Question 1

What is programmatic advertising and real-time bidding?

Accepted Answer

**Programmatic advertising** is the automated buying and selling of ad inventory through software, replacing the negotiated deals that dominated media buying historically. **Real-time bidding (RTB)** is the auction mechanism most programmatic buying runs on.

**What happens when a page loads**, in roughly 100 milliseconds:

**The publisher's ad server** identifies an available ad slot and passes a request to a **supply-side platform (SSP)**.

**A bid request goes out** to many **demand-side platforms (DSPs)**, containing information about the slot, the page, and whatever is known about the user — location, device, interests, segment membership, and identifiers where available.

**Each DSP decides** whether the impression matches an advertiser's targeting and what it is worth, and returns a bid.

**The auction resolves** — historically second-price, now mostly first-price — and the winning ad is served.

All of this completes before the page finishes rendering.

**Why advertisers use it:** access to inventory across thousands of sites without individual negotiations; targeting individual impressions rather than whole placements; and real-time optimisation.

**Why publishers use it:** filling inventory that a direct sales team could not sell.

**The significant criticisms:**

**The supply chain takes a large share.** Multiple intermediaries each take a cut, and studies — notably by ISBA and PwC — have found a substantial proportion of advertiser spend not reaching publishers, with a portion of it entirely **unattributable**.

**Data exposure.** Bid requests broadcast user information to many bidders, most of whom do not win but receive the data anyway. This has been the subject of GDPR complaints.

**Brand safety and ad fraud** — ads appearing beside unsuitable content, and bots generating fraudulent impressions.

**Made-for-advertising sites** existing solely to harvest programmatic spend.

**Private marketplaces and programmatic direct** offer more controlled alternatives.

Question 2

What is connected TV advertising, and how is it different from linear TV?

Accepted Answer

Advertising delivered to internet-connected television screens — through smart TV apps, streaming services, set-top boxes and games consoles — bought like digital inventory rather than like broadcast

Question 3

What is podcast advertising, and how is it bought?

Accepted Answer

Advertising inside audio programming, and its distinctive property is that a large share of it is read by the host — which is why it performs differently from almost every other advertising format.

Question 4

What is ad fraud, and how much of it is there?

Accepted Answer

Any activity that generates payable advertising events — impressions, clicks, installs, conversions — without a genuine human being exposed to the advertisement. Estimates of its scale vary

Question 5

What is a retail media network, and why is every retailer building one?

Accepted Answer

A retailer selling advertising inventory against its own shopper data — on its website, in its app, in physical stores, and increasingly on other websites entirely. It has become the fastest-growing

Question 6

Why can a high click-through rate be a bad sign?

Accepted Answer

Click-through rate (CTR) is clicks divided by impressions. It measures how compelling something looked — not whether the click was worth having. A high CTR paired with poor downstream results usually

Question 7

What is brand lift measurement?

Accepted Answer

Measuring whether advertising changed what people think — awareness, recall, consideration, favourability — rather than what they immediately bought. It exists because a great deal of advertising

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