Last November, a former rising star inside Google's ad operations stood on stage at the Brand Safety Summit in New York City presenting what at first blush might have seemed like a lesson in Econ 101.

In fact, that's what his presentation was entitled, but as he pointed to the slide below, the audience of brand marketers, agency execs and ad tech reps could clearly see something was broken.

You can see Levin's entire deck here, but as you can see from the slide, Levin had developed quality scores delineating the qualitative value of various digital video advertising units -- both "in-stream" and "out-stream" -- indicating wildly different values.

The problem, he said, was that the programmatic video advertising supply chain -- including his former employer -- treats them all equally in terms of how they are priced to the demand-side of advertisers and agencies and DSPs buying them.

It was Levin's first public presentation of a case he has been making since 2023, when serving as Google's representative on an IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) committee updating guidelines for valuing the quality of programmatic video ad units set a new industry standard that has essentially been ignored by both the supply and demand sides -- so far.

Levin doesn't like to go into details about what happened next, but let's just say the new standard is the reason he no longer works at Google, but has been trying to get the message out -- mainly in posts on his LinkedIn account, in some...

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