Marco DeLuca

Marco joined PropellerAds in early 2018, two years after the format-arbitrage gold rush peaked. The job was meant to be junior account management — write campaign briefs, send them to the trafficker, follow up when conversions dropped. Within six months he was running the iGaming book for Italy, Spain, and the LATAM cluster, because the senior AMs kept rotating out to client-side and someone had to know what was actually happening with the traffic.

What he learned over the next five years isn't in any of the network's marketing copy. It's in the gap between what the panel shows you and what the campaign actually does — the geo where the CPMs look amazing because the conversion tracking is broken, the vertical that converts at 8% in week one and 0.4% by week four because the audience is burned, the publisher that quietly serves bot traffic that passes every fraud filter on the network's side because the fraud filters were written before that bot existed.

He left in October 2023 with no plan more elaborate than "stop being on the side of the network for a while". The writing started as personal notes, became a Substack he never published, and is now this site. He still consults. He still buys popunder traffic for friends' offers when they ask, mostly because it's a useful sanity check on what's actually working versus what the LinkedIn feed says is working.