The new Signal & Noise episode with Eric Tilbury, “The Bid Request Has Receipts,” is now live. Listen (or watch): The Bid Request Has Receipts: Clean Supply, ID-Free Buying, and the Craft of Programmatic

Eric Tilbury is Vice President of Programmatic Ops & Solutions Engineering at Inuvo and an AdTech OG from the days when AdTech Twitter was a great place to learn something. An operator first, he runs campaigns, inspects supply paths, questions what the platforms are really doing, and calls it out when the numbers don’t add up. He always brings receipts.

Programmatic has spent years getting smarter about audiences, but many buyers still don’t fully know what they’re buying. Eric, Brett, and Rio go inside the machinery of modern programmatic to show why better technology doesn’t automatically mean better media buying.

Eric explains why an ID-free strategy can quietly become an ID’d one once DSP settings like frequency caps and conversion tracking kick in, and why clean supply goes well beyond brand safety, especially in CTV and mobile apps. He also makes the case that iOS is an overlooked opportunity and that platform ROAS and CPA are directional metrics, not the source of truth.

The three also dig into why DSP auto-optimization can steer budgets toward terrible inventory, how Inuvo’s IntentKey reads content to make decisions without building on a user profile, and whether AI agents will weaken or strengthen the DSP.

Tired of the politicized noise surrounding the data center debate? So are we, so we went to a man on the front lines. Dawson Kluesner manages both sides of it as Director of External Affairs at the Wyoming Association of Municipalities, and he joins Brett and Rio to cut through the fear mongering and misinformation.

Dawson says many of the water fears trace back to 20-year-old data. One new Wyoming project is expected to use about 600,000 gallons a year, roughly what five or six homes use. Cheyenne’s large load tariff makes the data center, not residential ratepayers, pay for the grid, and in a state where about two-thirds of tax revenue comes from energy and minerals, a small permanent workforce isn’t a dealbreaker.