Marketecture: Get Smart. Fast.

Episode 156: Does quality really matter? Erez Levin weighs in

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Ari Paparo and Eric Franchi are joined by Erez Levin, a former Googler who focuses on media and inventory quality. They dig into what “quality” really means in programmatic advertising, why short-term outcomes can be misleading, and how incentive structures have pushed spend toward lower-value impressions.


Takeaways

  • Quality is best understood through effectiveness, but most measurement overweights short-term signals. 
  • “Not all impressions are created equal.”  quality varies by context, format, and goal. 
  • Video definition loopholes led to premium pricing for lower-attention formats and contributed to market confusion. 
  • MFA, SPO, and curation are connected symptoms of incentives that reward cheap scale and vanity metrics. 
  • Verification helps, but quality needs to be addressed across the full media workflow, including experimentation and MMM. 
  • Agentic buying could either improve quality controls or make it easier to optimize only to what’s measurable in the near term. 
  • Publisher traffic declines reinforce the difference between commoditized content and differentiated journalism or creator-led media. 


    • Chapters

    00:00 Welcome and introduction to media quality

    01:29 Marketecture Live updates and announcements

    04:18 Erez Levin on why advertising quality matters

    06:00 Defining quality vs outcomes in digital advertising

    08:30 Brand impact, long-term effectiveness, and mental availability

    09:43 Lessons from Google AdX and DV360

    10:58 Video misclassification, IAB definitions, and market fallout

    14:03 Outstream video, pricing, and mobile gaming use cases

    17:00 MFA, SPO, and the real causes of inventory quality problems

    19:03 Tools, verification, and the role of measurement frameworks

    20:30 Agentic buying, AI, and control over media quality

    22:41 AI news: Google UCP, AdCP, and agentic commerce

    30:13 Apple, Siri, and Google Gemini’s implications

    34:16 Publisher traffic decline and the future of content

    36:23 Agentic buying vs RTB and portfolio theory

    42:34 AppleCart funding and influence-based advertising

    45:04 Liftoff IPO filing and the mobile ad tech landscape

    47:57 Google antitrust lawsuits update

    49:03 Closing thoughts and wrap-up


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    Marketecture: Get Smart. Fast.By Ari Paparo
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