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About BidStream
Most writing about advertising technology falls into one of two categories. There is the trade press, which reports what companies say about themselves. And there is the thought leadership content, which is what companies pay people to say about the industry on their behalf. Both are fine if you are looking for news, a headline, a quote to forward to a colleague.
But if you are trying to learn, to actually understand how this industry works, what breaks, who benefits, and why decisions get made the way they do, a press release repackaged as journalism will not get you there. The only format that does is the long-form, data-driven, deeply reported piece that follows the numbers wherever they lead, without a sponsor to protect or a narrative to sell. That is what BidStream is. Neutral. Unbiased. Honest about what the data says even when it is inconvenient for the people the data is about.
Now, a little about why I get to have opinions here.
I did not arrive at programmatic advertising through a marketing degree and a graduate scheme. I came through the back door, which in this case was a seven-year stint at NDS, the conditional access company that kept pay-TV platforms from being pirated and powered the broadcast infrastructure behind DirecTV in the United States, BSkyB in the United Kingdom, Canal Plus across Europe, and Tata Sky and Airtel Digital TV in India. My job was engineering. Embedded JVMs, browser engines squeezed onto set-top box hardware with almost no memory, the invisible plumbing that made interactive television run before anyone was calling it connected TV. It was unglamorous work that very few people understood, and it gave me a genuine understanding of how media gets from a broadcaster to a screen, and what sits in between.
That foundation matters because advertising does not exist in a vacuum. It sits on top of a content distribution system, and if you do not understand the distribution system, you will misread the advertising layer every time.
From NDS, a detour. I founded Patterbuzz, a digital magazine platform in India, and spent more than 3 years learning what it actually feels like to build something with your own capital and no corporate safety net underneath you. It is a different kind of education.
Then came Amagi, and the streaming era arriving in earnest, and the job of building an OTT ad platform from zero. Server-side ad insertion, which is the technology that stitches ads into a stream at the delivery layer rather than in the browser. The clients were Roku, Samsung, Xumo. A billion monthly ad requests by the time I left. For four years I sat on the supply side of the programmatic ecosystem, watching how publisher inventory gets packaged, how SSPs and DSPs negotiate at the technical layer, and precisely where revenue disappears between what a buyer bids and what a publisher collects.
Then The Trade Desk, and everything flipped. The demand side now. Global product strategy for retail media, working with Walmart, Target, and Kroger on how first-party data becomes addressable inventory at scale. Creatives. Identity. China & APAC. The same auction I had spent four years watching from the sell side, I was now running from the buy side. Very few people have sat in both seats. That full-cycle view is the lens through which I read every measurement claim, every supply chain diagram, and every press release about transparency in this industry.
Currently I am CPO at Moving Walls, a global digital out-of-home advertising platform, where the challenge is a familiar one wearing unfamiliar clothes. How do you build a real audience-based marketplace when the inventory is physical screens, the measurement is probabilistic, and half your buyers still think in gross rating points. The answer, it turns out, involves relitigating most of the arguments that programmatic display and CTV already had, just a decade later and with less infrastructure to inherit.
The writing here comes out of all of it. Not the conference-ready version, but the version where I pull the footnotes out of the measurement methodology documents and ask what the numbers are actually saying. I am interested in market structure, publisher economics, the gap between what closed ecosystems claim and what independent audits find, and the slow-moving ways that technology transitions redistribute power and money across the supply chain.
If you read something here and want to argue about it, good. Come find me.
LinkedIn — where I occasionally surface the less polite version of these thoughts in professional clothing.
X — where the polite clothing comes off entirely.
Colliding Neurons — my other publication, where I write about technology, product management, and startups outside the adtech world.
On the side, I build things. Careerplot is an AI-driven career planning platform. Penome is a collaboration tool for product managers. Both are works in progress, which is the only honest way to describe any software.
