Adtech’s Lemon Market: Why We Keep Buying Sour Fruit and Calling It Progress
Adtech is starting to feel like a carnival funhouse—flashy, disorienting, and filled with surprises that make you question your life choices. Take The Trade Desk’s (TTD) latest “innovation,” for example. They’ve slapped a shiny new name,
“Prism,” onto their old “Audience Excluder” feature and decided to charge a 10% fee for it. That’s on top of a system that already siphons 44% of ad budgets before advertisers even reach their intended audience. Imagine buying a car and finding out that nearly half of what you paid went to the dealership for “consultation fees.” And yet, we’re supposed to applaud this as progress.
Tom Triscari, always the cool-headed pragmatist, weighed in with his signature shrug:
“Lemon markets either implode because
buyers exit or thrive because they want lemons—as crazy as that might sound. Just because folks talk about wanting transparency ad infinitum (yawn) does not mean they actually want it. If they wanted it, they’d have it by now. In any case, adtech media money tends to flow to and from cognitive dissonance as the primary unit of trade.”
Tom, you charming handsome realist, I can’t argue with your logic—but I will absolutely argue with your conclusions. Your take is like watching a plane spiral into the ground and saying, “Well, planes crash sometimes.”
Yes,
they do, but maybe we should figure out why instead of admiring the wreckage.
Lemon Markets: Where the Buyers Know It’s Bad and Keep Buying
Tom’s lemon market analogy is spot-on: the adtech ecosystem is built on buyers knowingly—or unknowingly—purchasing subpar
products. They keep showing up for the sour fruit, even as the system rots around them. But here’s the twist: it’s not that they want lemons. It’s that lemons are the only thing on the menu, and the alternative—fixing the system—is a Herculean task that nobody wants to undertake.
Transparency? Sure, advertisers talk about it endlessly, but as Tom points out, if they really wanted it, they’d have demanded it by now. Instead, we get vague platitudes about “efficiency” and “value,” while most brands can’t even pinpoint where their money is going in the supply chain. Transparency in adtech is like a mythical creature—you hear about it, you hope it’s real, but deep down, you know it’s just a marketing fable.
And that’s not by accident. Adtech thrives on opacity because it allows everyone to take their cut without too many questions. SSPs, DSPs, and every other acronym in the chain are making bank off inefficiencies, all while claiming to “streamline” the process. It’s the equivalent of paying extra to have someone “organize” your wallet, only
to find out they’ve pocketed half your cash.
Cognitive Dissonance: The Real Currency of Adtech
Tom’s zinger about cognitive dissonance being the “primary unit of trade” in adtech deserves a standing ovation. This industry runs on contradictions so glaring,
they’d make a philosopher weep. Advertisers pay exorbitant fees to target audiences with laser precision, only to discover that half their impressions landed in places no human being would willingly visit. They nod along in meetings about “brand safety” while their ads play next to clickbait articles about alien conspiracies.
And let’s not forget the ultimate contradiction: the obsession with ROI in a system designed to obfuscate actual results. Advertisers are throwing money into a black box, then applauding when a report spits out metrics they can barely understand. It’s like celebrating a good grade on a test you didn’t take.
Why We Keep Asking
Questions
Tom, I get it. You’re treating this like a wildlife documentary: the predators prey, the scavengers scavenge, and the unsuspecting advertisers stumble into the watering hole, blissfully unaware of the crocodiles lurking beneath the surface. It’s nature, right?
The market doing what markets do. But here’s the thing—just because it’s the way things are doesn’t mean we should accept it.
I’m not content to sit on the sidelines, munching popcorn, and watch this chaotic ecosystem implode under its own weight. Asking questions isn’t whining—it’s how
we drag this industry kicking and screaming toward progress. Every inefficiency we shrug off isn’t just an inconvenience; it’s a black hole siphoning billions of dollars from brands and agencies that, frankly, should know better. This isn’t some quirky feature of the system we can laugh off—it’s the equivalent of building a house on quicksand and acting surprised when the foundation starts to sink.
And let’s not kid ourselves: this isn’t sustainable. Advertisers are already wincing every time they see their budgets sliced and diced by line items that would make an IRS auditor blush. At some point, they’re going to demand real accountability—or they’re going to walk. And when they do, this house of cards isn’t just going to wobble; it’s going to collapse in
spectacular fashion.
Here’s the brutal truth: advertisers aren’t bottomless ATM machines, and their patience isn’t infinite. The constant nickel-and-diming, the murky “tech fees,” and the dazzling but dubious metrics are wearing thin. You can only dress up inefficiency as innovation for
so long before people start asking, Why am I paying so much for so little?
Let’s not forget, there’s a growing wave of scrutiny. Regulators are circling. Brands are scrutinizing every penny. Even the average marketer is starting to ask uncomfortable questions about what they’re
really buying. And once the cracks in the system become too obvious to ignore, it won’t just be a minor correction—it’ll be a reckoning.
The Trade Desk: When Innovation Feels Like Extortion
Back to TTD and their shiny new fee.
Let’s not sugarcoat it—this isn’t innovation; it’s a blatant cash grab in a slick suit. Slapping a new name on an old feature and tacking on a 10% fee isn’t solving any real problem; it’s inventing one, then handing advertisers the bill for “fixing” it. It’s like selling someone a car with no tires and charging extra for the wheels.
But this isn’t just about The Trade Desk. This is about an entire industry that has quietly made this kind of behavior the rule, not the exception. It’s an ecosystem where inefficiency isn’t a bug—it’s a feature, designed to funnel as much money as possible into the hands of middlemen while advertisers foot the bill. And worse, we’ve allowed this dysfunction to masquerade as progress.
Let’s talk about those advertisers. They’re not just funding inefficiency—they’re subsidizing a system they didn’t break and can’t control. And they’re being told, time and time again, that this is just “the cost of doing business.” It’s not. It’s the cost of complacency. Because at some point, these cracks in the system are going
to get too big to ignore, no matter how much gloss and jargon the adtech world slaps on top.
When nearly half of your ad budget evaporates into “fees” and “tech stacks” before your campaign even reaches an audience, let’s not pretend that’s a business model. It’s a ticking time
bomb. One day, advertisers will wake up and realize they’re paying for a system that’s bleeding them dry. And when they do, the fallout won’t be subtle—it’ll be catastrophic.
The truth is, TTD and their ilk aren’t just milking inefficiencies; they’re betting the farm that
advertisers will keep playing along. But every house of cards has its limit. The higher the stack, the harder it falls—and when this one goes, it’s not just TTD that’s going to feel it. The entire adtech ecosystem is heading for a reckoning. And if the industry doesn’t course-correct soon, there won’t be much left to save.
Final Thoughts: Stop Settling for Lemons
Tom,
your pragmatism is refreshing, but I refuse to accept “it is what it is” as the final word. The adtech ecosystem is broken, and pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone. We don’t ask questions because we’re bored; we ask because we care about fixing this mess before it collapses under its own weight.
Adtech doesn’t have to be a lemon market. But to move forward, we need to stop settling for sour fruit and start demanding something better. Otherwise, the system will implode—and we’ll have nobody to blame but ourselves.
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