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

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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