Marketing, Media & Adtech

Welcome to another brutally honest episode of The ADOTAT Show, where we rip the curtain off the adtech industry and drag the truth into the spotlight—whether it wants to be there or not.In this episode, Pesach Lattin, editor-in-chief of ADOTAT, sits down with Jules Minvielle, the co-founder and CEO of Olyzon, to dissect, dismember, and ultimately bury the outdated beast that is programmatic advertising as we know it.Let’s be blunt:If you think programmatic advertising is “fine,” you’re either not paying attention—or your job depends on keeping it broken.This isn’t another polite panel or recycled press release. This is a full-frontal autopsy of the programmatic media supply chain, DSP inefficiency, and the epidemic of AI-washing plaguing the ad industry in 2025.👨‍🔬 Topics we cover in excruciating, hilarious, and informative detail include:Why the legacy DSP model is fundamentally broken and exists mostly to feed intermediaries and inflate CPMsHow Agenic Media from Olyzon isn’t just another AI buzzword—it’s a complete rebuild of media buying infrastructureWhat it really means to deploy AI-native adtech, not just slap a prompt UI on a crusty platformHow CTV advertising is evolving—and how real-time contextual analysis at the program and scene level changes everythingThe difference between fake automation and true autonomous agentic systems that operate without human babysittingWhy “platforms” are dead, and modular, embeddable, always-on agents are the futureHow transcript parsing, scene-level metadata, and semantic understanding are outperforming cookies, cohorts, and conventional targetingThe dark secret: most advertisers and publishers are complicit in keeping the adtech status quo inefficientWhy programmatic “scale” is meaningless if the signal is trash—and how Olyzon’s AI agents filter for relevance, not just reachThe hilarious tragedy of 50% viewability as a success metric (yes, we go there)Why ad fraud thrives under complexity, and how clarity is the most dangerous tool of all💡 Jules Minvielle’s thesis is simple but radical:You don’t need another platform.You need a scalpel.And that scalpel is built from AI agents that read content like analysts, plan like strategists, and optimize like machines that don’t need PTO.⚖️ Thank you to our sponsors who make this unfiltered chaos possible:🔹 Troutman Amin – The legal commandos of adtech, privacy, TCPA, and digital regulation. Whether you're fighting off a class-action lawsuit or launching a data-rich startup in the landmine field of compliance, this is the law firm that doesn’t blink. They don’t do "general counsel," they do "survival strategy."🔹 Incremental – The measurement company for brands that are done playing make-believe with attribution. They deliver true causal lift, incrementality analysis, and marketing science you can actually take to the boardroom. No more last-click worship. No more modeled delusions. Just real, testable impact.👀 Coming up next week:We go from insurgent to insider as we sit down with Jean-Marc Papin, SVP of Advanced Video and Agency Partnerships at Horizon Media. We’ll talk about why attention metrics are broken, what it actually means to reach a human being in 2025, and why agencies need to stop fetishizing scale and start worshiping context.If you’ve ever wondered why your media budget feels like it was thrown into a black hole—or if you’ve quietly suspected your DSP is gaslighting you—this episode is for you.🔔 Subscribe to the channel, hit that bell icon, and drop a comment below. We actually read them. Even the spicy ones.https://new.adotat.com/subscribe🧠 Want more behind-the-scenes insights, strategy breakdowns, and marketing truth bombs?Subscribe to ADOTAT.com – where independent adtech journalism lives, breathes, and occasionally yells.#AdTech #ProgrammaticAdvertising #CTVAds #DigitalMedia #AgenicAI #DSP #Olyzon #AdvertisingTechnology #AIinAdvertising #MediaBuying #CTVTargeting #ContextualAdvertising #AdMeasurement #Incrementality #LegalCompliance #TroutmanAmin #Incremental #HorizonMedia #JeanMarcPapin #PesachLattin #AdTechNews #MarketingInnovationStay Bold. Stay Curious. And Know More Than You Did Yesterday.

Zack Rosenberg, Founder and CEO of Cortex, is back to challenge the outdated practices in video ad targeting. He reveals how over 89% of video content is miscategorized, highlighting the need for advanced AI for accurate analysis. Zack tackles biases in brand safety tools and shares the absurdity of mislabeling content, like calling plane crash footage 'Travel Content.' With humor and insight, he discusses the necessity of moving beyond demographic-based targeting and embracing deeper audience understanding in the evolving ad landscape.

Welcome to another episode of The ADOTAT Show — where ad tech comes to get emotionally undressed and no buzzword leaves with its dignity intact.This time, we’re graced — again — by the one and only Anthony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab and unofficial frequent flyer of our guest chair. That’s right: third time on the show. At this point, we’re contractually obligated to get him a branded mug or start issuing loyalty points. Possibly both.And what are we unpacking? Oh, just the usual carnival of chaos that is digital advertising:Google’s Cookie Resurrection Tour: Just when we were planning the eulogy, Chrome said “never mind.” Is this a smart industry save or a Groundhog Day reboot with worse privacy implications?CTV’s Glow-Up: Is Connected TV really the golden child of media innovation — or just linear TV wearing a trench coat and pretending to be digital? Spoiler: There’s more emotion than logic, and also some QR codes that know you better than your therapist.Fingerprinting — the F-word of Ad Tech: Is it a gentle handshake or a biometric tattoo you didn’t ask for? Anthony dives into the nuance while Pesach gleefully pokes the bear.Fraud: The Rash That Won’t Go Away: We talk ad fraud like it’s an STD the entire industry pretends not to have. Why is no one willing to fund the research to actually figure out how bad it is? (Spoiler: Fear of finding out. Yes, FOFO is real.)Desert Island Ad Tech: We strand Anthony Katsur on an imaginary island (again) and make him choose his survival tools. Hint: They’re nerdier than a Swiss Army knife but just as useful if your metric dashboard crashes mid-campaign.Legacy, Leadership, and Lying to Ourselves: Anthony gets personal about his journey from NetGravity to now, drops names (yes, Megan Pagliuca, we see you), and waxes philosophical about why ad tech needs to stop beating itself up — and each other — like some deranged Fight Club in a WeWork.This isn’t a fireside chat. It’s a flamethrower session. If you’re in the business of digital media, you owe it to yourself to watch two people call B.S. on the things we all pretend are working.Subscribe, argue in the comments, and maybe — just maybe — ask your DSP how it’s really feeling.Stay Bold. Stay Curious. Know More Than You Did Yesterday.

How do you rebuild your life after an unimaginable loss—and turn tragedy into a lasting legacy?In this powerful and deeply personal Season 5 premiere of The ADOTAT Show, Pesach Lattin sits down with Kevin Krim, President & CEO of EDO, but known to many New Yorkers for a profoundly different reason: the heartbreaking loss of his two young children, Lulu and Leo, in one of New York City’s most widely covered tragedies of the past decade.Rather than be defined solely by grief, Kevin and his wife Marina transformed their pain into purpose through the creation of Choose Creativity, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering children with creativity and resilience. This remarkable conversation reveals how creativity became Kevin’s lifeline, teaching him lessons about leadership, letting go, and redefining what really matters in life and business.On a lighter—but no less insightful—note, Kevin and Pesach also venture deep into the rabbit holes of adtech, from battling the industry’s obsession with vanity metrics like GRPs (seriously, let it go!) to sorting out the real innovators from the QR-code-obsessed pretenders in the CTV landscape. Think: less PowerPoint nonsense, more predictive data brilliance.Key topics covered (with trademark irreverence and wit):How genuine creative leadership can transform your team—no buzzwords required.Why outcomes and predictive metrics are finally toppling tired impression-based models (it's about time).The messy yet fascinating world of convergent TV, programmatic chaos, and who’s actually pushing adtech forward.Why should you watch?This special episode goes beyond business. It's a human conversation about resilience, grace, and how deeply personal experiences shape leadership and innovation. You’ll walk away inspired, entertained, and ready to rethink your own relationship with creativity and data.Special thanks to our sponsors:Incremental.com, because real insights matter more than pretty dashboards.Troutman Amin LLP, handling your adtech legal headaches so you can actually sleep at night.👉 Subscribe, hit like, and share your thoughts on this powerful conversation below.👉 Get the full industry scoop straight to your inbox—subscribe to the ADOTAT newsletter: http://new.adotat.com #AdTech #CTV #CreativeLeadership #ChooseCreativity #MarketingInnovation #ProgrammaticAdvertising #IndustryInsightsFor more on Choose Creativity and how to support their mission, visit: https://choosecreativity.org/Learn more about ADOTAT: https://new.adotat.com/subscribe

What happens when you sit down with one of adtech’s longest-running insiders, who helped turn a four-person startup into a $2 billion global media infrastructure—and he actually tells the truth?Welcome to this episode of The ADOTAT Show, where host Pesach Lattin talks with Tyler Kelly, President of Basis Technologies, about what it really takes to scale, lead, and stay sane in an industry obsessed with shiny objects and meaningless metrics.Tyler’s been in the trenches since before most DSPs had names, let alone logos. He’s not just steering the ship—he helped build the shipyard. And in this brutally honest, refreshingly irreverent conversation, he breaks down everything from adtech burnout to the future of automation, why AI is mostly smoke and mirrors, and how Basis plans to become the global operating system for media.In this episode, we cover:💡 The Moonshot Vision:Why Basis isn’t aiming to be “just another DSP”—but the foundation layer every marketer builds on. Search, social, CTV, linear, and beyond.⚙️ Automation Without the Bull:How Basis has quietly automated the ad tech grunt work for years, and why most so-called “AI solutions” are just ChatGPT in a trench coat.📉 Why Click-Through Rates Deserve to Die:Spoiler: they're useless, misleading, and possibly the biggest placebo in modern media metrics.📦 The Myth of the All-Knowing Signal:Tyler lays out why cross-device tracking is still mostly fiction, and why many marketers are building castles on quicksand.🏢 How to Keep 1,000 Employees From Burning Out:From small clients that drain your team to the structure that actually keeps people at Basis for 15+ years.🏕️ Desert Island Scenarios, Fleece Vests, and Tribal Council Votes:Yes, we also talk about which media roles get voted off first in the great agency survival game.Plus, we ask the real question behind all the dashboards and dashboards-for-dashboards:What are we even optimizing anymore—if half the signals are broken and the other half are lies?🧠 Whether you're a media buyer tired of dancing around buzzwords, a strategist trying to sort substance from vaporware, or just wondering how anyone stays grounded in this industry—this episode has the sharp insights and sarcasm you didn’t know you needed.🎯 Featured Guest:Tyler Kelly, President, Basis Technologies— adtech veteran, culture-builder, automation realist, and scrappy operator still thinking like employee #4.🙌 Special thanks to our sponsors:🛡️ Troutman Amin LLP – Legal firepower with an adtech IQ.📊 Incremental.com – Turning retail media from guesswork to growth engine.🔔 Like, comment, and subscribe for more brutally honest takes from inside the media machine. This is The ADOTAT Show—where the BS stays in the press release, and the signal finally cuts through the noise.Stay Bold. Stay Curious. And Know More Than You Did Yesterday.#AdTech #BasisTechnologies #ProgrammaticAdvertising #MediaBuying #Automation #RetailMedia #CTV #DigitalMarketing #PesachLattin #TheADOTATShow #Leadership #MarTech #AIinAdvertising #AgencyLife #AdvertisingTruthshttps://new.adotat.com/subscribe

What happens when you hand an ad tech blowtorch to someone who’s not afraid to use it? You get this episode.Join host Pesach Lattin as he goes toe-to-toe with Scott Ensign, Chief Strategy Officer of Butler/Till—a man who believes fewer impressions are the future, upfronts are fossils, and programmatic curation isn’t dead…it’s just wildly misunderstood.We dig into everything:🥊 How indie agencies are body-checking bloated holding companies🔥 Why Butler/Till blew the dust off a nine-figure pharma campaign—and stole it🧪 Whether curation is a misunderstood genius or a washed-up rockstar🧹 Who’s cleaning the ad supply chain (spoiler: not the people pointing fingers)🧠 What Steven Pinker, Freud, and coconut VPNs have to do with strategy🗑️ Which buzzwords deserve to be yeeted into the ocean (looking at you, “cookieless future”)It’s smart, sharp, and slightly unhinged—in the best possible way. We cover everything from SSP cleanup and MFA site drama to philosophical takes on ad waste, attention scarcity, and the dark arts of media planning.Special thanks to our fearless sponsors:🔹 Troutman Amin — for making sure we don’t get sued for saying the quiet part out loud🔹 Incremental.com — for proving incrementality isn’t just another vanity stat👉 If you’ve ever wanted your ad tech with a side of sass, strategy, and storytelling, hit play.🧁 Stay Bold, Stay Curious, and Know More Than You Did Yesterday.

Richard K. Howe is not your average adtech CEO. He’s not selling AI that guesses which shampoo you bought last week or stuffing identity graphs with browser crumbs and bad intentions. No—he’s building something far more dangerous to the status quo: AI that actually thinks.In this episode of The ADOTAT Show, we sit down with the CEO of Inuvo, a structural engineer turned advertising insurgent, who’s throwing the entire surveillance-based ad model into the recycling bin (right next to your cookie policy pop-ups). Richard walks us through how his team built an AI platform that doesn’t care who you are—but why you do anything. It’s not about identity anymore. It’s about motivation. Psychology. Intent.We unpack:Why the “who” question that adtech has obsessed over for 30 years is officially uselessHow Inuvo’s AI can sniff out a sleepless dog owner in Iceland… and sell them Bose SleepbudsWhy retargeting is the AOL CD of marketingHow the open web has become a junkyard of skipped impressions—simply because they lack a cookieAnd why most adtech vendors know they’re selling snake oil but keep doing it anywayRichard also drops wisdom on mergers and acquisitions, why integration fails most of the time, how AI projects are like building bridges, and yes—his inability to remember garbage day. Spoiler: his biggest rival in life might be the trash bin.Oh, and if you’re wondering how Karen Carpenter, Metallica, and short-nosed pugs all fit into the same episode… you’ll want to listen.Big thanks to our sponsors:💼 Troutman Amin LLP – The lawyers who actually understand this industry and aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty.📊 Incremental.com – The measurement company that’s finally putting a stake in the heart of vanity metrics. If you're tired of dashboards that lie to you, they’re the ones who’ll show you what’s actually working.This is adtech without the nonsense. Just sharp insights, broken myths, and a whole lot of pug snoring.🧠 Watch now.💣 Rethink everything.🎧 And stay bold, stay curious, and know more than you did yesterday.

Adam Potashnick, North American CEO of Brainlabs, blends military-grade leadership with a passion for team culture. He discusses the importance of hiring socially gifted individuals over 'rockstars' for effective collaboration. Adam tackles the shortcomings of AI in advertising, emphasizing the need for genuine human connections. He underscores the significance of celebrating wins, big or small, and shares personal anecdotes about resilience and growth. With candor, he reveals the realities of ad tech, making this conversation a refreshing take on modern marketing dynamics.

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 forHow to tell if your “attention” vendor is selling smoke and mirrorsWhat went right with Slater & Gordon’s attention-optimized campaignCoca-Cola’s underrated playbook on brand salience and light buyersWhy performance marketing without memory is like selling coupons in a blackoutWhat “search as shelf space” really means—and why branded keyword spend might be your budget’s saddest line itemAnd 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.https://new.adotat.com/subscribe

Chris Kane, from Jounce Media, delves into the chaotic world of ad tech, revealing shocking insights about the state of the open web. He discusses the downfall of Multi-Functional Advertising (MFA) and how DSPs serve low-quality impressions instead of high-value ones. Kane sheds light on the economic struggles of publishers, caught in their own Hunger Games of optimization. He emphasizes the critical need for transparency and trustworthiness in ad tech, all while sharing his personal growth philosophy and the occasional dance-off. Dive in for a rude awakening!