Signal & Noise The Cost of Keeping Quiet: Ad Fraud, Incentives & The Silence Protecting Billions, with Sarah Caputo & David Nyurenberg
Feb 24, 2026
Sarah Caputo, media and marketing leader advising brands on attribution and transparency. David Nirenberg, CTV and performance marketer focused on media innovation. They unpack how misaligned incentives, opaque take rates, arbitrage and CTV supply issues keep billions flowing to waste. They discuss procurement pressures, vanity metrics, and practical moves brands can make to demand audits and clearer margins.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
Ecosystem Incentives Favor Flow Over Transparency
- The ad ecosystem structurally rewards keeping spend flowing because many intermediaries extract margins from CPMs.
- David Nirenberg explains DSPs, SSPs, ad servers and agencies all need scale to feed multiple mouths, creating disincentives to question quality.
Crawl Walk Run Your Programmatic Tests
- Use staged testing (crawl, walk, run) with outside-platform and in-platform experiments before committing large budgets.
- Sarah Caputo advises tests and control groups to measure directional effects and avoid locking into single partners prematurely.
Last Touch Metrics Create A Death Loop
- Relying solely on last-touch/direct-response metrics creates false expectations and can hollow out long-term brand value.
- David Nirenberg advocates multi-method measurement: last-touch for direction, MMMs and experiments for long-term effects.