As we head into 2026, we have begun explicitly referring to ourselves as a pubtech company, not an adtech company. Whilst this may seem like a subtle shift in semantics, what’s important is what it represents for our clients.

The phrase adtech is short for advertising technology. Trade House Media could easily fit this bill. We are technology that facilitates the execution of advertising on a website, app or CTV player. But adtech is a sweeping term that covers everything from the tools used by media agencies, the DSPs, the SSPs and hundreds of other companies that make up the often referenced LUMAscapes that show how fragmented and sprawling the adtech industry is.

What we do at Trade House Media has never sat well with me as simply adtech. Primarily because what we preach to clients is the opposite of this diagram. The diagram represents the result of virtually unlimited venture capital being thrown at solutions trying to find a problem; it represents complexity by design. It represents things that should really be features being spun out as entire companies.

Most importantly, it represents at an entire industry working for the enrichment of investors and advertisers, whilst ignoring the side of that diagram which actually creates the value: publishers.

Our soft refocus on the semantics of adtech vs pubtech is a representation of our firm belief that publishers are the creators and visionaries who built up the audiences that an entire market is trying to exploit. A market that we don’t want to fit in with. We are contracted by publishers and they are whose best interests we are consistently working for.