The Ad Podcast

Jeff Hastedt is an entrepreneur, sales leader, and the Co-Founder and Managing Director (or affectionately, "Chief Pizza Officer") of Brkthru , a digital media and advertising firm founded in 2017. With a background in media and sales dating back to 2000, his early career spanned broadcast radio and mass media roles with organizations such as CBS , Clear Channel Outdoor , and Powerhitz,...

David Bridges is the Global CEO of the wellcom group Worldwide, a global creative production agency and subsidiary of INNOCEAN . An industry veteran who grew up in the advertising world—starting out in his father’s Manhattan photo retouching business as a kid—Bridges went on to found the creative digital production agency thelab in New York in 2002. Following Wellcom’s acquisition of thelab in 201...

Michael Paradiso is a veteran marketing executive, Fractional Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), and owner of a WSI World Digital Marketing agency based in the Greater New York Area. With over 30 years of strategic marketing leadership across Fortune 500 enterprises and high-growth technology brands, he specializes in translating high-level business goals into scalable growth engines. Through WSI Worl...

Jan Harling is an international media leader, marketing consultant, and the CEO of Virtus Asia Consulting. Originally from Germany, Harling has spent over 15 years living and leading marketing operations across major Asian markets, including Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Bangkok. His executive background bridges major international 4As agencies and client-side leadership, having prev...

Lorenzo De Plano , Co-Founder and CEO of ALP Supply Co . and Chief of Strategy at Turning Point Brands, Inc. Lorenzo is a relentless brand operator who previously spearheaded the global modernization of Zig-Zag before co-founding ALP—the direct-to-consumer nicotine pouch brand disrupting the alternative CPG market. From leveraging high-profile cultural partnerships with figures like Tucker Carlson...

Jeremy Barker , Founder and CEO of Murphy Door and host of the 90 Proof Wisdom podcast. Jeremy is a firefighter-turned-entrepreneur who took a simple concept—turning standard doorway space into hidden storage—and built Murphy Door into a national manufacturing giant featured on the Inc. 5000. From building a manufacturing supply chain in America to scaling a D2C physical product brand and hosting...

Paul Robinson - Chief Creative Officer and EU Partnerships - NEFT Vodka —the ultra-premium Austrian vodka brand packaged in its signature, unbreakable aluminum barrel. Paul is an LA-based mixed-media artist and brand visionary who leads NEFT’s creative identity and global partnerships. From designing NEFT's limited-edition barrels to launching major film and arts initiatives like the NEFTi Fil...

Discover how video artificial intelligence is transforming ad placement and brand safety across Connected TV (CTV) and the open web. In this episode, Raghu Kodige, Founder and CEO of Anoki Inc., breaks down the mechanics of scene-level contextual targeting, explaining how modern AI moves beyond blunt keyword proxies to analyze video frame-by-frame. The Evolution of CTV Context: Comparing legacy we...

The creator economy is plagued by administrative friction, unverified metrics, and an unregulated talent management landscape. In this episode, Kurt Stadelman, VP of Talent and Influencers at Pearpop, breaks down how modern agencies combine exclusive talent representation with enterprise-grade brand marketing campaigns. Discover how AI infrastructure is automating the business lifecycle for creato...

Julie Haleluk , Global Head of Growth for Amazon Shopping Video. Julie is a media and marketing executive who spent years managing media strategy at DIRECTV & AT&T before joining Amazon to scale one of the most exciting initiatives in e-commerce: shoppable video. Sitting right at the intersection of streaming, creator culture, and point-of-sale conversion, Julie leads the charge on how bra...

In this episode, Jason Keehn, CEO & Founder of Accompany Creative, breaks down how modern marketing leaders can unite authentic brand purpose with rigorous financial metrics to drive enterprise growth. Recorded live at Advertising Week in New York City, this conversation offers an unvarnished look at how to satisfy CFO scrutiny without losing cultural resonance. Measuring Purpose-Driven ROI: T...

Juan Andrés Elhazaz, Global CEO of SAMY—one of the world's premier social-first agency networks, spanning 15+ countries and backing major global accounts like Unilever Foods and Barilla. Juan Andrés spent nearly 14 years driving brand strategy at L'Oréal before joining SAMY, where he served as Global COO for seven years before stepping into the CEO chair. Combining deep corporate brand dis...

In this episode of The AD Podcast, host Dylan Conroy sits down with Ryan Laul, North American CEO of Talon, to explore the rapid evolution of out-of-home (OOH) media, digital billboard automation, and retail media integration. Discover how brands are bypassing legacy print lead times with programmatic platforms, why digital creators are using physical billboards for offline validation, and how phy...

Reaching modern consumers requires moving past passive video and into immersive, participatory gaming ecosystems. In this episode, Matt Edelman, CEO of Super League, breaks down how enterprise brands successfully navigate multi-platform advertising campaigns, leverage native ad tech, and build long-term connections with younger demographics. Cross-Platform Advertising : Executing custom builds, re...

The commercial landscape of women's professional sports is undergoing an unprecedented operational evolution. In this episode, Chantell Preston, Co-Founder and Owner of the San Francisco Signal, breaks down the strategic economics of launching a franchise within League One Volleyball (LOVB). Discover how private capital deployment, aligned equity structures, and player welfare standards are re...

Tom Telford, President of Digital Marketing and Chief Digital Officer at Clarity. Tom is a veteran agency leader who is actively reshaping how enterprise brands navigate the biggest shift in search and communications in two decades. Rather than treating PR, performance media, and SEO as separate agency silos, Tom connects earned authority directly with digital growth. Today, he’s leading the charg...

In this episode, Modop Co-Chief Creative Officer Steve O'Connell sits down at Advertising Week in New York City to unpack how modern agencies are successfully integrating technology expertise with world-class brand creative strategy. Discover how building custom AI layers fine-tuned to client data creates an unbeatable competitive advantage in client pitches compared to generic off-the-shelf s...

Enterprise marketing organizations waste millions of dollars annually by isolating performance budgets into rigid, channel-specific walled gardens. In this episode, Zach Dugow, Founder and CEO of The Cool Company, breaks down how merging search, social, and programmatic spend into a unified AI-managed pool unlocks performance gains between 30% and 75%. Key tactical themes covered in this episode i...

Andrew Graff is an agency leader, marketing innovator, and the long-standing Chief Executive Officer of Allen & Gerritsen (A&G), an independent, integrated agency with offices in Boston and Philadelphia. Under Graff’s leadership, A&G has expanded into a national powerhouse bringing together creative, media, PR, customer experience (CX), data, and technology to help brands become "...

In this episode of The Ad Podcast, host Dylan Conroy sits down with Pat Dunneback, Managing Director of Battery Agency’s Chicago office, live from Advertising Week in New York. They unpack the intricacies of managing a multi-year enterprise relationship with Land O'Lakes, examining how legacy brands navigate shifting agricultural economics and consumer expectations. The operational mechanics o...

In this episode of The AD Podcast, host Dylan Conroy sits down with Isabel Muñoz, CEO of Sounds Fun, live from Advertising Week in New York City. They unpack the critical intersection of emerging automation technology and authentic human connection, examining why brands that blindly replace human workers with AI face severe operational consequences. Key Episode Takeaways: Why superficial AI adopti...

Alexander Guerrero , Founder and CEO of Nextide Media —the modern adtech network unlocking livestreaming for enterprise brands. Alexander started NexTide after experiencing firsthand how painful and unpredictable creator-led live activations could be. Today, he’s built the technology stack that treats live streamers as modern publishers—combining non-disruptive ad overlays with LiveGuard™, a paten...

Enterprise brands navigating complex, high-consideration buyer journeys face a structural shift as consumer research moves toward LLM aggregation and agentic commerce. In this episode of The AD Podcast, Gregg Johnson, CEO of Invoca, joins host Dylan Conroy to break down why top-of-funnel web traffic is decreasing while transaction readiness and conversion rates are hitting new peaks. Learn how mar...

Modern digital publishers and enterprise marketers face unprecedented disruption as AI answer engines transform traditional organic search discovery. In this episode of The AD Podcast, host Dylan Conroy sits down with Bethany Epner, Head of Business Marketing at Fandom, to explore how platforms serving 300 million global uniques adapt to evolving search behaviors. The conversation examines why hig...

Enterprise marketing executives face severe operational bottlenecks when attempting to scale lifecycle personalization across fragmented customer touchpoints. In this episode of The AD Podcast, host Dylan Conroy sits down with George Khachatryan, Vice President of AI Decisioning at Braze, to unpack how enterprise organizations can transition from static segmentation rules to self-improving, autono...