Marketing, Media & Adtech

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...

Rich Kahn, CEO of Anura and one of the digital advertising industry's most uncompromising voices on ad fraud, joins Pesach Lattin on The ADOTAT Show for a conversation that should be required watching for every media buyer, brand marketer, programmatic trader, and ad tech executive who has ever looked at a campaign dashboard and assumed the numbers were real. They are not. At least not half of the...

Skye Frontier of Incremental came on ADOTAT to tell me everything the marketing industry doesn't want you to know. He did not disappoint. We got into why ROAS is the high fructose corn syrup of marketing measurement, how 73% of organizations are still running their entire media programs on a metric that has no proven connection to actual sales, and why the platforms selling you attribution softwar...

Justin Pearse, editor of New Digital Age and co-founder of BlueStrike Group, joins Pesach Lattin on the ADOTAT Show for a conversation spanning thirty years of digital advertising history, the rise and fall of attention metrics, the future of trade media, the BlueStrike model of owning both a PR agency and a trade publication simultaneously, and why the advertising industry has survived every near...

Jeremy Hlavacek, former VP at The Weather Company, IBM Watson Advertising, and Experian Marketing Services, joins Pesach Lattin on the ADOTAT Show for one of the most honest conversations about the state of digital advertising, programmatic, identity resolution, and connected television that you will find anywhere in 2026. Jeremy built one of the first programmatic publisher operations in the indu...

Everyone in ad tech slapped AI-powered on their homepage and called it a product update. Matt Spiegel calls it what it is. Matt Spiegel — founder, Omnicom exec, programmatic pioneer, and EVP of True Audience Growth and Strategy at TransUnion — sits down with Pesach Lattin to deliver the most uncomfortable truth in digital advertising right now: AI doesn't solve broken data problems. It amplifies t...

He Thinks Your CTV CPMs Are Too Low (And He Has Receipts) | Jordan Greene | ADOTAT Show Jordan Greene has spent 25 years collecting unpopular opinions about digital advertising and occasionally being proven right about all of them. As co-founder and Chief Media Officer of Alpha Precision Media -- the only NMSDC-certified minority-owned Amazon ecosystem partner in the country -- he has watched mobi...

116 views Feb 26, 2026 #AI #audio #podcasting Tim Armstrong went from a dairy farm in rural New Zealand to leading digital transformation at Mangrove Digital in Australia. Somewhere between herding 200 cows through lightning storms at 5 a.m. and optimizing programmatic supply paths, he picked up a take so hot it might melt your entire AI strategy: People still matter more than your algorithm. Yeah...

Frazer Locke has 34 years of retail and ad tech scars. He spent a decade inside Amazon building the ads machine before anyone took it seriously, and now he's SVP of International Sales at TripleLift, the creative SSP trying to keep retail media from becoming an unwatchable Blade Runner hellscape of infinite ads. In this episode of the ADOTAT Show, Pesach Lattin sits down with Frazer to talk about...

Liz DeAngelis from Brainlabs joins Pesach Lattin on the ADOTAT Show to tear apart everything the ad tech industry pretends is working. From programmatic advertising's broken incentives to why attribution is theater, why video completion rate is an emotional support KPI, and why cheap never actually means efficient, this conversation pulls no punches. Liz has seen it all. Mobile app marketing. The...

Gaming is the single largest media channel on the planet. Bigger than streaming. Bigger than social media. Bigger than CTV. 3.5 billion people play at least one game every month — that's 90% of everyone connected to the internet. And yet the advertising industry has spent the last two decades pretending gaming doesn't exist. In this interview, I sit down with Itamar Benedy, the founder and CEO of...

Sam Bloom, Head of Partnerships at PMG, returns to the ADOTAT Show for round two. Either that's heroic or deeply concerning. In this episode, Sam gets brutally honest about the AI hype cycle flooding ad tech, why most "agentic" tools are just the same old crap with a .ai domain, and how to tell the difference between real innovation and vendor theater. He breaks down his two-question filter that e...

Bob Lord: The Quantum Computing Defector Who Escaped Advertising, Spent 8 Years Learning How Technology Actually Works at IBM, and Then Came Back to Burn Down the FTE Model Here's a career arc that sounds like a fever dream: He ran Razorfish, sold it to Microsoft, sold it again to Publicis, became president of AOL during Verizon's $4.4 billion acquisition, then completely abandoned advertising to...

Jason White has spent 20+ years actually BUILDING technology at Viacom, OpenX, CBS, Fox MySpace, and multiple startups. Unlike the PowerPoint warriors flooding LinkedIn, he's coded real systems, invented RTB structures, and survived every hype cycle from the dot-com bubble to today's AI frenzy. In this brutally honest conversation, Jason exposes: ❌ Why 60-70% of "AI features" are just rule-based...