Inside Performance Advertising with Jason Fairchild delivers unfiltered insights, strategic perspective, and hard truths from inside the evolving world of adtech.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Performance and transparency are not mutually exclusive. In fact, the best performance partners show you how they work. They don’t hide behind black boxes.
How we got here: performance channels gatekept by opacity
Search and social advertising unlocked a new era of scale and precision, giving rise to the modern performance marketer. But as Google and Meta became the must-buy channels of the past two decades, they also became the least transparent.
Marketers could no longer see where their ads appeared, how sales were generated, or whether campaign data was even attributable to real incrementality. And they were forced to make decisions inside closed systems designed to protect platform economics, not marketer outcomes.
Now, as performance budgets migrate into channels like CTV, too many platforms are replicating the worst parts of the walled gardens.
Let’s talk about two examples.
MNTN: ROAS without visibility
MNTN functions like Performance Max or Advantage+ for CTV: a black-box system where marketers have limited control, no log-level transparency, and no visibility into what media is actually being delivered. You get a ROAS number — but not the information needed to validate it, improve it, or trust it.
Contrast that to tvScientific, where we’ve built our outcome optimization platform around a radically transparent, fully verifiable model. Every campaign is trackable at the log level, every placement is visible, and advertisers can override the algorithm if a placement doesn’t meet their standards.
Performance and transparency are not mutually exclusive.
AppLovin: Scale without scrutiny
AppLovin is another example. It’s a platform that’s impressed investors with its use of AI-powered optimization. But it remains a black box. Advertisers don’t get transparency into how the algorithm works, where ads run, or whether reported results are truly incremental.
That’s the problem. The absence of verification is itself a red flag, especially when billions in ad spend are on the line.
Advertisers shouldn’t have to choose between performance and control. But black boxes force that tradeoff.
Performance TV should deliver performance with proof
At tvScientific, we built a Performance TV platform where every campaign is transparent, measurable, and verifiable at the log level. We let advertisers see exactly where their ads ran, override placements they don’t want, and confirm every dollar drives real outcomes.
It’s not easy. It took six patents and over $50M in investment to get it right. But we believe “trust but verify” should be the standard — not the exception.
Marketers deserve performance they can see, learn from, and improve on. That’s how real growth happens.
Let’s leave the black boxes behind.
Inside Performance Advertising with Jason Fairchild delivers unfiltered insights, strategic perspective, and hard truths from inside the evolving world of adtech—cutting through the noise to focus on what really drives outcomes. Subscribe here.
