Mar 14, 2021 · 37m · another-podcast
Trying to understand Ad Tech
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this in-depth discussion, technology analysts Benedict Evans and Toni Cowan-Brown demystify the complex mechanics of digital advertising, examining how platform privacy shifts, programmatic targeting flaws, and macroeconomic realities reshape the modern internet ecosystem.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The hosts hold 99.9% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 7.4 Guest teaching 0.9 Guest disagreement 0.6 The hosts pushing back 1.0
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 21:40 Dismissing publisher complaints as self-deception
Evans forcefully dismisses journalist claims that Google and Facebook are stealing or republishing their content, labeling it deliberate self-deception.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 13:35 Challenging blanket targeted-advertising bansEvans firmly challenges the mainstream activist framing that targeted ads should be banned, showing the definition is flawed and misunderstands context versus tracking.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 8:36 Exposing political ad targeting data as garbageCowan-Brown leverages direct political campaign experience to explain how third-party behavioral datasets rely heavily on inaccurate assumptions rather than meaningful user intent.
The host holds their own ▶ 18:30 Dissecting macro ad spend migrationEvans demonstrates domain mastery by illustrating with concrete examples (car dealers, real estate, Booking.com) why the standard narrative of newspaper revenue moving to tech giants is fundamentally flawed.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The hosts as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The hosts pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mechanics of Online Targeting and Intermediary Layers | 8 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Benedict Evans lays out an extensive technical breakdown of search, display, first-party versus third-party cookies, and cites findings from a PwC study on ad tech intermediary take rates. The dialogue is collaborative and instructional. | |
| Data Quality Flaws and Advertising Measurement Challenges | 6 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Toni Cowan-Brown brings in election-campaign experience to highlight the flawed assumptions underlying audience data sets. Evans expands on how privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA interact with Safari and Chrome cookie blocking. | |
| Platform Privacy Mandates and Industry Disruption | 8 | 0 | 0 | 2 | Evans provides a deep dive into Apple's deprecation of IDFA, SKAdNetwork, and the antitrust versus privacy tensions between Apple and Google's duopoly. He pushes back against simplistic calls to simply ban targeted advertising. | |
| Debunking the Print Revenue Migration Myth | 8 | 1 | 1 | 2 | Evans debunks the common narrative that print newspaper revenues simply migrated directly to Facebook and Google, pointing to unspent classifieds and travel-agency spend shifting to OTAs. Cowan-Brown supports this with an Uber market-expansion parallel. | |
| Macro Advertising Trends and Converging Commercial Budgets | 7 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Evans cites historical data tracking US advertising as a share of GDP since 1950 and illustrates how retail rent, customer acquisition, and free returns have merged into a unified commercial expense category. | |
| Micro-Targeting Dynamics and Regulation in Political Advertising | 7 | 2 | 1 | 1 | The hosts discuss micro-targeting within elections, Facebook's ad library policies, and how blanket bans on paid political ads disproportionately favor populists with organic reach over lesser-known candidates. | |
| The Theological Distinction Between Device and Server Privacy | 8 | 1 | 1 | 1 | Evans dissects the theoretical and theological distinction between on-device profiling versus server-side data collection, comparing privacy debates to literary theology in Tristram Shandy. |
Statements from this episode (16)
Evans: The global ad market is $600B with half spent online
“Firstly, here is, like, the global advertising industry this year is probably 606 hundred Fifty billion dollars, and at least half of that is online, and that pays for a very large chunk of all the stuff that we use, including Google and Facebook and Twitter, …”
Evans: Google and Facebook hold at least two-thirds of online advertising
“So something like half of online advertising is search, which means, mostly means Google. And then like another maybe 10 or 20%, I'm picking these numbers from memory, is Facebook. So Google and Facebook, between them, have at least two-thirds of online advert…”
Evans: PwC found 15% of digital ad spend is completely untraceable
“Last year, PwC did a study on this where they said that of the money spent by the advertiser, the publisher only gets about half, because all of the rest goes to all of these brokerage players in the middle. And they actually only could only find, 15% of it, t…”
Evans: Ad targeting data is far less accurate than vendors claim
“It's abstract and separated and disaggregated, and there's an awful lot less accurate and effective than the people selling the stuff would like to say.”
Evans: Apple blocks and Google will soon eliminate third-party browser cookies
“Apple has been blocking third-party cookies entirely in Safari by default, and now Google has said from next year they're going to do that as well.”
Evans: Ad tech built an inverted pyramid of rent-seeking on cookies
“The last 25 years we've built up this sort of inverted pyramid of complexity, rent-seeking, arbitrage, Fraud, privacy, infringement, and god knows what else, on top of a cookie, and now that's kind of going to get turned off.”
Cowan-Brown: Most ad buyers do not know where their ads actually run
“Most of the people responsible for ad spending have actually no idea how their ads are actually running, where they're using, where they're running, sorry. And if they're being, if they're actually performing”
Evans: Apple's SKAdNetwork limits conversion attribution data compared to IDFA
“They're going to turn it off and replace it with something called SK Ad Network, which will really just tell you there was an install, but not tell you what or how much it resulted in, which is like massively less useful.”
Evans: Booking and Expedia spent $10B on Google search in 2019
“Booking.com and Expedia between them, I think, in 2019 paid between them about ten billion dollars in search advertising to Google.”
Evans: Lost print ad revenue mostly vanished or migrated elsewhere cheaply
“The money that was going to newspapers, a lot of it just isn't spent at all, or it's spent income not on Google and Facebook, but in other places at a 10th or a 100th of the price.”
Evans: US advertising as a share of GDP dropped 33% since 2000
“The chart that I've done of long-term US advertising since 1950, I did as a share of GDP, mainly as a way to adjust for inflation. But the interesting thing that it shows, it suggests, is that US advertising as a share of GDP has gone down by about a third sin…”
Evans: E-commerce converged retail rent, shipping, and advertising into one budget
“Retail, rent, advertising, marketing, same day returns, free shipping, free returns. These in the past were all separate budgets. Now they're all kind of the same thing.”
Evans: Banning paid political ads inherently favors populists and established celebrities
“If you say you can't buy reach, what you're actually saying is you can only have organic reach. So Trump has got however many followers he's had, so he's kind of fine. So, so when you say you can't do political advertising, but you can have organic reach, whic…”
Evans: Distinguishing on-device from server ad profiling is purely theological
“What exactly is the difference between Google knowing you're a woman with young children, and having that on a data center in Oregon, and Apple knowing, and your iPhone knowing that you're a woman with young children, and showing you an ad targeted at women wi…”
Evans: Google's post-cookie alternative assigns users to cohorts locally within browsers
“Google's proposal for replacement is that this happens in the browser, that the browser basically builds sort of
Algorithmically determined cohorts.
So there's like 10,015 thousand cohorts, and the browser works out which one of those you're in, but that neve…”