Writing & Press

Bylines.

Notes from the field across 15 venues. Programmatic, privacy, contextual, AI, agentic advertising, GTM strategy, and the occasional detour into books and the meaning of work. 152 entries, oldest 2015.

Explore the Orrery → The interactive orbital map — every essay by topic, route, or full archive.
WRITING & PRESS The corpus — bylines across many publications since 2015, threaded by topic. BYLINES since 2015 Agentic advertising — protocols, agents, and the new transaction layer. Agentic Programmatic — the auction, the pipes, and where spend actually moves. Programmatic Contextual — relevance, attention, and signal after the cookie. Contextual Privacy — clean rooms, consent, and the post-identity stack. Privacy AI & AGI — what machine intelligence changes about the work. AI / AGI Notes from the field.
Most commercially useful reads Read this if you're considering scoping work. — show 7 essays — click an essay to read it; each is cross-linked to the advisory surface it most informs

Seven essays, each cross-linked to the advisory surface it most informs. About an hour total — the operator view in one pass, before the broader topic hubs below.

  1. 01
    Unlocking the US Market

    The state of US market entry for international AdTech / MarTech / data vendors — what stalls, what compounds.

    Used in Market Entry Audit
  2. 02
    How clean rooms will power the future of digital marketing in 2025?

    Clean rooms as a commercial operating motion, not a platform purchase. Reads against most "clean room strategy" decks.

    Used in Enterprise Data Collaboration
  3. 03
    The Missing Link in Ad Tech: How UCP & AdCP Are Finally Unifying the "Alphabet Soup"

    The map of agentic-advertising protocols and what changes when buyer + seller agents transact directly.

    Used in AdCP Signals Adaptor
  4. 04
    From Meridian to NNN: How Transformers Are Redefining Marketing Mix Modeling

    How transformer-based MMM changes what "measurement" actually buys post-cookie.

    Used in Attention playbook
  5. 05
    Relevance Realization: The Cognitive Science of Attention in the Age of AGI and Advertising

    The cognitive-science argument underneath EARO — why attention-only measurement doesn't survive the agentic transition.

    Used in EARO framework
  6. 06
    Stop reading about "The Agentic Future"...

    A short operator essay on what to actually do this quarter instead of reading another agentic-future think piece.

    Used in Advisory Retainer
  7. 07
    From #OpenToWork to #Hiring

    On hiring, role design, and how operating models break when commercial hires precede the system.

    Used in Org Design playbook
If a problem is live

Reading because one of these problems is live?

The writing explains the thesis. The scorecard routes the operating problem.

Start here 6 curated reading paths — show table — click a path to open the canonical first-read
  1. 01
    Agentic Advertising 19 essays →
    Protocols, agents, and the shift from rules to reasoning.
  2. 02
    AI, Attention & EARO 8 essays →
    Cognitive science applied to media — relevance over reach.
  3. 03
    AdTech & Measurement 25 essays →
    Programmatic, MMM, attribution, embeddings, and the plumbing beneath.
  4. 04
    Contextual Intelligence 3 essays →
    Story, emotion, archetypes — and context agents in media planning.
  5. 05
    US Market & Operating 3 essays →
    GTM, hiring, communication — operator notes from the field.
  6. 06
    Reading & Personal 5 essays →
    Books, philosophy, life — what shapes how I think.
  7. 07
    Embeddings in Advertising Topic hub →
    Vectors, semantic similarity, and how embeddings reshape targeting, contextual, and agentic activation.

There's usually a working session behind every one of these.

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Topics across 152 bylines Show cloud Click any topic to filter ↓

2026

  • Jul
    No Fluff Advisory
    AMC Is Free Now — Sort Of: What Amazon's Clean-Room Democratization Actually Changes

    Amazon opened AMC to all sponsored-ads advertisers in Sept 2025. What's free, what still costs, what the 100-user threshold hides, and what expires Dec 2026.

  • Jul
    No Fluff Advisory
    CDP vs. Reverse ETL Is the Wrong Question

    People search 'CDP vs. reverse ETL' like it's a product bake-off. It's a category error — one is a suite, the other is a pipe. The real question is where the customer truth should live, and once you answer that, the comparison resolves itself. A decision table, three scenarios, and the trap on each side.

  • Jul
    No Fluff Advisory
    Fire the Dashboard, Hire the Agent

    A complete build recipe: GA4, Search Console, Claude, and GitHub wired into an editorial agent that reads a month of data, writes five ranked recommendations, grades its own previous advice, and pings you — on two cadences, for pennies. Five APIs, zero dashboards, one afternoon.

  • Jul
    No Fluff Advisory
    iROAS Is Not a Number, It's a Negotiation

    The same campaign, 54 defensible iROAS values, 83% flipping sign on methodology alone. Eight audit questions — and the failure mode each one catches.

  • Jul
    No Fluff Advisory
    Measurement for Agentic Commerce

    The agent doesn't click, doesn't see ads, and buys anyway. A breaks/survives/emerges triage of commerce measurement, and the instrumentation to build now.

  • Jul
    No Fluff Advisory
    Measurement, on the Browser's Terms

    The W3C Attribution API debate, read as a constitutional question. Mozilla's Martin Thomson says the quiet part precisely: the test of any privacy technology is not the information flows — it is who decides. The browser is bidding to become the counterparty that grants measurement its standing, and every operator concern in the spec follows from that one move.

  • Jul
    No Fluff Advisory
    Adtech and Martech Were Never Two Industries. They Were Two Copies of the Customer.

    Adtech versus martech was never a strategy — it was a custody arrangement: two industries built on two copies of one customer, one reaching through rented access, the other through owned relationships. The agentic CDP did not end the split; it exposed how little of it was strategic. One governed customer memory — read, written, and learned against by agents on both sides — is absorbing the operating boundary between paid and owned. Sequel to 'The Composable CDP: How Customer Data Stopped Moving.'

  • Jul
    No Fluff Advisory
    The Context Economy Has a Governance Problem

    An AdExchanger column just named the shift the whole industry is feeling: from an audience economy to a context economy. It is right, and it is the direction a season of this site's writing has been pointing. But 'understand the moment and act on it instantly' is one governance layer away from being a faster surveillance economy — and that layer is the whole ballgame.

  • Jul
    No Fluff Advisory
    The Great Repackaging

    Curation went from an SSP side product to the organizing fight of programmatic in under two years: every exchange has a named platform, the data specialists got absorbed by credit bureaus and holdcos, retail media and CTV fused into curated marketplaces, and now the agencies are building marketplaces of their own — Stagwell's, announced this week, assembles bespoke supply with AI agents fed by The Trade Desk's own quality data. This is the audience economy reorganizing itself on the supply side. The question is not whether the packaging adds value. It is who signs the package — and what happens to a shelf of pre-cut deals when buyers gain an agent that can assemble supply per brief.

  • Jul
    No Fluff Advisory
    The Prebid Sales Agent: AdCP's Sell Side Lands in the Wrapper

    AdCP's sell side is a deal machine beside the wrapper, not inside it — the architecture, the deal loop, five publisher decisions, the caveats nobody prints.

  • Jul
    No Fluff Advisory
    What Agents Can't Manufacture

    Friday's poll asked what becomes scarce in a market run by agents. The obvious answer is the last decade's winner — the biggest data. Wrong layer. Every cycle relocates scarcity rather than abolishing it, and an agentic market makes data, compute, and distribution all self-suppliable — leaving one asset a machine is structurally incapable of minting for itself: trust.

  • Jun
    DMEXCO
    The Future of Marketing Measurement: From Reports to Real-Time Feedback

    DMEXCO column. As agents make decisions in real time, measurement must shift from delayed reports to live, machine-readable feedback — a pricing signal, not a post-campaign scorecard.

  • Jun
    Signal & Noise
    Vectors Won't Save You From GDPR. They Just Move The Problem.

    The often-overlooked intersection of AI, data governance, privacy, and regulations (GDPR · CCPA). Why vector databases don't fix the compliance problem — they just relocate it.

  • Jun
    No Fluff Advisory
    Notes from the Implementer Seat

    What running a live AdCP signals agent teaches you that reading the spec never will.

  • Jun
    No Fluff Advisory
    Recommendation or Decision? The Veto That Doesn't Scale

    Friday's poll asked when an AI recommendation becomes an AI decision. Most said 'when humans stop reviewing.' Right answer, wrong tense — in agentic ad tech that line is already behind us, and the surviving signature isn't a decision-maker, it's a name for the post-mortem.

  • Jun
    No Fluff Advisory
    Signal Containerization: The Next Abstraction Layer for Agentic Advertising

    A framework for packaging buyer intent, semantic meaning, provenance, privacy policy, activation rules, and measurement logic into executable advertising signal containers.

  • Jun
    No Fluff Advisory
    The Composable CDP: How Customer Data Stopped Moving

    A framework for the warehouse-native generation of customer data: what 'no data egress' actually buys, why reverse ETL became the last mile, how multi-cloud clean rooms split the work, and where the lock-in really went.

  • Jun
    No Fluff Advisory
    The First AI-Native Fraud Isn't a Fake — It's Laundered Authority

    Friday's poll asked what the first truly AI-native fraud is. The crowd answered with familiar villains. The trap was the question: the new scarcity isn't authenticity, it's accountability.

  • Jun
    No Fluff Advisory
    The Packaging Problem

    AdTech platforms now own more capability than ever. The winners will be the ones that turn capability into one buyable story through commercial architecture.

  • May
    AdExchanger
    Why Agentic Measurement Will Reprice The Ad Market

    AdExchanger Data-Driven Thinking. How agent-mediated measurement collapses the gap between exposure and outcome.

  • Apr
    LinkedIn
    AdCP 3.0 Gave Linear TV Its Rails. Here’s the Other Half.

    What linear TV still needs from AdCP 3.0 — measurement standards, identity bridges, and a cross-screen ledger.

  • Mar
    AdExchanger
    Why Binary Audience Decisions Aren’t Fit For The Agentic Era

    AdExchanger Data-Driven Thinking. Why "audience yes/no" must yield to graded similarity scores in vector space.

  • Mar
    DMEXCO
    The Audience is Dead: Long Live the Vector

    DMEXCO column. The semantic shift from named segments to learned embeddings — and what it means for buyers.

  • Mar
    LinkedIn
    Agentic Advertising Protocols: A Unified Map of What’s Next

    Ad tech's standards run in silos. The Agentic Era makes that gap impossible to ignore — a map of how OpenRTB, AdCOM, OpenDirect, Deals API, and GPP each extend into the agentic stack, and the missing layer (UCP) that turns them into one coordinated system.

  • Mar
    LinkedIn
    Automate Lead Qualification in 90 Minutes....

    A reproducible Rube + Claude + Slack recipe. From inbox to scored lead in under 30 seconds.

  • Feb
    Whitepaper whitepaper
    Agentic Audiences Powered by the Universal Content Protocol (UCP)

    A Technical Whitepaper on Embeddings-Based Agent-to-Agent Advertising.

  • Feb
    LinkedIn
    AI Agents in Ads need a “Common Language”

    Vector alignment as practical infrastructure — projectors, capability discovery, and the handshake between buyer and seller agents.

  • Feb
    LinkedIn
    Marketecture Media — Hot Takes interview

    Conversation with Ari Paparo on agentic advertising, AdCP adoption, and what changes for sales teams.

  • Feb
    LinkedIn
    IAB ALM 2026: AI moved from “feature” to “infrastructure”

    Field notes from IAB ALM 2026 — AI has stopped being a checkbox and become the substrate of media operations.

  • Feb
    LinkedIn
    Stop reading about "The Agentic Future"...

    Start building it. A bi-monthly tutorial series on shipping real GTM agents in Rube, Claude, n8n.

  • Feb
    No Fluff Advisory
    The Missing Link in Ad Tech: How UCP & AdCP Are Finally Unifying the "Alphabet Soup"

    How UCP and AdCP retire ad-tech's "Tower of Babel" — Architect (intent) and Engineer (math) of the agentic stack.

  • Jan
    LinkedIn
    CES 2026: when AI stopped being a feature and became the platform

    CES 2026 read — generative interfaces, on-device intelligence, and the platform-level inevitability of AI.

2025

2024

2023

2022

  • Oct
    LinkedIn
    The Dream Job - This Way Please....

    How to evaluate the next role — Vision, Mission, Purpose, Culture, Team, Leadership, Challenges, Opportunities.

  • Jan
    LinkedIn
    The Future of Addressability = $100B

    When you run a quick keyword search of "addressability" on LinkedIn titles and get hundreds of roles, it is a clear indication that the time has come to write something provocative and radical as $100B+ on the subject. This narrative is...00B+ of post-cookie open-web spend. The four addressability paths and which ones survive 2023.00B+ of post-cookie open-web spend. The four addressability paths and which ones survive 2023.00B+ of post-cookie open-web spend. The four addressability paths and which ones survive 2023.

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