Marketecture: Get Smart. Fast.
Marketecture: Get Smart. Fast.
Ari Paparo
Episode 156: Does quality really matter? Erez Levin weighs in
51 minutes Posted Jan 16, 2026 at 11:00 am.
Welcome and introduction to media quality
Marketecture Live updates and announcements
Erez Levin on why advertising quality matters
Defining quality vs outcomes in digital advertising
Brand impact, long-term effectiveness, and mental availability
Lessons from Google AdX and DV360
Video misclassification, IAB definitions, and market fallout
Outstream video, pricing, and mobile gaming use cases
MFA, SPO, and the real causes of inventory quality problems
Tools, verification, and the role of measurement frameworks
Agentic buying, AI, and control over media quality
AI news: Google UCP, AdCP, and agentic commerce
Apple, Siri, and Google Gemini’s implications
Publisher traffic decline and the future of content
Agentic buying vs RTB and portfolio theory
AppleCart funding and influence-based advertising
Liftoff IPO filing and the mobile ad tech landscape
Google antitrust lawsuits update
Closing thoughts and wrap-up
0:00
51:35
Download MP3
Show notes
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
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices