Signal & Noise

AI may live in the cloud, but the infrastructure behind it is very physical: land, power plants, transmission lines, water systems, construction crews—and communities deciding whether they actually want massive data centers in their backyard.

In this episode of Signal & Noise, Rio Longacre and Brett House sit down with Dawson Kluesner, Director of External Affairs for the Wyoming Association of Municipalities and Coordinator for the Wyoming Economic Development Association. Dawson sits at a fascinating intersection: he works with the cities and towns evaluating major infrastructure projects while also working alongside the economic-development community trying to attract in...

AI makes it easier to create content. Getting people to care is still the hard part.

On this episode of Signal & Noise, host Rio Longacre and guest host Krish Raja sit down with Gregory Kennedy, founder of Vibe Your SaaS, for a candid conversation about memes, founder-led marketing, creative talent, and building an independent business in the AI era.

Gregory traces his path from New York’s design scene and an award-winning website he built in 1997 to two decades in Silicon Valley and a move to Seattle. He explains how a founder-coaching idea grew into Vi...

The open web has survived search, social media, programmatic advertising, privacy regulation, and the rise of the walled gardens. But does generative AI represent a fundamentally different threat?

In this episode of Signal & Noise, Rio Longacre sits down one-on-one with Kurt Donnell, President & CEO of Freestar, while Brett House is away.

Kurt brings an unusual perspective. He began his career as an M&A attorney, moved into media and operations, helped take YogaWorks public, and eventually joined Freestar as its first CEO. Under his leadership, Freestar says it has grown sevenfold, expanded to 185 employees across 15...

Few people have had a better vantage point on the transformation of advertising, technology, and work than Rishad Tobaccowala.

Over a 37-year career at Publicis Groupe, Rishad helped pioneer its digital businesses, chaired Digitas and Razorfish, and ultimately served as Global Chief Strategist and Growth Officer. Today, he is an author, teacher, adviser, senior adviser to Publicis Groupe, co-founder of the Athena Project on Modern Leadership, and one of the industry’s most original thinkers on how people and organizations navigate change.

In this wide-ranging, smart, funny, and deeply thought-provoking conversation, Rishad joins Brett House an...

What does it take to walk away from a prestigious legal career, build a technology company from scratch, take it public—and then reinvent the business along the way?

In this episode of Signal & Noise, Brett House and Rio Longacre sit down with Bryan Leach, Founder, CEO, President & Chairman of Ibotta, for a wide-ranging conversation about entrepreneurship, commerce media, measurement, AI, and why he chose Denver as the place to build.

Bryan’s path to technology was anything but conventional. After Harvard, Oxford as a Marshall Scholar, Yale Law School, a Supreme Court clerkship, and a su...

Generative AI has made it radically easier—and cheaper—to create advertising. But if every brand can suddenly produce infinite variations using the same models, what creates competitive advantage?

In this episode of Signal & Noise, Rio Longacre and Brett House sit down with Alex Collmer, Founder & Executive Chairman of Vidmob, to explore why the next battleground in advertising may not be content generation. It may be the intelligence that determines what to create, why it works, and what brands learn from every ad they put into market.

Alex traces Vidmob’s evolution from a marketplace connec...

Retail media was built on a powerful promise: connect advertising directly to transactions and finally show marketers what their media dollars produced. But as the category matures, a harder question is replacing simple attribution: Did the advertising actually cause the sale?

In this episode of Signal & Noise, Rio Longacre and Brett House sit down with Jeffrey Cohen, Chief Business Development Officer at Skai and former Principal Evangelist at Amazon Ads, for a wide-ranging conversation about the evolution of commerce media—and what happens as intelligent agents begin taking over work once performed through dashboards, spreadsheets, rules engines, an...

AI agents can retrieve, combine, analyze, infer from, and act on enormous amounts of data—often at a speed no human compliance team can match. But access to data does not automatically confer the right to use it. So who sets the rules, and who remains accountable when an AI system crosses the line?

In this episode of Signal & Noise, Brett House and Rio Longacre sit down with Richy Glassberg, Co-Founder and CEO of SafeGuard Privacy, for a candid and wide-ranging conversation about privacy, consent, AI governance, and the digital advertising industry’s long history of creating prob...

Everyone is talking about AI. Far fewer people have spent decades actually building AI and data systems inside some of the world’s largest organizations.

In this episode of Signal & Noise, Brett House and Rio Longacre sit down with Zoher Karu, Head of AI at Taelor, to separate AI hype from what it actually takes to create measurable business value.

Zohar brings an unusually broad perspective. His career has taken him through McKinsey, Sears, Citi, eBay, Blue Shield of California, and now Taelor—an AI-powered men’s clothing rental service attempting to combine machine intelligence with h...

Artificial intelligence may be the most transformative technology of our generation—but according to Fern Potter, AI alone is not a strategy.In this episode of Signal & Noise, hosts Rio Longacre and Brett House sit down with Fern Potter, Co-Founder of Intelligent Assistance, to explore why the greatest opportunity in AI isn’t replacing people—it’s amplifying human judgment.After more than two decades leading strategy, product, partnerships, and commercial growth across agencies, media, and ad tech—including serving as Chief Strategy & Growth Officer at Multilocal—Fern made the leap to entrepreneurship. Alongside her co-founders, she launched Intelligent Assistance a...

For more than two decades, digital marketing revolved around a familiar goal: get people to your website.

Rank higher. Earn the click. Drive the traffic. Convert the visitor.

But what happens when the customer never makes it to your homepage?

As consumers increasingly turn to ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and other AI-powered experiences to research products, vendors, and brands, the rules of discovery are being rewritten. Increasingly, AI is deciding which companies get mentioned, how they’re described, which sources are trusted—and which brands get recommended at all. 

In...

What becomes valuable when artificial intelligence makes information—and misinformation—nearly limitless? According to Nextdoor CEO and Co-Founder Nirav Tolia, the answer is trust.

In this episode of Signal & Noise, Nirav joins Brett House and Rio Longacre for a wide-ranging conversation about the internet’s evolution from the age of information to the age of intelligence—and why that transformation must be accompanied by a renewed age of human connection.

Nirav reflects on lessons from his career as an entrepreneur and early Yahoo employee, his return to lead Nextdoor, and the challenge of building a digital...

Dollar General might be one of the most underestimated media businesses in America.

With more than 21,000 stores, over two billion transactions annually, and 75% of Americans living within five miles of a Dollar General, DG combines enormous physical reach with high-frequency customer relationships, rich first-party data, and access to audiences that advertisers often struggle to reach elsewhere.

In this episode of Signal & Noise, Krish Raja sits down with Austin Leonard, Vice President and General Manager of DG Media Network, to explore how Dollar General is turning those assets into a sophisticated advertising business—and how AI is...

Programmatic advertising automated the transaction. AI may automate the negotiation.

In this episode of Signal & Noise, Brett House and Rio Longacre sit down with Andrew Mole, CEO and Co-Founder of PubX, for a provocative conversation about agentic trading, publisher monetization, and what happens when AI agents begin representing both sides of the advertising market.

Andrew has spent much of his career watching programmatic evolve from a breakthrough in efficiency into an extraordinarily complex ecosystem of DSPs, SSPs, exchanges, data providers, verification platforms, and intermediaries. His argument is simple: much of this infrastructure exists because humans...

Digital commerce spent the last two decades perfecting the storefront. AI may be about to make the storefront far less important.

In this episode of Signal & Noise, Brett House and Rio Longacre sit down with Bryan House, CEO of Elastic Path, to explore how AI is reshaping ecommerce, B2B commerce, product discovery—and potentially the act of buying itself.Bryan argues that commerce had actually become somewhat predictable. Platforms had spent years removing friction, optimizing conversion and standardizing the online shopping experience. Then AI arrived and reopened some of the biggest questions in the industry. One of...

What happens when companies move so fast to adopt AI that they forget everything they already learned about building technology safely?

In this special edition of Signal & Noise Live at AI Con, Signal & Noise Executive Voice contributor Lucas Longacre, Head of Product at Inlightened, sits down with Ken Johnston, co-founder of the AI Governance Operations Foundation (AI GovOps), for a candid conversation about what it really takes to deploy and scale AI inside an organization.

Ken argues that the rush to embrace AI has created a massive case of enterprise FOMO. Companies feel enormous pressure...

For the past two years, the AI conversation has centered on one question:

Which model is best?

But what if we’ve been focused on the wrong competitive advantage?

In this episode of Signal & Noise, hosts Rio Longacre and Brett House sit down with Eddie Drake, Industry Principal, Marketing, Advertising & Experience at Snowflake, to explore why the future of enterprise AI won’t be determined by the smartest foundation models—but by the quality of an organization’s proprietary data, governance, and enterprise context.

As AI becomes embedded across every business function...

For years, app marketing revolved around one metric: installs.

But what if installs are actually the least important measure of success?

In this episode of Signal & Noise, Brett House and Rio Longacre sit down with Mick Rigby, Founder & CEO of Yodel Mobile, to explore how nearly two decades in mobile have reshaped the way brands should think about app growth.  

Mick founded Yodel Mobile in 2007—months before Apple launched the App Store—and has spent the last nineteen years helping brands including Gymshark, NBCUniversal, B&Q, and Kuda acquire, retain, and monetize app users...

Marketing has spent decades building walls.

Brand versus performance. Advertising versus MarTech. Agencies versus in-house teams. IT versus marketing. Customer experience versus media.

What if those walls are finally coming down?

In this episode of Signal & Noise, Brett House and Rio Longacre sit down with Ana Mourão, a globally recognized marketing technology leader, author, and thought leader, to explore why the future of marketing belongs to leaders who can bridge strategy, technology, data, and AI.

Drawing on years of experience leading marketing transformations inside some of the world’s largest glo...

Advertising has never had more data—or less certainty.

Marketers today have access to billions of signals, AI-powered dashboards, clean rooms, attribution models, marketing mix models (MMM), and platform reporting. Yet despite this explosion of data, one fundamental question has become harder to answer:

What actually worked?

In this episode of Signal & Noise, Brett House and Rio Longacre sit down with Joanna Drews, Co-Founder and CEO of HyphaMetrics, for a thought-provoking conversation about the future of advertising measurement and why the industry may have been chasing the wrong kind of precision all along. Th...

Mobile advertising has quietly become the largest laboratory for innovation in digital marketing. From privacy changes and AI-powered creative to playable ads and performance optimization, many of the industry’s biggest breakthroughs have happened on mobile first.

Few people have had a closer view of that transformation than Alex Merutka.

In this episode of Signal & Noise, hosts Rio Longacre and Brett House sit down with Alex Merutka, Founder and CEO of CRAFTSMAN+, to explore the evolution of mobile advertising, the future of creative intelligence, and why the next competitive advantage in performance marketing won’t come...

What happens when AI stops assisting marketers—and starts becoming the marketing team?

In this episode of Signal & Noise, Brett House and Rio Longacre sit down with Julius Körfgen, Co-Founder & CEO of Uplane, to explore one of the biggest questions facing the marketing industry: if AI can plan campaigns, generate creative, optimize budgets, launch ads, analyze performance, and continuously improve results, what role is left for human marketers?

Julius isn’t simply predicting the future—he’s building it.

After growing up in Germany, launching his first online business as a teenager, and leadi...

Artificial intelligence is changing how work gets done. But what if the real disruption isn’t AI itself?

What if the most valuable asset in the future economy isn’t code, content, or even data—but your judgment?

In this episode of Signal & Noise, Executive Voice Krish Raja sits down with Dan Pratl, CEO of Quadron, for one of the most philosophical and forward-looking conversations we’ve had on the show. Drawing on his unique background in securities regulation, open-source software, cryptocurrency, and AI infrastructure, Dan argues that we’re entering a new economic era where expe...

What happens when artificial intelligence stops being just another productivity tool—and starts changing how we think about work, creativity, organizations, and even what it means to be human?

In this thought-provoking episode of Signal & Noise, hosts Rio Longacre and Brett House sit down with entrepreneur and AI infrastructure founder Kyle Csik, Founder & CEO of Adaly AI, for a wide-ranging conversation that stretches from enterprise AI architecture to philosophy, economics, education, and the future of civilization. 

Kyle’s career has always sat at the intersection of technology, entrepreneurship, and systems thinking. After founding his first compa...

Gaming has grown far beyond entertainment. It is now one of the world’s largest industries—and one of technology’s most influential laboratories for understanding engagement, retention, monetization, community, and consumer behavior.

In this episode of Signal & Noise, Brett House and Rio Longacre sit down with Phylicia Koh, General Partner at Play Ventures, a global venture capital firm investing in gaming, consumer applications, and the technologies powering both.

Phylicia joined Play Ventures as its first employee after nearly a decade working across marketing, growth, product, and startup operations. Today, she invests in game studios, techno...

What if the best way to future-proof your career isn't learning another AI tool—but learning to think like a hacker?

In this episode of Signal & Noise, Executive Voice Krish Raja sits down with Alanna Laforet—technology executive, former Chief Revenue Officer, startup operator, blockchain pioneer, and advisor—to explore what it really takes to reinvent yourself in an era where AI is transforming every industry.

Alanna's career has never followed a traditional path. From starting as a Unix systems administrator and QA engineer at DoubleClick to helping shape advertising standards at the IAB Tech Lab, leadi...

Artificial intelligence is transforming every industry—but what happens when it transforms an entire city?

In this episode of Signal & Noise, hosts Rio Longacre and Brett House sit down with Suma Nallapati, Chief AI & Information Officer for the City and County of Denver, to explore one of the most important—and often overlooked—applications of AI: improving the lives of citizens.

Rio and Suma first met during Mayor Mike Johnston's transition team, and this conversation brings together years of shared interest in technology, public service, and civic innovation. Rather than focusing on AI's impact on marketing or e...

Every AI breakthrough begins with something far less glamorous: clean, trustworthy data.

In this episode of Signal & Noise, Brett House and Rio Longacre sit down with Jer Tippets, Director of Digital Tagging & Implementation at Hyatt Hotels, to explore the invisible infrastructure that powers modern digital marketing. While everyone is talking about generative AI, personalization, and autonomous agents, Jer argues that none of it works without a solid data foundation—and after spending more than 15 years building customer data systems for global brands, he's uniquely qualified to explain why. 

Rio first met Jer when they were both s...

For nearly two decades, digital advertising has optimized around one primary objective: finding the cheapest possible way to reach the right person. Programmatic buying, identity signals, attribution, and performance marketing have created extraordinary efficiency—but they may also have trained the industry to systematically undervalue one of the most important variables in advertising effectiveness: the quality of the media itself.

In this episode of Signal & Noise, Rio Longacre and Brett House welcome back friend of the podcast Erez Levin for his third appearance and his second full-length conversation. Erez is one of the industry's most respected voices on me...

This week, the future of digital advertising arrived.

Following Boostr and Vox Media’s landmark announcement of one of the industry’s first public agentic media buys using AdCP, Signal & Noise sits down for an exclusive conversation with Patrick O’Leary, Founder & CEO of Boostr, to unpack exactly what happened—and why it matters.

For months, we’ve argued that agentic trading wasn’t a distant vision. It was already beginning. This announcement is one of the clearest signals yet that AI agents are moving beyond copilots and into autonomous negotiation, with buyer and seller agents worki...

Attribution was supposed to get easier. Instead, marketers today operate in a world of disappearing identifiers, privacy restrictions, walled gardens that increasingly measure themselves, and consumer journeys that unfold inside environments few advertisers can fully observe.

So how much confidence should we still have in the numbers? In this episode of Signal & Noise, Brett House and Rio Longacre sit down with Brian Quinn, President & GM of AppsFlyer, one of the most influential—but often least understood—companies in digital advertising.

For more than a decade, AppsFlyer has been at the center of mobi...

Colorado has become ground zero in one of the most important debates shaping the future of technology: how do we regulate AI without slowing innovation?

In this episode of Signal & Noise, Brett House and Rio Longacre sit down with Srinivas "Chinnu" Parinandi, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, to unpack the growing clash between government oversight, technological progress, and economic competitiveness.

The conversation begins with Colorado's controversial AI legislation and expands into a broader discussion about privacy regulation, federalism, interstate commerce, and the unintended consequences of state-by-state technology governance. Chinnu ex...

What happens when you stop trying to sound "professional" and start sounding like yourself?

In this Signal & Noise conversation, Executive Voice Krish Raja hosts his first solo episode with Justin Kramm, Founder & Creative Director of Shit Show Creative. The result is one of our funniest—and most surprisingly insightful—conversations to date.

Justin has spent more than two decades shaping creative work for brands including Nike, Red Bull, NVIDIA, Xbox, Uber, ESPN, and many others. More recently, he's built an enormous following on LinkedIn by doing something refreshingly different: embracing absurdity, authenticity, and humor to build a...

Day 4 marks the final chapter of Signal & Noise’s first Cannes Lions together as a team—and what a way to close out an unforgettable week.

Across four days at Hearst House, we recorded conversations with some of the brightest minds in advertising, media, identity, AI, cybersecurity, consulting, and marketing transformation. Cannes 2026 felt bigger, busier, and more energized than ever, with AI moving from theory to implementation and nearly every discussion centered on what happens when intelligent systems begin participating directly in media, commerce, and customer experiences.

In this Day 4 compilation, Rio Longacre, Brett House, and...

Day 3 at Cannes Lions 2026 may have been the hottest day in French history, but it also delivered some of the most thoughtful conversations of the week.

Recorded live from Hearst House in Cannes, this Signal & Noise compilation brings together founders, CMOs, product leaders, publishers, identity experts, and healthcare innovators to discuss what’s actually changing in advertising, media, data, and AI.

A recurring theme throughout the day was that we’re entering a new phase of the AI era. The prototypes are everywhere, but deployment is hard. Brands are still wrestling with fragmented data, trust, cont...

With Rio Longacre, Krish Raja & Brett House

Signal & Noise is on the ground at Cannes-Lions 2026.

This year marks the first time Rio Longacre, Krish Raja, and Brett House have attended Cannes together as a team under the Signal & Noise banner. While each of us has been to Cannes in previous years, experiencing it together—and recording conversations live from Hearst House—made this year’s festival something special.

And what a year to do it.

Cannes Lions 2026 felt bigger, busier, and more energized than ever. The familiar faces from advertising, media, and pu...

For weeks, reports that Publicis was exploring a relationship with Hightouch following its acquisition of LiveRamp circulated as an industry scoop. Until now, no one involved had publicly confirmed it.

In this special Signal & Noise Signal Break, we sit down with Hightouch co-founder and CEO Tejas Manohar, who confirms that Hightouch has in fact been in discussions with Publicis.

That confirmation adds an important new dimension to one of the biggest stories in adtech this year. What would a partnership between Publicis, LiveRamp, and Hightouch mean for identity, activation, clean rooms, and the future architecture of...

Signal & Noise Exclusive

Publishers create the content. Publishers build the audiences. Publishers bear the costs.

Yet somehow, after two decades of digital advertising innovation, many publishers capture only a fraction of the value they create.

In this Signal & Noise exclusive, Rio Longacre and Brett House sit down with Keith Petri, SVP of Data, Identity & Supply at Viant, and Rich Hyden, SVP of Publisher Solutions at Viant, for a deep discussion on one of the most important questions facing the open internet:

Can publishers reclaim their economic future—or are the economics of...

What happens when an early Amazon engineer who helped pioneer automated advertising leaves AdTech behind to build the world's fastest commercial airliner?

In this episode of Signal & Noise, Brett House and Rio Longacre sit down with Blake Scholl, Founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, for a wide-ranging conversation about innovation, entrepreneurship, aviation, AI, and why some of the world's biggest opportunities are hiding in plain sight.

Before launching Boom, Blake helped shape early internet advertising at Amazon, worked through the hypergrowth years at Groupon, and experienced firsthand the rise of AdTech, recommendation engines, and large-scale cu...

What happens when the technology that powers advertising becomes the thing consumers interact with directly?

In this episode of Signal & Noise, Rio Longacre and Brett House sit down with industry analyst Karsten Weide to explore one of the most important—and controversial—questions facing the digital economy: how AI will ultimately make money.

From advertising inside chatbots to agentic commerce, autonomous media buying, and the future of the open web, Karsten shares why he believes AI will reshape advertising more profoundly than any technology shift he has witnessed in more than three decades covering media, techno...