Coconut-Sized Courage: Mattia Fosci on Ethics, AI, and the Great Ad Tech Li

Welcome to The ADOTAT Show, where integrity meets insanity — and the only thing more dangerous than ad fraud is honesty.

This week, Pesach Lattin sits down with Mattia Fosci, the lawyer-turned-activist-turned-ad-tech-CEO who’s been kicked out of Congress, nearly killed in a jungle, and somehow decided to take on the wildest beast of them all: programmatic advertising.

Now leading Anonymized, Fosci is on a mission to prove that advertising doesn’t need to spy on you to work. He calls out the industry’s biggest myth — that IDs and endless data syncing make ads more effective — and explains why the obsession with attention metrics, click-through rates, and PowerPoint transparency reports is nothing but performance art.

He doesn’t stop there. Fosci breaks down how AI should supervise machine learning, not replace it, why large language models are too slow to keep up with real-time bidding, and how his custom algorithms have already outperformed human planners two-thirds of the time. And yes, he actually says:

“We’ve got access to all the world’s knowledge in our pockets, and we use it for cat videos.”

Between jokes and truth bombs, Fosci talks about leadership, rebellion, and the art of staying human in a system designed to turn people into data. He explains why he’ll never sell out to Big Tech — even when offered millions — and why his grandfather’s old-fashioned lesson still guides him today: “There’s right and there’s wrong, and you always want to be in the right.”

And then, with the dry grin of a man who’s survived both politics and ad tech, Fosci sums up his own legacy:

“Smart guy with a bold vision — and two balls the size of coconuts.”

It’s not just a punchline. It’s a business plan.

Featuring:

– Brutal honesty about ad tech’s supply chain rot

– A masterclass in how AI actually works in programmatic

– Leadership that’s part rebellion, part rationality

– A reminder that decency still scales — if you let it

Sponsored by:

Incremental – Helping marketers measure what really matters.

Troutman Amin LLP – The legal sharp minds who keep innovation on the right side of the chaos.

The ADOTAT Show:

Where candor still counts, jargon dies young, and every guest leaves slightly more self-aware than they arrived.

Stay bold. Stay curious. And know more than you did yesterday.