Ad Serving Technology: Understand the marketing revelation that commercialized the Internet

This book is a useful high-level overview of the digital advertising/marketing space. It offers good insights into certain job functions within that ecosystem, most specifically media planners, media buyers, and ad traffickers. It also offers a good general overview of the core ad types and the core feature set offered by the most popular ad servers. To that end it has proven to be a good purchase for me overall, as I am a creative developer who was hoping to gain a broader understanding of the whole digital advertising ecosystem.Unfortunately I have 2 major gripes about the book: 1) It's completely useless on a technical level. Don't buy it expecting to gain anything but the most surface level of understanding for how any of the actual gears of the online ad world fit together. This is in no way a technically informative book. 2) This is without a doubt the most difficult book to read I have ever encountered, owing to an overwhelming abundance of grammatical errors, typos, incomplete sentences, and just plain bad writing across the board. Every single page of the book seems to have AT LEAST 2 blatant errors that should have been flagged by an editor. I'm not even a very good writer, and I felt that I found something that was just plain wrong, from a writing perspective, in almost every single paragraph. Overall the writing measures up to perhaps a 10th grade student's level, and I must admit that I was frequently left scratching my head wondering if the author learned English as a second language (and not well learned). It's that bad.Final word – as a high level overview of the digital ad space, I'd give it 4 stars. As a technical book, which its title implies it is, I give it 1. The writing, well, that deserves maybe .25. So overall I give it a generous 2 star rating. There is value in this book, as long as you can stomach the atrocious writing and editing and parse the value after trudging through that minefield.

I recently switched industries completely from more of a traditional IT role to a product management role at an ad tech company. I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I accepted the job, and how many fascinating things there would be to learn about advertising technology. I was shown this book by a new colleague and read through the whole thing within a couple of days of getting it.This book is THE introduction to the ad tech industry and contains the entire spectrum of information for getting yourself introduced to advertising technology where it stands today. From basic terms and explanations, all the way down to the details of reporting and gaps in the industry, this book will guide you through everything. The diagrams are excellent, as well, for giving an overall picture of what Greg is trying to convey. I've recommended this book to several new people at my company, as well, who are new to this industry and all have had positive things to say!One thing, as mentioned by another reviewer, there are some minor typos, but they are all across the book. Not distracting by any means, but just something to probably revise in a future edition. Otherwise, the content is amazing and a one of a kind resource. Excellent book!

There are, as many have noted, a GREAT NUMBER of typos and poorly constructed and edited sentences, and sometimes it's truly difficult to understand what the author is communicating. That said, Cristal very clearly knows his subject from a practitioner's perspective, and covers - almost always I found in just the right amount of detail - a wide ranging at times complicated subject. Having read the book I feel very well versed in not only ad server operations, but digital marketing in general. There aren't many such authoritative sources out there right now in this particular area, and this is the most authoritative source I found. So if you want or need to know about ad server operations and digital marketing, you should read this book (but some editing by the author would make that a little bit easier and more enjoyable)!

It's a great book for those starting on ad-tech. Provides a very thorough understanding of ad-tech.The downside is that it's too detailed and tactical (more suited for engineers and may be PMs) and it's hard for someone in sales / marketing to quickly get the gist of things. But worth the effort if you spend time and the best out there to get that content depth. There a some noticeable grammatical errors that can lead to confusions at times.

The book covers an exciting topic but it is structured and written in a very abstract way, if the reader is not already a domain expert. It would be much better if some cases or examples were included.

Many minor typos should be fixed and an index added, but there is not much else out there book wise for an intro to ad tech, so it's recommended for anyone looking for an intro to display ad ops as of 2013.

This book is a Gem. A lot of unfair ratings are here because of some typos. They typos have zero effect on learning the concepts. It is very detailed and explains all the players of this technology. A must read

The amount of typos in this book are literally insane, I could overlook it for the first few chapters but after that it becomes basically unreadable. The actual content is pretty helpful, if you can decipher what the author is actually trying to say. It's hard to perceive the author as professional or an expert in the field when he couldn't think to proofread his own book, though. Do not recommend.

I wish I had this book when I started learning. It covers pretty much everything you need to know if you work in/ with ad tech. Some updates may be required due to more recent industry changes, although most content is still relevant. Visuals are clear and simple, easy to understand. I highly recommend this book to anyone keen to get a broader picture of advertising ecosystem.

Good

Well done Gregory! This book has several positive points: completeness, accuracy, abundance of pictures and diagrams, technical details. Some parts are a bit redundant.

This is an encyclopedia of sorts on digital advertising & Ad Tech and recommended for anyone interested in this industry. Thanks for this great work Gregory!!

I bought this book to improve my understanding of ad-serving technology, and have found it extremely informative, detailed, descriptive, and one that has vastly benefited my understanding of ad-serving, dynamic creative, and rich media. It now sits pride of place on my desk using it to leverage my own work and improve my overall marketing knowledge.