State of Ads

Our industry connect programme

State of Ads™ is Blowtrumpet’s industry engagement programme: research, events and open collaboration on the problems advertising has not solved. Attention and mental health. Privacy. Fairness in how creators are paid. Whether any of it can be measured honestly.

It is a subsidiary product unit of Blowtrumpet Technologies.

[Go to State of Ads]

Why State of Ads

Advertising is one of the largest industries in the world and one of the least examined from the inside. Most of what it publishes about itself is marketing. The questions that matter get asked mostly by people outside it, with limited access to how any of it actually works.

We thought those questions were worth asking from inside, in the open, by people who operate the systems being discussed.

We are proud curators of the participation and we envision this journey to become an industry voice for next generation advertising.

What it brings together

Advertisers and agencies. Publishers and creators. Emerging and immersive media. The engineers and developers building the infrastructure underneath all of it. Researchers and academics who study what this industry does to the people on the receiving end. Students and early-career people about to enter it.

Those groups rarely sit in the same room. Most of the value of this programme comes from the fact that here they do.

The programmes

Research partnerships — empirical work on attention, wellbeing, privacy, fairness and measurement, run with external researchers who keep their authorship and their independence.

Panels and workshops — discussion-led sessions with people in the room who disagree with each other.

Industry roundtables — closed sessions, under the Chatham House Rule, on the problems nobody will discuss on a stage.

Creator sessions — the economics of creator advertising, with the creator’s interest treated as a first-order concern.

Early-career programme — the next generation of talent meeting this industry before it has finished forming their opinions for them.

Testing programmes — structured testing of tools and formats emerging from our research, clearly identified as such.

What we hold ourselves to

Research is published whatever it says. A study that does not support our commercial position gets published anyway.

It is not a sales channel. State of Ads takes no briefs, generates no leads and is not a route into a commercial conversation.

Ownership is stated on every output. The programme is funded by a company with a position in the market.

Privacy is where we have most to say

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: no tag, no pixel, no cookie, no device identifier, no viewer-side request of any kind. Targeting is contextual by counterparty: whose audience, never which individuals.

That is a structural property, not a policy setting, and it is unusual. The industry’s standard privacy position is that data is collected more carefully. Ours is that it is not collected.

State of Ads is where we argue that case in public, publish the evidence for and against it, and invite people to test whether it holds.

[Read the research] · [Collaborate with us]

State of Ads™ is a trade mark of Blowtrumpet Technologies.