State of Ads™ is Blowtrumpet’s industry connect programme — research, events and open collaboration on the problems advertising has not solved. The engineering teams behind Vedoki have been part of it from the ground up, and that is not a decoration on the org chart. Several of this system’s hardest constraints exist because the research said they should.

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Where research becomes architecture

Privacy, decided at the foundation. The programme’s position is that the interesting question is not how carefully data about viewers is collected, but whether it needs to be collected at all. Our systems answer that structurally: no viewer personal data — not minimised, not anonymised, not collected. Creative is composited locally before broadcast, so there is no ad call, and therefore no tag, pixel, SDK, cookie, device identifier or viewer-side request anywhere in the path.

For an engineer that is the interesting part. It removes an entire class of compliance risk and an entire class of attack surface, and it removes the easy answers to several measurement problems, which then have to be solved properly. Most of the genuinely difficult work here comes from that one decision.

Measurement that has to mean something. Research into impact and wellbeing metrics only matters if the systems underneath can produce numbers that hold up. Verification before value moves is what makes that possible, and it is load-bearing rather than a reporting feature.

Instrumentation for research. Studies need data that is accurate, timely and ethically collected. Building that without undermining the privacy position is a real constraint problem, and it is one of the better interview conversations we have.

Why we take pride in it

This industry is notorious for taking attention by surveillance, and for gathering and using people’s data without any consent worth the name. It did not have to be built that way. It was built that way because it was easier, and because nobody with the ability to build the harder version was being asked to.

We were asked. We built the harder version. The programme is where we argue for it publicly, publish the evidence, and invite people to try to knock it down.

An engineer who wants to work on systems whose main constraint is doing the right thing properly will find this a reasonable place to do it.

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Blowtrumpet™ and State of Ads™ are trade marks of Blowtrumpet Technologies, with registration applied for. Vedoki is a product name of Blowtrumpet Technologies.