Strategy question
Explain the ad tech market - the key players, what drives customer stickiness, the revenue model, and where the profit pools are.
- Flipkart
- Strategy
- Hard
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What this question tests
Whether you can explain a market's structure clearly, covering players, stickiness drivers, revenue model, and where the money actually concentrates.
How to approach it
- Note the ambiguity in scope and confirm whether this means digital advertising broadly or a specific vertical like programmatic display.
- Name the key players by layer: advertisers, publishers, and the intermediaries, like ad exchanges, DSPs, and SSPs, connecting them.
- Explain the revenue model: advertisers pay per impression, click, or conversion, and intermediaries take a cut of that spend.
- Identify what drives stickiness: data and targeting accuracy, integration depth with an advertiser's existing stack, and measurement trust.
- Locate the profit pools: the intermediary layer, especially demand-side platforms with proprietary data, tends to capture outsized margin versus publishers.
- Note the trend affecting the whole market: privacy regulation and cookie deprecation are shifting value toward first-party data holders.
What a strong answer includes
- Structures the answer by layer, advertiser, intermediary, publisher, rather than a flat list of company names.
- Explains stickiness through data and integration depth, not just brand recognition.
- Correctly identifies intermediaries, particularly those with proprietary data, as where disproportionate profit concentrates.
- Connects the answer to a real current shift, privacy and cookie deprecation, shaping where value moves next.
Common mistakes
- Naming companies without explaining the revenue model or where profit actually concentrates.
- Treating the market as static and ignoring the privacy-driven shift already reshaping it.
Likely follow-up questions
- How is cookie deprecation changing where profit pools sit in this market?
- Which layer of this market do you think is most at risk of margin compression next?
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More questions from Flipkart
Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovery and strategy for AI products
- Chapter 9: Prove it paid off: outcomes, economics, and pricing
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop