Why we invest in State of Ads

I get asked, occasionally and politely, why a company at our stage funds a research and events programme that sells nothing.

The honest answer is that I do not think you can fix an industry you have only read about from the outside, and I do not think you can see an industry clearly from the inside if the only questions you are allowed to ask are the ones with a revenue line attached.

State of Ads is our industry connect programme. Research, events and open collaboration on the problems advertising has not solved — run by Blowtrumpet, funded by Blowtrumpet, and kept deliberately out of the commercial business.

What it brings together

Advertisers and agencies. Publishers and creators. Emerging and immersive media. The developer communities building the infrastructure underneath all of it.

Those four groups talk about each other constantly and to each other almost never. The agency complains about the platform. The creator complains about the agency. The engineer builds what the brief says and never meets anybody affected by it. Everyone is partly right and nobody has the whole picture.

State of Ads exists to put them in one room and see what survives the conversation.

The programmes, and what they are for

Research partnerships with academics and independent researchers — on attention, wellbeing, privacy, fairness and measurement. They keep their authorship, their independence and their conclusions. We do not get to approve findings, and we publish work that does not suit us.

Industry roundtables, closed and under the Chatham House Rule, because the useful version of “what is not working” is never said on a stage.

Panels and workshops, deliberately built with people in the room who disagree.

Creator sessions, on the economics of creator advertising, with the creator treated as the first-order interest rather than a stakeholder to be handled.

An early-career programme, because the next generation should meet this industry before it has finished forming their opinions for them.

Testing programmes for formats and tools coming out of the research, clearly labelled as what they are.

What it means depending on where you sit

If you are an advertiser or an agency, it is a room where you can say the measurement does not work without it turning into a pitch, and a place where the replacement is being built in the open.

If you are a publisher or a creator, it is the first serious attempt I have seen to study where the money actually goes between a budget and your bank account — and to treat burnout, rates and leverage as research questions rather than complaints.

If you work in emerging or immersive media, it is where the formats get tested before anyone sells them, including for the ways they can go wrong. A format people choose to enter can still be designed to be hard to leave, and somebody should be saying so.

If you are a developer, it is where the architectural arguments happen in public. Most of the constraints we build under came out of this programme rather than a product meeting.

If you are a researcher, it is access to real systems, real problems and a company that has agreed in writing not to interfere with your conclusions.

If you are a student, it is the easiest room in which to meet this industry honestly.

The impact we are actually aiming at

Three things, and I would rather state them plainly and be held to them.

A creator community that captures more of what it generates. Creators carry the internet’s attention and capture the smallest share of what it is worth. That is not a law of nature; it is a consequence of how the plumbing was built, and plumbing can be rebuilt.

Immersive media that earns its attention rather than taking it. Interactive, game-based and immersive formats are the most interesting thing happening in this industry and the easiest to abuse. If they are going to become the default, somebody needs to be studying what they do to people while there is still time to change the answer.

An ecosystem where a privacy-first, socially conscious advertiser is not making a sacrifice. Today, a brand that wants to advertise without surveilling anybody pays for that choice in reach and in measurement. That is the thing I most want to be false in ten years.

The part I am proudest of

Our systems process no viewer personal data. Not minimised, not anonymised — not collected. Creative is composited locally before broadcast, so there is no ad call at all: no tag, no pixel, no cookie, no device identifier, no viewer-side request. Targeting is contextual by counterparty — whose audience, never which individuals.

This industry is notorious for the opposite: attention taken by surveillance, data gathered and used without consent that anybody would recognise as consent. The reformed version of that position is usually *collect the same things, more carefully*. Ours is that we do not collect them.

I want to be precise, because precision is the whole point. We are a data fiduciary for the people we do business with — creators we pay, business contacts at advertisers — and that is governed by our privacy policy. The claim is no *viewer* personal data, and I will not let it drift into anything larger.

It was the harder way to build it, and it cost us the easy answers to several measurement problems. State of Ads is where we make the case for it publicly, publish the evidence, and invite the industry to try to knock it down.

If somebody does knock it down, we will publish that too.

*These are my own views — see [About](/about). State of Ads is a programme of Blowtrumpet Technologies.*