Methodology
How the analysis gets made
Trellis isn't an aggregator. We don't repackage headlines — we do the reading, then explain plainly what actually happened and what it means for you. Every issue is built by the same disciplined, repeatable pipeline. Here's exactly how it works.
How we analyze the news
Each day we pull from a wide set of trusted sources. Turning that firehose into one clear read takes four steps:
- Pull the day's stories. We collect from publisher feeds, trade press, company blogs, and primary sources, then extract the discrete stories inside each item — the actual claims, companies, and numbers — and set aside filler.
- Group what's really the same story. The same news breaks across a dozen outlets with a dozen headlines. We compare every story to every other by meaning — not by matching keywords — and mathematically cluster the ones describing the same event. That collapses ten versions of one announcement into a single thread, so you read the event once, with the full picture, instead of ten overlapping summaries.
- Weigh what matters. Each story thread is scored for importance to an ad-tech operator. Routine noise is demoted; the moves that change deal economics, market structure, or someone's roadmap rise to the top and earn deeper treatment.
- Explain it plainly. For the stories that matter most, we write a clear, factual summary in plain English: what happened, what changed, and what it means for you in practice — with the primary source named so you can check it yourself.
How we analyze podcasts
Industry podcasts are where a lot of the real signal lives — but they're long, and most of each episode is banter and ad reads. We listen so you don't have to.
Each episode is transcribed in full, then distilled through the same operator lens into a one-page brief with a fixed structure:
- TL;DR — two or three sentences capturing the whole episode's thrust, specific enough that you know whether it's worth your time.
- What was covered — the discrete topics, with named companies, people, and numbers. Ad reads and host chatter are dropped.
- Notable claims & predictions — the sharpest "if true, this matters" lines, attributed to who said them.
- Fact check — where a sharp claim doesn't hold up, we say so, with the accurate version. We keep a high bar: we only call something false when we're solidly confident, and when it's borderline we name the speaker's incentive and what they left out rather than allege a falsehood.
- Names mentioned — hits from our watchlist of companies, people, and topics worth tracking.
- Why it matters for operators — the connection back to ad-tech strategy, operations, and buying/selling behavior. If the impact is low, we say so rather than forcing relevance.
The result: the substance of a 90-minute conversation in the time it takes to drink your coffee.
Sources you can check
Every summary names the primary source it's built on and links to it, so you can always go read the original. We attribute claims to who made them and note when something is a company's own framing rather than an established fact.