Adtech needs better plumbing and “We are the plumbers of Adtech”.
If you’ve spent any time in this industry, you’ve probably seen the pattern when something breaks, performance dips, and transparency gets murky. We add another platform, or dashboard, or “all-in-one” solution, promising to simplify everything.
Congratulations. You’ve just installed a jacuzzi on top of a leaking pipe.
Behind the scenes, adtech looks less like a sleek cloud ecosystem and more like the basement of a 100‑year‑old house. Pipes run in every direction, with some that were installed decades ago and others patched during a growth spurt. Others, no one is entirely sure what they do anymore, but turning them off feels risky.
How the Pipes Actually Work
At its core, adtech is plumbing.
Data flows from publishers to SSPs, bid requests move to DSPs, and decisions are made in milliseconds. Money flows back through exchanges, fees are taken at multiple junctions, and reporting tries (often unsuccessfully) to reconcile what actually happened.
Every handoff introduces friction:
- Latency that kills performance.
- Data loss that muddies measurement.
- Hidden fees that quietly drain working media.
Industry bodies like the IAB Tech Lab have spent years documenting these issues. They’re building standards like OpenRTB, ads.txt, sellers.json, and supply chain object frameworks to expose what’s happening inside the pipes.
Yet instead of fixing infrastructure, the industry often responds by building around it with more layers, wrappers, and interfaces to “simplify” complexity that never actually went away.
When Abstraction Becomes Obfuscation
Abstraction isn’t inherently bad. In fact, it’s necessary. But when abstraction replaces understanding, it becomes dangerous.
Research from the World Federation of Advertisers has repeatedly highlighted how supply chain opacity and excessive intermediaries contribute to media waste. The problem is a lack of visibility into how that technology connects.
Even defining a baseline for transparency has become difficult when no one agrees where the pipes start and end.
If you can’t trace the flow of data and dollars, optimization becomes guesswork.
AI Is Making Plumbing More Important
AI is radically accelerating how fast adtech platforms can be built. Code generation, automation, and rapid prototyping mean teams can spin up new systems in weeks instead of years.
But speed without architectural understanding creates fragile systems.
AI-driven automation is reshaping adtech stacks, but organizations that fail to understand underlying architecture risk compounding inefficiencies faster than ever.
In other words, AI can install pipes instantly, but it can’t tell you whether they’re connected correctly.
Fixing the Pipes Instead of Painting the Walls
This philosophy sits at the heart of ViSTARS, a company built around deep system literacy rather than surface-level tooling. We aim to make complexity legible, because progress isn’t made by pretending adtech is simple.
Progress comes from understanding:
- Where decisions are made.
- How data is transformed at each step.
- Where value leaks out of the system.
Education is more impactful than abstraction. Before installing another shiny layer on top of your stack, grab a wrench. The problem probably isn’t the bathroom itself, but the plumbing.