I was in a similar place when I was first exposed to the advertising industries. One of the most effective ways I found in familiarizing myself with AdTech was by teaching it. So I ended up handling all of the onboarding of new product managers, engineers and designers in our company.

The lumascape is meant to scare folks not familiar with the industry away. At the basic core of advertising, it is simply about connecting advertisers with their target audience through content sites and various mediums. Everything else in between are middlemen with varying degrees of effectiveness.

Some of these players make a business out of optimizing an advertiser's campaign on metrics that matter to them (eCPM, CTR, CPE, etc). Others move the needle further by removing the human aspect (i.e. sales, campaign managers, etc) by connecting advertisers with publishers programmatically.

I am happy to go over this crowded and somewhat confusing advertising ecosystem if you have specific follow-up questions.