Signal & Noise

This week, the future of digital advertising arrived. Following Boostr and Vox Media’s landmark announcement of one of the industry’s first public agentic media buys using AdCP, Signal & Noise sits down for an exclusive conversation with Patrick O’Leary , Founder & CEO of Boostr, to unpack exactly what happened—and why it matters. For months, we’ve argued that agentic trading wasn’t a dist...

Attribution was supposed to get easier. Instead, marketers today operate in a world of disappearing identifiers, privacy restrictions, walled gardens that increasingly measure themselves, and consumer journeys that unfold inside environments few advertisers can fully observe. So how much confidence should we still have in the numbers? In this episode of Signal & Noise , Brett House and Rio Lon...

Colorado has become ground zero in one of the most important debates shaping the future of technology: how do we regulate AI without slowing innovation? In this episode of Signal & Noise, Brett House and Rio Longacre sit down with Srinivas "Chinnu" Parinandi, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, to unpack the growing clash between government oversight...

What happens when you stop trying to sound "professional" and start sounding like yourself? In this Signal & Noise conversation, Executive Voice  Krish Raja  hosts his first solo episode with  Justin Kramm , Founder & Creative Director of Shit Show Creative. The result is one of our funniest—and most surprisingly insightful—conversations to date. Justin has spent more than two de...

Day 4 marks the final chapter of Signal & Noise’s first Cannes Lions together as a team—and what a way to close out an unforgettable week. Across four days at Hearst House, we recorded conversations with some of the brightest minds in advertising, media, identity, AI, cybersecurity, consulting, and marketing transformation. Cannes 2026 felt bigger, busier, and more energized than ever, with AI...

Day 3 at Cannes Lions 2026 may have been the hottest day in French history, but it also delivered some of the most thoughtful conversations of the week. Recorded live from Hearst House in Cannes, this Signal & Noise compilation brings together founders, CMOs, product leaders, publishers, identity experts, and healthcare innovators to discuss what’s actually changing in advertising, media, data...

With Rio Longacre, Krish Raja & Brett House Signal & Noise is on the ground at Cannes-Lions 2026. This year marks the first time Rio Longacre, Krish Raja, and Brett House have attended Cannes together as a team under the Signal & Noise banner. While each of us has been to Cannes in previous years, experiencing it together—and recording conversations live from Hearst House—made this yea...

For weeks, reports that Publicis was exploring a relationship with Hightouch following its acquisition of LiveRamp circulated as an industry scoop. Until now, no one involved had publicly confirmed it. In this special Signal & Noise  Signal Break , we sit down with Hightouch co-founder and CEO  Tejas Manohar , who confirms that Hightouch has in fact been in discussions with Publicis. That conf...

Signal & Noise Exclusive Publishers create the content. Publishers build the audiences. Publishers bear the costs. Yet somehow, after two decades of digital advertising innovation, many publishers capture only a fraction of the value they create. In this Signal & Noise exclusive, Rio Longacre and Brett House sit down with Keith Petri, SVP of Data, Identity & Supply at Viant, and Rich H...

What happens when an early Amazon engineer who helped pioneer automated advertising leaves AdTech behind to build the world's fastest commercial airliner? In this episode of Signal & Noise, Brett House and Rio Longacre sit down with Blake Scholl, Founder and CEO of  Boom Supersonic , for a wide-ranging conversation about innovation, entrepreneurship, aviation, AI, and why some of the world...

What happens when the technology that powers advertising becomes the thing consumers interact with directly? In this episode of Signal & Noise, Rio Longacre and Brett House sit down with industry analyst Karsten Weide to explore one of the most important—and controversial—questions facing the digital economy: how AI will ultimately make money. From advertising inside chatbots to agentic commer...

What happens when a society can no longer agree on basic facts? In this episode of Signal & Noise, Rio Longacre and Brett House sit down with Vanessa Otero, Founder and CEO of Ad Fontes Media and creator of the influential Media Bias Chart, to explore the growing crisis of trust, polarization, and information quality in the modern media landscape. Vanessa's Media Bias Chart began as a pers...

What happens when AI stops assisting media teams and starts acting on their behalf? In this episode of Signal & Noise, we sit down with Ethan Settel, Head of Sales & Accounts at Newton Research, to explore one of the most important developments in advertising today: the emergence of agentic media buying. While much of the industry remains focused on AI tools that summarize dashboards, gene...

The MarTech landscape exploded from a few hundred tools to more than 15,000. But according to Scott Brinker, the real story isn’t software sprawl — it’s the collapse of the silos between marketing, advertising, data, AI, and enterprise operations.... In this episode, we sit down with the “Godfather of MarTech” to unpack one of the biggest shifts happening in modern business: the convergence of Mar...

What if nearly half of every dollar spent on Connected TV is being wasted before an ad is ever served to the right person? In this episode of Signal & Noise, Brett House and Rio Longacre sit down with Scott McKinley, one of the advertising industry’s most outspoken voices on data quality and identity. As founder and CEO of Truthset, Scott has spent years exposing a problem that sits at the hea...

The independent infrastructure era may be ending. In this inaugural Signal Break, we unpack one of the most consequential AdTech deals in years: Publicis Groupe acquiring LiveRamp . Joined by Bob Walczak and Krish Raja, we break down what this deal really means for identity, clean rooms, publishers, UID2, systems integrators, and the future of the open internet. Is this the end of “neutral” identi...

What if marketing’s biggest problem isn’t a lack of data… but a lack of  discipline ? In this episode of Signal & Noise, we sit down with Greg Stuart, CEO of the Marketing + Media Alliance (MMA), for a deep, unfiltered conversation on why marketing still struggles to earn trust—and what it will take to fix it. Greg has spent the last several years rebuilding MMA into a global force focused on...

For the better part of two decades, the buy-side controlled the game. Data. Decisioning. Optimization. Margin. Publishers? Commoditized. Intermediated. Squeezed. But that era may be ending. In this episode,  Joe Root (Co-Founder & CEO, Permutive)  returns to Signal & Noise with a sharper—and far more disruptive—thesis:  AI is shifting the center of gravity of advertising back to the sell-s...

Most companies don’t fail at strategy. They fail at  execution =. In this episode of Signal & Noise, Brett House and Rio Longacre sit down with Tom Amies-Cull—a seasoned operator who has spent two decades inside the most complex, high-pressure agency environments, including senior leadership roles across IPG, Dentsu, and Kinesso. This isn’t a conversation about AdTech plumbing. It’s about some...

What happens when AI stops being a tool—and starts redefining what work actually  is ? In this episode of Signal & Noise, Brett House and Rio Longacre sit down with Jennifer Borchardt—UX leader, systems thinker, and newly minted  Signal & Noise Executive Voice contributor —to unpack one of the most urgent questions of our time:  What does AI mean for jobs, identity, and society itself? Dra...

This compilation episode captures the final day of POSSIBLE 2026 in Miami — where the tone shifts from hype to clarity. Filmed entirely on-site, these conversations reflect what leaders actually think after three days of meetings, launches, and late-night debates. The signal coming out of Day 3 is clear: The industry is moving from tools → systems, from workflows → agents, and from execution → orc...

Day 2 of POSSIBLE in Miami was Signal & Noise at full speed—filming live from the Press Room, sitting down with some of the sharpest operators across adtech, martech, and AI. If Day 1 was about setting the stage, Day 2 was about  how it actually works —the systems, tradeoffs, and rewiring happening underneath the industry. Here’s who we spoke with—and what they unpacked: Adam Heimlich (Chalice...

Recorded live from the MadConnect Mansion in Miami, this special Signal & Noise episode captures  Day 1 of Possible 2026 —bringing together some of the sharpest operators across advertising, media, data, and AI. Across a full day of rapid-fire interviews, Rio Longacre, Brett House, and Krish Raja sat down with industry leaders to unpack what’s actually happening beneath the surface of the hype...

What does it actually mean to be “full stack” in a world where AI is starting to write the code for you? In this episode of  Signal & Noise ,  Lucas Longacre  sits down with  Viktor Williamson  for a deep, practitioner-led conversation on the evolution of software engineering—from fundamentals to the fast-emerging agentic future. This marks Lucas’s  second long-form appearance on S&N  and...

Everyone agrees first-party data matters. So why is almost none of it actually showing up in media? In this episode of Signal & Noise, Rio Longacre and Brett House sit down with Rob McLaughlin, Founder & CEO of AUDIENCES, to unpack one of the biggest disconnects in modern marketing: the gap between data strategy and data activation. Despite years of investment in CDPs, clean rooms, cloud m...