I'm the author. Ad Age is obviously an ad industry publication—-probably the biggest one--but within that there are a diverse audiences it caters to. You can g

I'm the author. Ad Age is obviously an ad industry publication—-probably the biggest one--but within that there are a diverse audiences it caters to. You can google the term "lumascape" to see a ton of images showing just what a chaotic mess of companies and kinds of companies are involved in digital advertising, but there are typically four groups involved: the brands that are paying for all this marketing, the agencies who they hire to help them reach their customers, the publishers that produce the content, and the ad tech companies that provide the tools to get the ads from the brands and agencies to their potential customers as they spend time on publisher's sites. One criticism I've gotten on this piece is that it's not ad tech's fault, it's the publishers who use these tools. I think that's like saying it's not the drug dealers fault that his user OD'ed. A key point I was trying to make was not that the tools themselves are the problem, but that the environment they've emerged in is. All of those audiences I've described play a role in that environment.