Marketing, Media & Adtech

Every company is buying AI tools. Matt Egol says that's the easy part, and the reason most of them won't see a return.

Matt is founder and CEO of Journey Spark Consulting, a strategic advisor to AgenticAdvertising.org, and spent 15 years as a partner at PwC, where he worked alongside Randall Rothenberg back in the Booz & Company days. His argument: AI won't drive ROI if you don't change how your organization thinks, decides and behaves. Culture eats strategy for breakfast, and it eats AI budgets too.

In this episode:

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Moburst grew 200% a year by betting on mobile before anyone else took it seriously. Now its co-founder and COO, Lior Eldan, says SEO is already dead, and most marketers just haven’t accepted it yet.

Lior explains why the next decade of search belongs to AEO and GEO: being the source that ChatGPT, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews trust and cite, not the blue link that ranks number one. He walks through how Moburst rebuilt itself as a house of brands (Uproar for PR, Kitcaster for podcasts, Layer for web and apps) because AI judges your whol...

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:

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Host Pesach Lattin sits down with Kristina Kaganer, CPTO at Navigator and founder of Wayfable, for a conversation about AI, profitability, and what fifteen years inside the big holding companies actually teaches you. ABOUT THE GUEST Kristina Kaganer is Chief Product & Technology Officer at Navigator, where she leads product, engineering, paid media, and ad operations to build a commerce media network. She is the founder of Wayfable, a personalized children's storytelling product she designed and shipped in two weeks using the Yoto developer API and ElevenLabs voice synthesis. Before Navigator she spent roughly fifteen years buying and building marketing...

ordan Finger took Freshly from 5 million to a Nestlé exit and ran growth at Nutrafol before Unilever came calling. Now he runs a fractional CGO practice and shows up to my show to bury the entire agency model, insult the 27-year-old running your Facebook account, and argue that a hundred bucks of AI replaces the whole shop. So I did what I do. I asked him how selling "pattern recognition built over decades" is any different from being an agency of one, and whether pattern recognition is precisely the thing AI is best at. We got into the exits, t...

Here's a podcast episode description with a fresh title.

Title:

The Cache That Cried Apocalypse: Lotem Karmon on the Ad Tech Crisis That Was Just a Subsidy Ending

Description:

Microsoft sent an email, picked a date, said the word "deprecate," and an entire industry started shopping for a funeral. Pre-bid cache was dying on April 30th, and large publishers were staring down caching bills of fifty to a hundred thousand dollars a month for a thing most of them didn't know they were using.

Then Lotem Karmon, VP of...

Ashkan Karbasfrooshan built one of the biggest channels on the planet from Montreal. 17 billion views. 40 million subscribers. Fifteen years without a dollar of outside money. Six of those years, he lost money and took out a second mortgage. Now he wants to do something harder: bring Major League Baseball back to Montreal. A team that left in 2004. A four-billion-dollar price tag he doesn't have. A stadium that doesn't exist. And a plan that's mostly phone calls and a refusal to ask anyone's permission. In this episode we get into all of it. The "10-year overnight success." The four-quadrant theory...

The Alienation Tax: Dennis Pekel on the AI Bubble, Adtech's Detroit Moment, and Why "Adoption" Is a Lie | The ADOTAT Show Dennis Pekel quit GumGum to sit at home and think. No company, no product, no number. Just the sharpest read on the AI bubble in advertising we have heard all year, and a phrase you are going to steal: the alienation tax, the cost a brand pays for selling to people whose worldview it never checked. He cannot tell you what it costs. We spent an hour finding out anyway. In this episode of The ADOTAT Show, Pesach...

Season 9 of the ADOTAT Show kicks off with a guest who actually has the standing to tell The Trade Desk to sit down. John Nardone, founding IAB member, the man behind the first internet banner ad on Wired in 1994, sold X Plus One to Rocket Fuel for $230 million, sold Flashtalking for half a billion, and is now CEO of JWX. After Jeff Green characterized SSPs and resellers as obfuscators dressed up as defenders of the open web, Nardone wrote him a public letter. The line that ricocheted through adland: "please don't insult us with false virtue." In this episode...

iHeartMedia quietly acquired the most important infrastructure company in audio and almost nobody in adtech noticed. John Rosso, CEO of Triton Digital and President of iHeartMedia's Technology Solutions Group, joins Pesach Lattin to break down the $230 million acquisition, why broadcast radio just shipped an identity solution connected TV has spent six years failing to build, and which audio inventory tiers are mispriced going into 2026.

This is the season eight finale of the ADOTAT Show. Season nine returns Monday, June 1, 2026.

WHAT WE COVER

The plumbing thesis and why infrastructure matters more than content.

On this episode of The ADOTAT Show, Pesach Lattin sits down with Shawn Jensen, Founder and CEO of Profila, the Swiss startup that's spent eight years building what they call zero-knowledge advertising, a privacy-first AdTech architecture where consumer data never leaves the device. Jensen doesn't pull punches. He calls CPM a vanity metric, says the $700 billion digital ad industry forgot to ask the customer what they want, and argues that the entire surveillance-based targeting model built since 2005 is a $50 billion-a-year fraud problem dressed up as innovation. We get into declared intent vs inferred intent, why GDPR and the EU...

Kirby Grimes helped build the first streaming TV apps on the planet. He co-founded Float Left, one of Roku's first development partners back in 2009, got acquired, launched 4320 (a B2B marketing agency for media tech companies), and now publishes The Streaming Wars. He also raps about the media industry on LinkedIn and made it to 42 without seeing Star Wars. In this episode of The ADOTAT Show, Pesach Lattin and Kirby get into: 00:00 Intro 01:30 Why ad-supported digital publishing is broken in 2026 06:00 The real reason recipe sites are unusable 10:00 Interruption vs ambient vs task-based attention in advertising 13:00 Contextual ads, dynamic creative...

Karsten Weide has spent 35 years inside the advertising machine. Journalist at Ziff Davis during the PC era. Built Yahoo Germany from an empty room with one phone on the floor. Sixteen years as a senior analyst at IDC modeling the digital advertising business. Now independent, and finally saying out loud what everyone in ad tech thinks but won't post on LinkedIn: the industry is lying, everybody knows it's lying, and if we all just stopped, we'd have more fun.In this episode of the ADOTAT Show, Pesach Lattin sits down with Karsten for one of the most honest conversations...

Retail media has reshaped the advertising landscape faster than almost any channel in the last decade. First-party data, closed-loop measurement, and new opportunities for brands to connect with shoppers at the point of decision. But as the space matures, important questions are emerging about concentration, competition, and what the next chapter looks like for buyers, retailers, and platforms. In this episode of The ADOTAT Show, we sit down with Mark Donohue, GM of Retail Media at Placements.io, for one of the most thoughtful and honest conversations we have had on the show. Mark brings decades of experience from...

Rob Janes is VP of Revenue at Ad Butler. He sells ad serving technology for a living. He also thinks the open auction was one of the worst things that ever happened to publishers, that Google had everyone locked in a dependency they could not escape, and that the entire programmatic ecosystem exists, at least in part, to make itself necessary.

He said most of this out loud. On a stage. In 2019. To a room full of people whose livelihoods depended on programmatic advertising.

But here is the thing about Rob Janes that makes this...

Rich Kahn, CEO of Anura and one of the digital advertising industry's most uncompromising voices on ad fraud, joins Pesach Lattin on The ADOTAT Show for a conversation that should be required watching for every media buyer, brand marketer, programmatic trader, and ad tech executive who has ever looked at a campaign dashboard and assumed the numbers were real. They are not. At least not half of them. In this episode, Rich Kahn breaks down the $140 billion annual ad fraud problem that the programmatic advertising ecosystem has systematically chosen to ignore, explains why the pre-bid filtering your DSP is...

Skye Frontier of Incremental came on ADOTAT to tell me everything the marketing industry doesn't want you to know. He did not disappoint.We got into why ROAS is the high fructose corn syrup of marketing measurement, how 73% of organizations are still running their entire media programs on a metric that has no proven connection to actual sales, and why the platforms selling you attribution software have absolutely no incentive to fix any of this.Skye has spent his career in measurement and incrementality, which means he has spent his career watching smart people cling to broken metrics for...

Justin Pearse, editor of New Digital Age and co-founder of BlueStrike Group, joins Pesach Lattin on the ADOTAT Show for a conversation spanning thirty years of digital advertising history, the rise and fall of attention metrics, the future of trade media, the BlueStrike model of owning both a PR agency and a trade publication simultaneously, and why the advertising industry has survived every near death experience thrown at it and will probably survive the next one too.

Justin started as a journalist covering the dot com boom, watched programmatic advertising get built from scratch, covered every major...

Jeremy Hlavacek, former VP at The Weather Company, IBM Watson Advertising, and Experian Marketing Services, joins Pesach Lattin on the ADOTAT Show for one of the most honest conversations about the state of digital advertising, programmatic, identity resolution, and connected television that you will find anywhere in 2026.

Jeremy built one of the first programmatic publisher operations in the industry at The Weather Company, ran revenue strategy at IBM Watson Advertising, and led identity and data strategy at Experian Marketing Services before launching his independent consulting practice. He has been inside every major wave of digital advertising at...

Everyone in ad tech slapped AI-powered on their homepage and called it a product update. Matt Spiegel calls it what it is.

Matt Spiegel — founder, Omnicom exec, programmatic pioneer, and EVP of True Audience Growth and Strategy at TransUnion — sits down with Pesach Lattin to deliver the most uncomfortable truth in digital advertising right now: AI doesn't solve broken data problems. It amplifies them.

In this episode we cover:

He Thinks Your CTV CPMs Are Too Low (And He Has Receipts) | Jordan Greene | ADOTAT Show Jordan Greene has spent 25 years collecting unpopular opinions about digital advertising and occasionally being proven right about all of them. As co-founder and Chief Media Officer of Alpha Precision Media -- the only NMSDC-certified minority-owned Amazon ecosystem partner in the country -- he has watched mobile advertising grow from carrier-based WAP pages into a $200 billion industry, and he is now making the same bet on connected television that most of the industry is still too nervous to make out loud. His position: CTV...

116 views Feb 26, 2026 #AI #audio #podcasting

Tim Armstrong went from a dairy farm in rural New Zealand to leading digital transformation at Mangrove Digital in Australia. Somewhere between herding 200 cows through lightning storms at 5 a.m. and optimizing programmatic supply paths, he picked up a take so hot it might melt your entire AI strategy: People still matter more than your algorithm. Yeah. We said it. In this episode of the ADOTAT Show, Pesach Lattin sits down with Tim to talk about why 53% of marketers think their AI is underwhelming (they're being generous), why companies are firing humans...

Frazer Locke has 34 years of retail and ad tech scars. He spent a decade inside Amazon building the ads machine before anyone took it seriously, and now he's SVP of International Sales at TripleLift, the creative SSP trying to keep retail media from becoming an unwatchable Blade Runner hellscape of infinite ads.

In this episode of the ADOTAT Show, Pesach Lattin sits down with Frazer to talk about what's actually broken in retail media (even though he's too British to use that word), why frequency capping is a sanity check the industry is failing, what he learned...

Liz DeAngelis from Brainlabs joins Pesach Lattin on the ADOTAT Show to tear apart everything the ad tech industry pretends is working. From programmatic advertising's broken incentives to why attribution is theater, why video completion rate is an emotional support KPI, and why cheap never actually means efficient, this conversation pulls no punches. Liz has seen it all. Mobile app marketing. The Ad Council's COVID-19 vaccine campaign. Growth at Monks. And now leading programmatic strategy at Brainlabs where she's asking the questions nobody wants to answer: does any of this actually drive business impact or are we just funding...

Gaming is the single largest media channel on the planet. Bigger than streaming. Bigger than social media. Bigger than CTV. 3.5 billion people play at least one game every month — that's 90% of everyone connected to the internet. And yet the advertising industry has spent the last two decades pretending gaming doesn't exist. In this interview, I sit down with Itamar Benedy, the founder and CEO of Anzu, the company pioneering programmatic in-game advertising with native 3D ad placements inside video games. After eight years building Anzu, Itamar says they haven't even hit 1% of the journey — and explains why that's both the...

Sam Bloom, Head of Partnerships at PMG, returns to the ADOTAT Show for round two. Either that's heroic or deeply concerning. In this episode, Sam gets brutally honest about the AI hype cycle flooding ad tech, why most "agentic" tools are just the same old crap with a .ai domain, and how to tell the difference between real innovation and vendor theater. He breaks down his two-question filter that every pitch must pass, explains why 70% of agency time disappears into work nobody enjoys, and reveals why he fears two people in a garage more than the big holding companies...

Bob Lord: The Quantum Computing Defector Who Escaped Advertising, Spent 8 Years Learning How Technology Actually Works at IBM, and Then Came Back to Burn Down the FTE Model

Here's a career arc that sounds like a fever dream: He ran Razorfish, sold it to Microsoft, sold it again to Publicis, became president of AOL during Verizon's $4.4 billion acquisition, then completely abandoned advertising to become a senior vice president at IBM where he got "steeped in large language models, neural networks, quantum computing" and learned to track a single product floating somewhere in the South China Sea. Now...

Jason White has spent 20+ years actually BUILDING technology at Viacom, OpenX, CBS, Fox MySpace, and multiple startups. Unlike the PowerPoint warriors flooding LinkedIn, he's coded real systems, invented RTB structures, and survived every hype cycle from the dot-com bubble to today's AI frenzy. In this brutally honest conversation, Jason exposes: ❌ Why 60-70% of "AI features" are just rule-based logic with an LLM wrapper ❌ The platform risk nobody talks about (spoiler: when ChatGPT builds your feature, you're done) ❌ Why ChatGPT is only right 50% of the time—and argues when it's wrong ❌ How ad blockers are inexplicably allowed in buying platforms ❌ Why programm...

Local TV has been written off as plumbers, pizza shops, and leftover budgets for far too long. Jason Manningham is here to explain why that take is lazy, expensive, and wrong. In this episode of The ADOTAT Show, Pesach Lattin sits down with Blockgraph CEO Jason Manningham to unpack the part of the TV ecosystem everyone pretends to understand and absolutely does not. We dig into why local advertising is actually a $170B market, why zip codes are a blunt instrument, and why proximity and household identity outperform the buzzword soup most decks are built on. This conversation covers...

Nick Stark didn’t come on The ADOTAT Show to talk about “the future of CTV” in soft-focus buzzwords. He came to talk about why connected TV advertising quietly bleeds money every day and why most of the industry pretends it’s normal. Nick is the CEO of GoGoCTV, a company that exists for one uncomfortable reason: streaming ads are often built on bad metadata, missing signals, broken ad plumbing, and contracts nobody audits after signing. If you’ve ever seen premium CTV inventory monetize like clearance-bin display, this episode explains exactly how that happens and why it keeps happening...

Founders love telling you they’re “building the future.” Most of them are really just building new ways to charge you for the same old chaos. On this episode of The ADOTAT Show, Pesach Lattin runs a rare double-header: Amol Waishampayan (the product philosopher behind Full Throttle AI) and David Regn (the guy who helped build Stream into a 27-year force of nature without lighting the building on fire). Together, they walk straight into adtech’s identity problem and do the unthinkable: talk like adults. Topics include: First-party identity: why the industry treated it like optional kale until the cookies...