Less Wrong & The Illusionists of #adtech. #advertising

Jeff Greenfield doesn’t just work in adtech — he’s lived long enough to watch it become a tragicomedy of dashboards and delusion. He’s been a magician, a chiropractor, a pilot, and a data scientist — which makes him uniquely qualified to explain how this entire industry pulled a coin out of your ear, called it “attribution,” and invoiced you twice for it.

In this episode of The ADOTAT Show, Pesach Lattin sits down with Jeff to unravel the most absurd, revealing, and occasionally magical truths about advertising’s obsession with proof. Together, they dissect the “data is the new oil” myth that turned measurement into a religion, analyze how last-click attribution became the Church of Denial, and explore why “optimization” now sounds suspiciously like “creative bankruptcy.”

Greenfield explains what happens when you treat marketing like math — you get precision without persuasion, certainty without soul. He walks us through his now-famous “hose story,” where one brand cut awareness spend and accidentally proved that faith-based measurement isn’t just for religion anymore. And he dives into the Garden State Parkway analogy: a system clogged with SSPs, DSPs, exchanges, and verification vendors, all extracting tolls on the way from advertiser to audience.

There’s talk of magic and measurement, of Jungian archetypes and the “collective unconscious” of advertising — that deep, emotional undercurrent brands used to tap before the spreadsheet became the creative brief. “People don’t actually want the truth,” Jeff says. “They want the story that feels true.”

And that’s the point. AI can mimic creativity, but it can’t feel wonder. Data can measure engagement, but not belief. Great advertising isn’t a product of optimization — it’s a human act of imagination.

Pesach and Jeff pull no punches as they expose how adtech’s “innovation layers” became little more than rent extraction, why Supply Path Optimization turned into “spiritual theater,” and how ad fraud remains the highest-reward, lowest-risk crime in the world. They end with the one metric that matters: the Return on Meaning.

This episode closes the series “The Illusion of Precision,” where ADOTAT explores the gap between what the industry claims to know and what it actually understands. It’s a rare mix of humor, insight, and uncomfortable honesty — proof that data might tell you what happened, but only imagination can tell you why.

🧠 Topics Covered:

The Gospel of “Less Wrong” Measurement

The Death of the Upper Funnel and the Rise of Left-Brain Marketing

How Over-Targeting Destroys Reach and Profit

The Toll-Booth Economy of Adtech: Fraud, Fees, and Fake Efficiency

Jungian Archetypes and the Lost Art of Storytelling

AI’s Limits: Why Machines Can’t Channel Inspiration

The Island Test: Can Your Marketing Survive Without Dashboards?

Proof Without Magic Is Just Math

💬 Best Quote:

“All models are wrong,” Greenfield says, “but some are useful.”

Sponsored by Troutman Amin and Incremental.com, who keep the lights on, the servers running, and the hosts just depressed enough to stay interesting. Without them, this show would be powered entirely by irony, caffeine, and broken attribution reports.

🎩 Watch if you’ve ever wondered:

Why your brand feels smaller even as your data gets bigger.

#TheADOTATShow #JeffGreenfield #Adtech #MarketingPodcast #Advertising #AI #Creativity #Data #MediaBuying #Programmatic #Measurement #Attribution #LessWrong #adtechgod #adtechlearnbd