Tim Hwang’s 2020 book, “Subprime Attention Crisis,” argues targeted advertising is a bubble set to burst. He argues that the intricacies of programmatic and the perverse incentives of agencies and ad tech platforms to maintain a steady flow of ad dollars have created a persistent opacity in programmatic markets.  Therefore he says it’s only a matter of time before the bubble bursts and advertisers pick up their toys and go home. The result will be a collapse of programmatic ad spending and a partial collapse of the free internet.

Rick Webb digs into some less commonly discussed issues with Apple’s new tracking rules, including how they fail to provision for GDPR and how SKAdNetwork doesn’t let app marketers credit multiple sources for a conversion.

In this episode: The future of retargeting, what’s next for Google’s sandbox proposals, and Criteo’s big task of building a single sign-on mechanism that will support the Universal ID 2.0 framework.

Manny Puentes, CEO of Rebel AI, describes the journey and recent sale of his company. And he expresses skepticism that hashed email addresses can be a viable identifier for this industry going forward. “Think about all the places you go today that you’re putting your email into,” he says. “Think about all the offline data you can link up with email. People say that it’s hashed and encrypted, and I get it – but it’s just another ID and this ID originated with something that can be linked with offline data.”