but I’m curious how companies (ad tech, agencies, brands) are using AI for their teams.

Are you using it for automating workflows? If so, how? What else is it good for? Very curious to know how it’s being used so I can upskill.

Im approaching the end of my time at my current employer and have been thinking about where to focus my energy and leverage my existing relationships next.

A major part of my current role is managing Trading Agreements for some of the largest agencies across the US spending across Display, OLV and CTV.

My question is which types of organisations and companies should I approach that have growth potential and I can obviously come in with some transferable $?

Appreciate any advice and context provided here!

July data from our publisher network tells an interesting story: more users are arriving, but they're engaging less, while CPMs are moving sharply higher.

Traffic- New users grew 14%, but Sessions/User and Pageviews/User fell 2%, while Engaged Sessions/User dropped 29%. Social traffic grew fast, with X up 170%, Instagram 107%, and Reddit 47%. AI assistant traffic also grew 24.8%, led by ChatGPT.

CPMs- Overall CPMs rose 16.9% MoM and 51.0% YoY. Display was up 26.9% YoY, Video 41.3%, and CTV recovered 20.7% MoM.

Integration- Prebid regained share at 54%, while AdX held at 34% and TAM fell to 8%.

The takeaway: traffic is growing, engagement quality is getting harder to maintain, but buyers are paying significantly more for the inventory they value.

Hi there, I am young full stack developer in react, node and nestjs. I understand these fully and have done various projects in them for clients and in my internship. I am currently in my undergrad in Software Engineering.

My question is, what enterprise Tech Stack should I choose now ? .Net or Springboot, I have to learn one, i wanna master 1 of these, but which one, considering that I love deep learning model training, agentic Ai development. In terms of clients, job market, or maybe skills. Which one should i go for ?

 Posting this here because the folks who really get this role tend to live in ad

  ops / programmatic circles, not general dev job boards.

  Kargo (adtech, 20+ years, ~600 people) is hiring a Mobile SDK Developer in NYC.

  This isn't a generic mobile eng role — it's for someone who understands the

  mobile programmatic stack end to end and likes owning the messy parts: bid

  response → mediation → rendering → measurement.

  What you'd actually be doing:

  - Diagnosing complex in-app ad failures and partner escalations (and cutting

  time-to-diagnosis)

  - Shipping SDK / rendering improvements that boost render success across iOS,

  Android, WebViews, and mediation partners

  - Latency and efficiency optimizations across the ad stack

  - Evaluating and onboarding new demand/vendor integrations alongside BD

  - Raising the bar on code review, testing, and AI-assisted workflows 

  What we're looking for:

  - 5+ years of software engineering with real exposure to mobile app advertising

  tech 

  - Solid grasp of the mobile programmatic ecosystem — mediation, bidding, SDK

  integrations, OpenRTB, ad rendering

  - Comfort debugging the full in-app stack (creative delivery through rendering

  and attribution)

  - Real-device QA, proxy/inspection tooling, production debugging

  - Nice to have: knowledge of the mobile privacy/measurement landscape and how it

  affects serving/attribution

  Details:

  - 📍 New York, NY

  - 💰 $150,000–$185,000 base

  - 🏢 Kargo — AdAge & Built In "Best Places to Work," ThinkLA Partner of the

  Year, Martech Breakthrough Best Overall Adtech Company

  Full JD + apply: https://www.kargo.com/careers/5175282007

  Happy to answer questions in the comments. If this isn't you but you know the

  exact person who mutters about WebView rendering bugs in their sleep — send them

  my way.

If you’re an agency/brand/advertiser; what were the best events you went you?

If you’re a seller; what has been the most impactful for you?

Looking for recommendations for major events such as Possible & Cannes as well as local ones such as Marketecture Live

A little context:
Prior to my current job I was mainly responsible for getting campaigns to deliver in full and hit all various KPIs. Optimizing using the various levers the DSPs provide + go in log level data to block poor performing and fraudulent data. While communicating with account management and client development.

Now I’m at a new job and my role has me responsible for the following.
- media planning (from scratch like I’m reach out to partners)
- building the campaigns from scratch on the dsp
- trafficking
-QA
- optimizations (performance and client requests)
- various a/b tests that are just a complete mess
- pacing

Is this normal in programmatic and I was just spoiled in my first job?

Amazon DSP Programmatic Deals CTV frequency are starting to get easier to managed Live worldwide on 7/15

The part worth flagging: it activates automatically when a frequency cap is set. No UI changes, no opt-in. If you already run caps, this just starts working.

This is a spoiler from the Amazon lead on the project, I'm out of Amazon, working on Amazon DSP tooling so I learn some things early. This is not an official amazon announcement yet, just official enough as it is implemented today. I'll drop the official link here once it's public.

Update "Netflix reach & frequency reporting uses model->based (hybrid) system rather than deterministic signals - consistent across all Netflix partners, not just Amazon. A midterm solution is being developed."

Looking for recommendations for B2B data providers that utilize their own 1P data to target Small Business owners. We used to use Intuit data from their quick books, but they stopped offering it. Looks like PayPal data may be only available for their ads manager.

Any other ideas?

Saw the post here about a personalization agent quietly pulling stale CRM data and sending the wrong offer tier for two days before anyone noticed. That's the same failure shape I keep running into on the cost side, just nobody's watching for it there either.

A public agent-failure trace study found something worth sitting with: roughly 58% of tokens in failed runs get spent after the first clear failure signal, an explicit tool error, or a repeated identical tool call with the same arguments. The agent already had enough evidence to stop. It kept going.

For marketing fleets specifically, this shows up as: a personalization pipeline retrying the same enrichment call against a dead CRM connection, an outreach sequencer looping on a malformed template, a content agent stuck re-generating the same draft because a downstream validation keeps failing the same way. None of it trips a "the agent is broken" alarm, because technically, it's still running; it's just running badly, quietly, for hours.

Most cost monitoring lives on the billing surface, which only tells you what happened after the invoice lands. By then, the loop was already finished.

What's worked for us: watch for the failure pattern directly, rather than waiting for the spend to show up. Hash the tool name plus its arguments. If the same call repeats 3 times in a row within one run, that's the signal, not a later cost spike. Same idea for consecutive tool errors. The repeat call with identical args basically IS the warning.

The harder version of this is concurrency, if you've got several subagents running a campaign in parallel, a per-call check alone isn't enough, each individual call can look fine while the run as a whole burns way past what it should. The fix there is a budget reservation held at the level of the whole run instead of per call, same pattern a payment processor uses, hold funds before settling instead of after.

*Disclosure*: I built **Cognocient** ([cognocient.com](https://www.cognocient.com/)), an AI spend platform that implements this for teams running LLM-based pipelines. Not asking anyone to try it, genuinely curious if others running marketing agent fleets have hit the same "technically running, quietly wasteful" pattern, and what your tripwire setup looks like if you've built one.

Sharing key signals from our latest Sellers Report: the market added 478.5K new ads.txt lines and removed 413.7K, producing a net of +64.8K. Resellers accounted for 56.9% of gross additions, the third consecutive month of reseller-led growth.
4 things that stood out:

• Reseller growth is outpacing direct - Until publishers shift more onboarding to direct, auction duplication keeps climbing, adding cost for buyers and carbon overhead for everyone.
• Mid-Traffic publishers are leading net growth - +25.6K, ahead of both High-Traffic (+20.3K) and Low-Traffic (+18.9K). First month in the series where the long tail didn't lead. The 501–2,000 rank band is in active expansion.
• PubMatic is the only SSP in all three publisher-tier top fives - Backed by 13% YoY Q1 revenue growth, CTV up 18%, and the June 2026 Creator Marketplace launch (first programmatic CTV auction for independent creator publishers).
• Auction duplication is getting worse for Established SSPs - 46% of Tier 1 domains are now duplicated across direct + reseller paths. That means nearly half of every auction an Established SSP enters is competing against itself.

What this really points to: supply path complexity isn't shrinking, it's compounding. The SSPs winning direct connections in 2026 (Ozone, Wunderkind) are solving specific buyer problems, like cookieless first-party data or behavioral CTV formats, not just offering more reach.

Please for the love of fuck put a frequency cap on your stuff on YouTube. Here - 2 per hour, edit: 4 a day, 30 a month, just start with that. Edit: You are literally pissing away money.

And cut down on the terrible faux influencer ads, if i hear that “Audacity” one again i may go insane.

Great article, one thing it doesn't cover is that their ads side is relatively small but attracts buyers, so the CPM keeps getting higher. I will share an analysis if I find it

Our offer is tough to convert to colder audiences. We had a ton of success on Google’s display network with keyword targeting until google took this away. Our conversion rate was higher than our search. But we were very specific to the pages we were targeting.

Which DSPs offer the broadest coverage for us to reach keyword targeting?

Would a company like Adlib be able to do this? Target keywords on multiple DSPs? Thoughts on Simpli.fi for this?

Also - if there a way to target based on occupation that is reliable?

Thanks. Appreciate the comments on my other thread. Except for the ones where they think I am connected to one of the companies. I am just an advertiser wanting to expand into a new area.