Ad Serving Technology: Understand the marketing revelation that commercialized the Internet Paperback – January 4, 2014

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)!

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

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.

One of the few books that covers topic thoroughly, 4 thumbs up (with two feet counted)

The book provides an interesting but shallow overview of the industry. But the English is SO BAD and with so many mistakes that is difficult at times to follow the ideas. While the author might have experience in the tech side, it is obvious that never worked for an agency or as a marketer. The Marketer perspective is nothing but stereotypes of the profession.My recommendation to the author - get a real editor. While there might be value in the ideas presented, the language and presentation totally diminish it.Huge disappointment

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.

Great information for a complex subject.This appears to have been totally un-edited. Perhaps he's not a native speaker of English. He certainly is not a good writer.