Every buyer knows the tent-pole calendar by now. Super Bowl. March Madness. Oscars. Spring Travel. Mother’s Day. Father’s Day. The problem is not picking the moments, but more so the problem is that tent poles make the programmatic marketplace louder, not cleaner. When demand spikes, CPMs rise, supply floods in, and then it becomes easier for budgets to drift into low-value placements that look like scale on a report, but do not behave like quality. That is why the conversation is shifting...

If you spend time in programmatic, you’ve heard the same claims over and over: “We analyze millions of domains.” “Our AI scans millions of URLs in real time.” “We see everything across the open web and CTV.” “We have the largest contextual graph in the market.” It sounds impressive. It sure does! But here’s the problem: big numbers don’t automatically mean useful inventory. We recently spent time talking through a very real question: How much inventory actually belongs in a Content Vault? Not...

Every time identity weakens, the industry reaches for another shortcut. Today’s shortcut is the “predictive ID,” a stitched-together guess that magically claims to follow a user across the open web, apps, and CTV. And where do these IDs tend to “perform” best? On long-tail inventory. The cheap stuff. The recycled stuff. The supply no brand intentionally chooses. Predictive IDs thrive there because no one questions the math. But if the environment is garbage, the performance story is too....