Marketing, Media & Adtech

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 2026 is the year paid ads entered LLMsAI walled gardens vs. the AI open web, and how ads can pay for the tokensIs Thrad to AI what AppNexus was to programmatic?The first mover disadvantage: why AI developers were scared to run ads, and what changed when OpenAI didClaude, the Super Bowl ad, and why Andrea thinks Anthropic’s no-ads promise is a math problemTrust from day one: separate, clearly labeled, additive adsWhy contextual ads in AI can be more private than cookies ever wereUser journey compression: the whole funnel in one chat windowWhere the brightest graduates went, and why advertising needs them backBrian O’Kelley, a Thrad cap, and AdCP’s Sponsored Intelligence protocolWhy “ads to agents” isn’t advertisingA desert island with his wife, his co-founder, his parents and his best friendAndrea Tortella is CEO and co-founder of Thrad. Find him on LinkedIn.Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XA4w3Q4Lu4The ADOTAT Show is the ad tech interview show for people who read the footnotes. New episodes Mondays. Subscribe to ADOTAT for the reporting behind the conversation: adotat.comPresented by Troutman Amin LLP. In partnership with Incremental.

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 their media agency model is fit for the future, and three in four expect to change how they pay their agencies. Ryan corrected the host on what those numbers actually mean, then explained why the system still pays agencies to do more.In this episode:What the 11% and 75% really measure, and why "fit for the future" is the worse findingWhy time and materials is dying, and why pure outcome-based pay doesn't work either"Incentives drive behaviors": how commission and asset pricing reward more media and more assetsWhy get a dog and bark yourself: what world-class advertisers want from an agency in 2026Why AI is an adoption problem, not a technology problemThe holding company diet: Omnicom, IPG, Publicis, LiveRamp and the agency brands that got sunsetThe missing middle: who trains the next planner when nobody hires juniorsA sea of sameness: what happens when every brand follows the same signalsWhy brands would rather hire engineers than media buyersStranded on a desert island with the entire cast of Curb Your EnthusiasmRyan Kangisser is Chief Strategy Officer of MediaSense. Find him on LinkedIn.The ADOTAT Show is the ad tech interview show for people who read the footnotes. New episodes Mondays. Subscribe to ADOTAT for the reporting behind the conversation: adotat.com

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 Trade Desk, and Mike finally started sleeping again. In this episode: Why he still won't call attention a currency, even with his name on a DSP button What you're actually buying in an attention segment (a prediction, a promise, or a vibe with a decimal point) The Brooklyn Lager theory: two seconds in New York, ten in London Danish people drinking Carlsberg for breakfast, confirmed How you measure attention to a podcast ad when there's no such thing as ear tracking Why muted video loses to audio with no pictures at all The goldfish was framed Cat videos vs. the Financial Times, and the New York Times vs. the New York Post The creative attention models he says he doesn't trust Saying no to partners, and his secret to a happy marriage: never talk about attention at home Mike Follett is CEO of Lumen Research. Argue with him on LinkedIn, where he promises to debate attention all night long. lumen-research.com The ADOTAT Show is the ad tech interview show for people who read the footnotes. New episodes Mondays. Subscribe to ADOTAT for the reporting behind the conversation: adotat.com

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 in 2026. Shimmel is president of Janus Strategy & Insights, head of strategy and a board member at DataFuelX, and the former Chief Research Officer at Turner. In this episode he tells Pesach Lattin that the tools to fix frequency already exist in shipping software, that switching currencies is a dropdown menu rather than an engineering project, and that the real barrier is inertia and a transaction everyone's comp plan is denominated in. We also get into why frequency is a television problem rather than a CTV problem, what he would build if he could design one currency from scratch, why less than ten percent of roughly twenty-five billion dollars in national linear is bought against an actual audience, and why he refuses to pick between Erwin Ephron and Byron Sharp. Plus Comscore's new CEO, Nielsen's jump from 40,000 panel homes to 45 million, Aquila's odds, whether AI is about to eat the last generation of analysts who can spot a wrong number, and a desert island containing two members of the Grateful Dead, Alan Turing, Barack Obama and George Carlin. The companion issue, including the reporting behind why this problem has survived four decades of everyone agreeing it is a problem, runs at adotat.com. The ADOTAT Show is hosted by Pesach Lattin, investigative journalist and publisher at ADOTAT, covering ad tech fraud, programmatic economics and holding company structures. Confidential tips welcome. Subscribe to ADOTAT: adotat.com ADOTAT+ members get the full analysis and the archive.

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 agency CEO in America has written: Acadia had taken a rebate and given it back, pro rata, to 53 clients. On the Season 10 premiere of The ADOTAT Show he explains the mechanics, calls undisclosed rebates and principal media "unacceptable, deplorable, and borderline fraudulent," and lays out how he built a shop where clients pay publishers directly, timesheets don't exist, unwanted attrition runs at 9 percent, and there are zero vice presidents because "titles are cancer."In this episodeWhy Acadia took exactly one rebate, and why he won't name the vendor"How do you not get pregnant? Abstinence." The case for never touching client moneyThe $40 billion, where it came from, and what he thinks it actually provesHow the holding companies made rebates acceptable by bragging about them to Wall StreetWhy he'd rather work for California Pizza Kitchen than CokeZero vice presidents, no timesheets, and the $350,000 group director versus the heart surgeonRetail media and digital media are merging, and the thing holding it up is laborWhat Shackleton would do about rebates (it involves the Arctic Ocean)Jared Belsky is co-founder and CEO of Acadia, MediaPost's 2024 Independent Agency of the Year, and former CEO of 360i. acadia.ioThe ADOTAT Show is hosted by Pesach Lattin, investigative journalist and publisher of ADOTAT, covering ad tech fraud, programmatic economics and holding company structures. Read the issue and the members-only analysis at adotat.com. Confidential tips: [email protected] or Signal.Season 10, Episode 1.#adtech #agencyrebates #mediaagency #principalmedia #advertising #ADOTAT #JaredBelsky

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 detailed technical vision of agent-to-agent advertising I've heard from anyone, including the people writing the protocol. Then she brought Donald Trump and JD Vance to a desert island. Not because she likes them. Because their absence triggers a search party.

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 unfalsifiable nonsense, and that the AI machine about to reorganize your entire company got explained to him by a piece of guitar software.He is not bitter. He is not retiring. He is building the next thing and telling you what it costs.What's in this one:Why he calls ad tech people "transactionists" and means it as a diagnosis The CES line about AI turning us into a choir of identical consultants using the same prompts CRAIFT vs CRAIP, and why the parentheses are unnecessary The two Cannes festivals happening on the same beach, and which one you've been attending Rosser Reeves, Ogilvy, Bernbach, Hopkins, Watson, Dichter, and why Rothenberg calls the intellectual history of advertising one bullshit theory after another Where performance marketing sits in that lineage (spoiler: at the end of it) MAMA, the white paper with John Frelinghuysen, and the guitar dongle that produced it Why the Publicis, WPP Open and Horizon Blue announcements are lagging indicators, not news AdCP vs ARTF, and his claim that the intelligence layer doesn't need standards at all because LLMs normalize data natively Whether advising the agentic effort makes him a traitor to the IAB (his answer is not what you expect) The 400 creatives in Brooklyn who blew up his own working hypothesis His one sentence for every CEO who hasn't called him yet.Thanks to Troutman Amin LLP for the sponsorship.

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, what actually happens when you retrain a programmatic system on verified vehicle sales instead of clicks, and the uncomfortable answer to whether any national brand tracks a tier one impression all the way down to a car leaving a dealer lot.He also tells the story of running his own team through a client's "request a quote" form. Nineteen separate contacts with the dealer. They never got a quote.

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 audio beacons into television commercials so mobile phones running their SDK could detect them and link TV viewing to device activity. In March 2016, the FTC issued warning letters to twelve Android app developers who had integrated the code. Chawla's account of the internal response is direct: "We did not take it seriously, we did not respond, so that's why they put it on the website and that became a bigger deal than it was."He then shut the product down, under no legal obligation to do so, and rebuilt the company around contextual video intelligence five years before cookie deprecation made contextual advertising a category everyone claimed to have believed in all along. As he puts it: "If you think of 2015, no one was talking about or even no one was using the word contextual at that time."Today Silverpush analyzes roughly half a billion seconds of video per day across YouTube, connected TV, TikTok, Meta, and open programmatic, on approximately $20 million in lifetime funding and about 150 employees across more than 30 countries.Topics covered in this episode:Ultrasonic audio beacons, cross-device tracking, and the 2016 FTC warning lettersWhy contextual targeting was the only viable answer to losing personal dataHow MIRRORS uses computer vision for in-video context detection and brand suitabilityThe Trend Intelligence Platform, launched January 2026, and what "real-time" actually means (a 24-hour refresh)Brand safety versus brand suitability, and why the difference matters for news publishers, political content, and opinion inventoryThe hard case: a shooting story that is unsafe by blocklist but suitable for a security brandBuilding YouTube contextual targeting for a decade without a YouTube relationshipWhy connected TV contextual is harder than YouTube, publisher metadata fragmentation, and using subtitle APIs to identify contentAgentic AI architecture, multi-agent campaign optimization, and why the entire company including sales is learning to codeThe attention economy versus the distraction economyEmerging market expansion across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, and why South America has not workedWhether third-party contextual vendors exist only because YouTube, TikTok, and Meta refuse to grade their own contentIndia engineering economics, cost structure, and competing against US and EU ad techRapid fire: the most overrated thing in ad tech ("that everyone is AI native, which is not true") and the most underrated (cash flow positive companies nobody talks about)Guest: Hitesh Chawla, founder and CEO of Silverpush. IIT Delhi, class of 2004. Investor in roughly 30 startups.Host: Pesach Lattin, investigative journalist and publisher at ADOTAT, covering ad tech fraud, programmatic economics, and holding company structures. Confidential tips: [email protected] , or Signal on request.Sponsors: Troutman Amin LLP, the lawyers you want on speed dial before the regulator writes, not after. And Incremental.com, for everyone still pretending their attribution model is real.The full three-part written investigation, including methodology, funding and headcount discrepancies, disclosures, and right of reply, is published at ADOTAT.Keywords: contextual advertising, brand safety, brand suitability, programmatic advertising, connected TV, CTV advertising, post-cookie targeting, cross-device tracking, ad tech, YouTube advertising, computer vision advertising, ad verification, FTC privacy, agentic AI, media buying, adtech podcast

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 consultant and ad exchange economist who thinks the industry is a theater where everyone knows the script and nobody wants the credit. We get into why executives grandstand on stage and then hide behind "in exchange for candor" when it counts, why Jeff Green is an actor and not a villain, and why Andrew Casale saying the quiet part out loud was the whole point. Then it gets good. Commoditization 1.0 versus 2.0, or how quality publishers walked into the casino and handed the house its credibility. The diamond dealers who need the sewage to stay in business. The trust loop. Why a hammer beats AI when you haven't fixed the basic stuff yet. And a desert island draft featuring Phil Jackson, Rosalía, the Fonz, and pointedly nobody from the industry. Alessandro on why AI is the most overrated thing in #adtech and strategy the most underrated. On self-sustaining media owners as a democracy problem, not a charity case. And on the difference between being sharp and being cruel, which he somehow lands on the right side of while calling things sewage. Thanks to our sponsors Troutman Amin LLP and Incremental.com.