Marketing, Media & Adtech

Consumers are fine with ads. Ricardo Belmar said it on The ADOTAT Show, to an ad tech audience, with a straight face.

Ricardo is the founder and host of the Retail Razor Podcast Network, a former retail marketing director at Microsoft, and a six-time RETHINK Retail top expert. His argument comes in three parts: consumers don't hate ads, retail is still a people business, and agentic commerce is a new channel, not the end of the store.

Pesach Lattin pushes back on every one of them.

In this episode:

• Why ad spend keeps rising, and whether that proves anything
• Amazon's sponsored-results buffet, and why Ricardo clicks the organic listing out of spite
• Streaming was born to kill ads. Then every streamer added an ad tier
• The Super Bowl as an awareness play, not a performance buy
• Retail media at $50 billion: proof that consumers accept ads, or a data heist with a nicer name?
• The 40 easy questions: what AI should actually do for store staff
• The toilet paper test: does the brand matter when a bot does the shopping?
• Why your product pages may be invisible to AI chatbots
• A June prediction about this holiday season, now due
• Manhattan is not America, and Gen Z wants a person
• Kylie Minogue, Ryan Reynolds, Aviation Gin, and the kids he left off the island on purpose

Chapters:

0:00 Cold open

0:10 The ADOTAT Show

0:40 A word from Troutman Amin

1:00 Ricardo Belmar joins

16:54 A word from Incremental

17:09 The conversation continues

34:05 Thanks for watching

Watch the video: youtube.com/watch?v=pB1lxLBRy2U

Read the full write-up, with the numbers checked and where Ricardo is wrong: new.adotat.com

The ADOTAT Show is sponsored by Troutman Amin LLP and Incremental (ROAS tells you what sold. Incrementality tells you what your ads caused.). Sponsors have no say over guests, questions or edits. ADOTAT is reader-supported. No paid placement in editorial.

Hosted by Pesach Lattin, investigative journalist and publisher of ADOTAT.

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:

- The global entertainment company that set out to automate more than half its marketing workflow, and why its own people pushed back

- Creativity vs. analytics, and why the industry still treats them as rival departments

- From authorship to orchestration: hundreds of ad versions per persona, and the 50 to 150 percent lift Matt says it can deliver over DCO

- Advertising's shift from bowling to pinball

- Lou Carbone's "brand canyon," the gap between what customers say about you and how you make them feel

- Why quantified emotion beats Net Promoter Score at predicting business outcomes

- A desert island with Mark Twain, Ben Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, Marie Curie and Kristen Kish

Chapters

0:00 Cold open

0:10 The ADOTAT Show

1:01 Meet Matt Egol

1:41 Why tools aren't the problem

2:47 The company that hit a culture wall

5:28 Matt, Randy Rothenberg and the AAO

9:23 Creativity vs. analytics

12:22 From authorship to orchestration

14:56 From bowling to pinball

17:37 What's the spark?

18:30 The desert island

22:46 X-ray vision for emotions

23:50 Lou Carbone and the brand canyon

25:44 Is AI making it stronger?

27:49 Designing for the unconscious

29:07 Rapid fire

30:08 Fix the culture first

Buy the technology. Fix the culture first.

The ADOTAT Show is sponsored by Troutman Amin LLP and Incremental. Sponsors have no say over guests, questions or edits.

Watch on YouTube: youtu.be/tajG11F2bOI

Read the full interview issue: adotat.com

Journey Spark Consulting: journeysparkconsulting.com

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 whole footprint, not just your website. He also explains why Reddit and real user conversations now carry so much weight with LLMs, and what “Q5” means for brands brave enough to run into the fire.

Plus: three things every CMO should do tomorrow, why ASO is getting pulled into AI search, and the most specific desert island pick in show history.

A previous guest told us agencies are dead. Lior runs one of the fastest-growing agencies in the world. Someone is wrong.

Chapters

0:00 Cold open

1:07 Meet Lior Eldan

1:50 Is SEO really dead?

4:22 AEO and GEO, explained

7:22 Moburst’s house of brands

12:30 Homework for CMOs

21:10 What ASO means now

21:23 The desert island

24:38 Q5 and running into the fire

33:46 What we learned

The ADOTAT Show is presented by Troutman Amin LLP and Incremental.

Be bold. Be curious. And know more than you did yesterday.

Subscribe free at adotat.com. No paid placement in editorial. Ever.

#AdTech #SEO #AEO #GEO #AISearch #Marketing #Moburst #TheADOTATShow

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 LLMs
• AI walled gardens vs. the AI open web, and how ads can pay for the tokens
• Is 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 did
• Claude, the Super Bowl ad, and why Andrea thinks Anthropic’s no-ads promise is a math problem
• Trust from day one: separate, clearly labeled, additive ads
• Why contextual ads in AI can be more private than cookies ever were
• User journey compression: the whole funnel in one chat window
• Where the brightest graduates went, and why advertising needs them back
• Brian O’Kelley, a Thrad cap, and AdCP’s Sponsored Intelligence protocol
• Why “ads to agents” isn’t advertising
• A desert island with his wife, his co-founder, his parents and his best friend

Andrea Tortella is CEO and co-founder of Thrad. Find him on LinkedIn.

Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XA4w3Q4Lu4

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

Presented 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 finding
• Why 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 assets
• Why get a dog and bark yourself: what world-class advertisers want from an agency in 2026
• Why AI is an adoption problem, not a technology problem
• The holding company diet: Omnicom, IPG, Publicis, LiveRamp and the agency brands that got sunset
• The missing middle: who trains the next planner when nobody hires juniors
• A sea of sameness: what happens when every brand follows the same signals
• Why brands would rather hire engineers than media buyers
• Stranded on a desert island with the entire cast of Curb Your Enthusiasm

Ryan 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 episode

• Why 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 money
• The $40 billion, where it came from, and what he thinks it actually proves
• How the holding companies made rebates acceptable by bragging about them to Wall Street
• Why he'd rather work for California Pizza Kitchen than Coke
• Zero vice presidents, no timesheets, and the $350,000 group director versus the heart surgeon
• Retail media and digital media are merging, and the thing holding it up is labor
• What 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.io

The 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.