Marketing, Media & Adtech

Consumers are fine with ads. Ricardo Belmar said it on The ADOTAT Show, to an ad tech audience, with a straight face. Ricardo is the founder and host of the Retail Razor Podcast Network, a former retail marketing director at Microsoft, and a six-time RETHINK Retail top expert. His argument comes in three parts: consumers don't hate ads, retail is still a people business, and agentic commerce is a...

Every company is buying AI tools. Matt Egol says that's the easy part, and the reason most of them won't see a return. Matt is founder and CEO of Journey Spark Consulting, a strategic advisor to AgenticAdvertising.org, and spent 15 years as a partner at PwC, where he worked alongside Randall Rothenberg back in the Booz & Company days. His argument: AI won't drive ROI if you don't change how yo...

Moburst grew 200% a year by betting on mobile before anyone else took it seriously. Now its co-founder and COO, Lior Eldan, says SEO is already dead, and most marketers just haven’t accepted it yet. Lior explains why the next decade of search belongs to AEO and GEO: being the source that ChatGPT, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews trust and cite, not the blue link that ranks number one. He walks thr...

Thrad started as a university dissertation that asked a simple question: what if ChatGPT had ads? Today it calls itself the world’s first SSP for large language models, and CEO and co-founder Andrea Tortella is building the plumbing for paid ads inside AI conversations. He also put his own face in ChatGPT’s ad slot, and it beat the logos. In this episode: Why 2025 was the year of GEO and AEO, and...

MediaSense is in the room when the world's biggest advertisers decide which agency gets their money. Its Chief Strategy Officer, Ryan Kangisser, has sat through more agency pitches than most agency CEOs have given, and his advice to every CMO walking into one is simple: ask what they can't do, not what they can. MediaSense's research with the WFA found only 11% of multinational marketers think the...

Mike Follett's company puts cameras on people to see if they look at ads. Mostly they don't. He's also the only CEO in the attention business who will tell you the attention span doesn't exist, which is like a baker admitting he has doubts about bread. Two years after telling us attention would never be a currency, Mike is back. The industry wrote guidelines anyway, Lumen got a button inside The T...

A connected TV campaign delivered a three reach and a two hundred frequency. Three percent of the target audience saw the ad. They saw it roughly two hundred times. Howard Shimmel, who has spent forty-seven years inside television measurement, delivers the verdict: "Irwin would grade that with a giant F." The Irwin is Erwin Ephron, who died in 2014, and whose name is on the ARF award Shimmel won i...

In the Season 10 opener, Acadia's CEO took one media rebate, sent it to 53 clients, and won't say which vendor paid it. Then he explained why agencies should never touch the money. Jared Belsky ran Fanta at Coca-Cola, ran a fertilizer company, and was CEO of 360i before walking away from Dentsu in 2021 to build Acadia into a 325-person independent agency. In February he wrote the column no other a...

Phylicia Koh is a general partner at Play Ventures, the gaming and consumer VC fund. She came on The ADOTAT Show and said privacy is a lie the industry tells itself, that Anthropic's promise never to run ads on Claude is either self-deception or deception, and that the entire agentic advertising stack being built right now forgot to include the one party the ads are aimed at. She also has the most...

The man who invented programmatic says the industry that runs on it cannot think. Randall Rothenberg ran the IAB for 13 years. He wrote the book on advertising. He described programmatic in a 2001 Ad Age column and got exactly zero responses. Now he says the technology side of this business has almost no creative thinkers in it, that performance marketing is the latest in a century-long parade of...

Carl Matter, Director of Ad Tech Performance at Urban Science, spends his days inside the most data-rich consultancy in automotive advertising. Urban Science knows what cars sold, where, updated daily, straight from the manufacturers. So why is an industry spending billions still grading itself on website visits? In this episode Carl explains why the technology stopped being the excuse years ago,...

Contextual advertising, brand safety, and the FTC warning letter that rebuilt an entire ad tech company. Hitesh Chawla, founder and CEO of Silverpush, joins Pesach Lattin on the ADOTAT Show for a conversation about ultrasonic cross-device tracking, the pivot to contextual targeting, and what post-cookie advertising actually looks like in practice. In 2015, Silverpush embedded inaudible ultrasonic...

Ad tech doesn't have a transparency problem. It has a courage problem. That's the thesis Alessandro De Zanche brought to the show, and he defended it with his whole name attached, which is more than he can say for the five sell-side executives who anonymously trashed The Trade Desk in the same article that started this whole thing. This week Pesach Lattin sits down with the media monetization cons...

Host Pesach Lattin sits down with Kristina Kaganer, CPTO at Navigator and founder of Wayfable, for a conversation about AI, profitability, and what fifteen years inside the big holding companies actually teaches you. ABOUT THE GUEST Kristina Kaganer is Chief Product & Technology Officer at Navigator, where she leads product, engineering, paid media, and ad operations to build a commerce media...

ordan Finger took Freshly from 5 million to a Nestlé exit and ran growth at Nutrafol before Unilever came calling. Now he runs a fractional CGO practice and shows up to my show to bury the entire agency model, insult the 27-year-old running your Facebook account, and argue that a hundred bucks of AI replaces the whole shop. So I did what I do. I asked him how selling "pattern recognition built ove...

Here's a podcast episode description with a fresh title. Title: The Cache That Cried Apocalypse: Lotem Karmon on the Ad Tech Crisis That Was Just a Subsidy Ending Description: Microsoft sent an email, picked a date, said the word "deprecate," and an entire industry started shopping for a funeral. Pre-bid cache was dying on April 30th, and large publishers were staring down caching bills of fifty t...

Ashkan Karbasfrooshan built one of the biggest channels on the planet from Montreal. 17 billion views. 40 million subscribers. Fifteen years without a dollar of outside money. Six of those years, he lost money and took out a second mortgage. Now he wants to do something harder: bring Major League Baseball back to Montreal. A team that left in 2004. A four-billion-dollar price tag he doesn't have....

The Alienation Tax: Dennis Pekel on the AI Bubble, Adtech's Detroit Moment, and Why "Adoption" Is a Lie | The ADOTAT Show Dennis Pekel quit GumGum to sit at home and think. No company, no product, no number. Just the sharpest read on the AI bubble in advertising we have heard all year, and a phrase you are going to steal: the alienation tax, the cost a brand pays for selling to people whose worldv...

Season 9 of the ADOTAT Show kicks off with a guest who actually has the standing to tell The Trade Desk to sit down. John Nardone, founding IAB member, the man behind the first internet banner ad on Wired in 1994, sold X Plus One to Rocket Fuel for $230 million, sold Flashtalking for half a billion, and is now CEO of JWX. After Jeff Green characterized SSPs and resellers as obfuscators dressed up...

iHeartMedia quietly acquired the most important infrastructure company in audio and almost nobody in adtech noticed. John Rosso, CEO of Triton Digital and President of iHeartMedia's Technology Solutions Group, joins Pesach Lattin to break down the $230 million acquisition, why broadcast radio just shipped an identity solution connected TV has spent six years failing to build, and which audio inven...

On this episode of The ADOTAT Show, Pesach Lattin sits down with Shawn Jensen, Founder and CEO of Profila, the Swiss startup that's spent eight years building what they call zero-knowledge advertising, a privacy-first AdTech architecture where consumer data never leaves the device. Jensen doesn't pull punches. He calls CPM a vanity metric, says the $700 billion digital ad industry forgot to ask th...

Kirby Grimes helped build the first streaming TV apps on the planet. He co-founded Float Left, one of Roku's first development partners back in 2009, got acquired, launched 4320 (a B2B marketing agency for media tech companies), and now publishes The Streaming Wars. He also raps about the media industry on LinkedIn and made it to 42 without seeing Star Wars. In this episode of The ADOTAT Show, Pes...

Karsten Weide has spent 35 years inside the advertising machine. Journalist at Ziff Davis during the PC era. Built Yahoo Germany from an empty room with one phone on the floor. Sixteen years as a senior analyst at IDC modeling the digital advertising business. Now independent, and finally saying out loud what everyone in ad tech thinks but won't post on LinkedIn: the industry is lying, everybody k...

Retail media has reshaped the advertising landscape faster than almost any channel in the last decade. First-party data, closed-loop measurement, and new opportunities for brands to connect with shoppers at the point of decision. But as the space matures, important questions are emerging about concentration, competition, and what the next chapter looks like for buyers, retailers, and platforms. In...

Rob Janes is VP of Revenue at Ad Butler. He sells ad serving technology for a living. He also thinks the open auction was one of the worst things that ever happened to publishers, that Google had everyone locked in a dependency they could not escape, and that the entire programmatic ecosystem exists, at least in part, to make itself necessary. He said most of this out loud. On a stage. In 2019. To...