Ricardo Belmar came on The ADOTAT Show and told an ad tech audience that consumers are fine with ads. He said it with a straight face. Then he admitted that on Amazon he scrolls past the sponsored results and clicks the organic listing out of spite.
So that settles that.
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. He arrived with three arguments: consumers don't hate ads, retail is still a people business, and agentic commerce is a new channel, not the end of the store.
I pushed back on all three. He held up better than most CEOs do, which is admittedly a low bar that we keep in the studio for exactly this purpose.
What you get in 35 minutes
Ad spend keeps rising. Whether that proves people like ads or just proves nobody asked them
Streaming was born to kill ads. Then every streamer added an ad tier
Retail media at $50 billion: proof consumers accept ads, or a data heist with a nicer name
The toilet paper test: does the brand matter when a bot does the shopping?
Why your product pages may be invisible to AI chatbots, which is a fun thing to learn in November
A June prediction about this holiday season, now due
Kylie Minogue, Ryan Reynolds, Aviation Gin, and the kids he left off the desert island on purpose
Where to listen
The ADOTAT Show is on every platform that will have us, and a few that have not noticed yet. Pick your poison. All four of these have been tested and go where they say they go, which in ad tech counts as a product differentiator.
Follow the show on any one of them and the next episode finds you on its own. No pixel, no identity graph, no clean room. Just a button, like our ancestors used.
Would rather read than listen? The full write-up, with the numbers checked and the places Ricardo is wrong, is right here.
The ADOTAT Show is sponsored by Troutman Amin LLP and Incremental. Sponsors have no say over guests, questions or edits. ADOTAT is reader-supported. No paid placement in editorial.
Consumers don't hate ads. They hate bad ads. We checked: this one is an ad for a podcast, and it is at least a good one.
