Marketing, Media & Adtech How to Catch a Scam (and Still Make Your Media Plan Work) | James McDonald, Audience Group
Ever wonder what happens when a seasoned ad veteran starts pulling the thread on 30 years of marketing lies—and doesn’t stop?
In this sharp, hilarious, and wildly informative episode of The ADOTAT Show, host Pesach Lattin sits down with James McDonald, Managing Director of Audience Group, to rip apart the industry’s most sacred assumptions and expose the real mechanics behind successful advertising. Spoiler: it’s not your CTR. And it’s definitely not your last-click attribution report from Google Ads.
With the energy of a detective, the wit of a comic-book superhero (literally—check the thumbnail), and the experience of someone who’s seen every adtech hype cycle from dial-up to programmatic, James delivers insight after insight on what actually drives effectiveness in media and why most marketing dashboards are just dashboards of delusion.
🔍 In this episode, we go full-on X-ray vision into:
Why Cost Per Memory Day (CPMD) might be the only metric worth fighting for
How to tell if your “attention” vendor is selling smoke and mirrors
What went right with Slater & Gordon’s attention-optimized campaign
Coca-Cola’s underrated playbook on brand salience and light buyers
Why performance marketing without memory is like selling coupons in a blackout
What “search as shelf space” really means—and why branded keyword spend might be your budget’s saddest line item
And yes—we talk about the platform scam economy:
💸 Google selling you the ad, grading the test, and sending the invoice
💸 Meta promising viewability while hiding actual engagement
💸 The rise of performance marketing addiction and what happens when you pull the plug
👓 “If advertising’s job is to make decisions easier, why are we optimizing for things people forget in 3 seconds?”
Whether you’re a media buyer trying to escape the CTR hamster wheel, a CMO who wants long-term brand equity without boring decks, or a performance marketer who suspects the spreadsheet is lying to you—this conversation is your sanity check.
🧠 Plus:
James unveils his Campaign Reality Check Worksheet—a practical tool to align your media, creative, and strategy teams around real metrics, not marketing cosplay.