There are a lot of ways to enter adtech. Being kicked out of Congress and almost dying in the jungle usually isn’t one of them. But that’s exactly how Mattia Fosci—lawyer, activist, disruptor, and now CEO of Anonymized—arrived at the business of cookies, bid requests, and corporate delusion.

He’s the kind of man you expect to see storming a barricade, not sitting in a boardroom explaining data aggregation to people who think “transparency” is something you print on a slide deck.

When I asked him how he was doing, he gave the most honest answer I’ve heard from a CEO all year: “I’m doing well, considering it’s 7 p.m. on a Friday and I’ve been working throughout August.” Translation: I’m trying to save an industry that doesn’t think it needs saving.

Fosci’s résumé reads like an indie film with too much caffeine: kicked out of Congress for mouthing off, nearly killed in the jungle, then found at Occupy London, fighting “the system.” Somewhere along the way, he realized that if you want to dismantle an empire, sometimes you have to infiltrate it.

“I’ve had an interesting career,” he told me, sounding more amused than proud. “When you know the law and you have a passion for justice and social issues, you just follow whatever you feel is the most interesting career path where you can make an impact.”

He followed that path straight into advertising—the most efficient propaganda machine ever built. But his reason wasn’t to sell more shampoo. It was to test a heresy: that you could have effective advertising without sharing billions or trillions of data points with anyone who wants them.

That’s how Anonymized was born—not out of greed or ego, but a kind of furious idealism. Fosci wanted to build a business that made money without needing to steal anything from anyone.

He says it simply, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. In this industry, that makes him sound like a revolutionary.

At one point in our conversation, I asked him the question everyone in adtech dodges: why haven’t the big players fixed the ID crisis?

His answer landed like a slow-motion punch. “There are two internets,” he said. “There’s a logged-in internet and there’s a non-logged-in internet. Unless you’re a guy who pretends that an IP address is an ID—in which case, I’ve got news for you—then you’ve got to find a solution for the fact that actually there are so many parts of the internet where there are no IDs.”

He pauses just long enough to let the absurdity sink in.

“Our approach,” he continued, “is that you can do a lot of that identity resolution, data collection, and measurement on the device. You do that within the device, in real time, instead of sending an ID and syncing it with every database out there. Keeping all those databases updated all the time just to sync—it feels very 2010. There’s a smarter way of doing that.”

He’s not wrong. Most of adtech still operates like it’s trying to fax itself into the future.

When I teased him—offering three multiple-choice reasons why the “big boys” hadn’t fixed the problem (“A: they’re lazy, B: they’re too rich to care, C: they’re all in Cannes pretending rosé counts as a strategy”)—he didn’t disagree.

“A bit of all of that,” he said. Then he leaned forward. “Big Tech has no reason to fix it. They’re sitting on billions of logged-in users. Their model works for them. But for everyone else? It doesn’t scale. We’re all playing by their rules, and those rules were never meant to work for us.”

That, in a sentence, is the quiet tragedy of modern advertising: it’s run by the people least incentivized to change it.

Fosci doesn’t talk like a marketer. He talks like a man who’s spent too much time staring at a broken machine and wondering why everyone else calls it progress.

When I brought up his infamous line—“the whole ID obsession is a massive lie”—he winced, then laughed. “I don’t remember saying that, but I might have. I say a lot of stuff I regret afterwards.”

Then he went quiet for a beat. “One of the lies,” he said slowly, “is this idea that we can empower a brand to reach a specific individual, that we know their preferences, and can measure scientifically whether that person bought the product. And we can do that at scale.”

He shook his head. “That’s a lie. We all know it’s a lie. There are too many ifs, buts, and caveats. We’re selling a story—a story that’s less and less efficient, less and less scalable. And when it doesn’t work, we just keep selling it anyway.”

He’s right again, damn him. The industry is addicted to its own mythology. We treat attribution models like scripture, even when the numbers don’t add up. Fosci calls it what it is: wishful math dressed as precision.

Fosci didn’t enter adtech to build another dashboard. He came to test the premise of the entire system: that surveillance equals success.

“I just wanted to prove that it was possible to have really effective advertising without sharing billions of data points,” he said. “And to do that, you have to build something that actually works better—not just sounds better.”

That’s the secret—he’s not pitching morality as a business strategy. He’s pitching efficiency as morality. The world doesn’t need another privacy evangelist. It needs a privacy pragmatist who can prove it’s cheaper, smarter, and faster than the surveillance industrial complex.

It’s why his tone isn’t angry—it’s weary. He’s done debating whether privacy matters. He’s too busy trying to prove that competence does.

Mattia Fosci isn’t trying to save the world. He’s trying to save the part of advertising that’s still worth believing in.

When he talks about the future, you can feel both the cynicism and the spark. He’s seen the sausage being made—and still believes the recipe can change.

He’s not naïve. He just refuses to play dumb.

And in adtech, that makes him something rarer than a disruptor.
It makes him dangerous.

Roughly 60 percent of all ad impressions today carry no persistent ID, a statistic that would once have sent shivers through trading desks and measurement vendors. For years, adtech’s orthodoxy has insisted that without IDs—cookies, mobile identifiers, login graphs—the ecosystem would collapse into chaos. Yet according to Mattia Fosci, the founder and CEO of Anonymized, that fear is not only misplaced—it’s self-inflicted.

“The industry talks about the ID problem like it’s an existential threat,” Fosci says, “but most of that fear comes from companies that built their business around the idea that everything must be tracked. It’s just not true anymore.”

Fosci’s view is that ID-less doesn’t mean powerless. It means different. His company’s model relies on device-side measurement and aggregate targeting—in essence, moving the heavy computation and audience analysis onto the user’s device, rather than shipping reams of behavioral data back to servers controlled by ad exchanges, data brokers, or tech giants.

Under this approach, an ad is measured and optimized within the device’s environment—an iPhone, a connected TV, a browser—using locally processed signals that never leave the hardware. Audience categorization happens there, in milliseconds, before the impression is even logged. It’s the same logic that enables Apple’s privacy-preserving analytics or Google’s on-device federated learning, but applied to the open web.

“It’s a smarter way to do what we’ve been doing inefficiently for a decade,” Fosci says. “Keeping databases in sync between every company in the chain—it feels very 2010.”

The timing is significant. As Apple and Google tighten their control over data collection, advertisers have grown dependent on the “logged-in internet”—platforms where persistent user IDs are maintained through accounts and emails. Those ecosystems, led by Google, Meta, and Amazon, are functionally closed: they offer near-perfect targeting precision, but only within their walls.

For independent publishers, ad exchanges, and demand-side platforms, the other half of the internet—the non-logged-in web—has become a wasteland of unaddressed impressions. These are users on Safari, Firefox, and most of CTV, where third-party tracking is no longer viable. Fosci’s argument is that chasing the logged-in audience is a losing game. “If you’re not one of the giants,” he notes, “you’ll always be playing by their rules, and those rules were designed for them to win.”

By shifting measurement to the device, Anonymized essentially routes around Apple and Google’s chokeholds. There’s no need to pass identifiers back to a centralized server—no syncs, no leaks, and no dependence on IDs that could vanish in the next policy update.

When asked why the “big boys” haven’t solved this, I offered Fosci three possible answers:
A) They’re too lazy.
B) They’re too rich to care.
C) They’re all in Cannes, pretending rosé counts as a strategy.

He smirked and said, “A bit of all of that.”

It’s not cynicism—it’s structural. The ID-based economy remains profitable for Big Tech because it keeps everyone else locked out. Solving the identity problem would mean unbundling their monopoly on logged-in users, something no platform with a trillion-dollar valuation has an incentive to do.

That, Fosci argues, is why innovation on the open web has been glacial. Every time the industry edges toward a privacy-first solution, the gravitational pull of the walled gardens drags it back.

If identity has always been a convenient myth—if adtech’s entire measurement infrastructure rests on probabilistic guesses rather than scientific precision—then what else in this industry is make-believe?

It’s a question that lingers long after the conversation ends. Because if Fosci is right, then the “ID crisis” isn’t the end of digital advertising. It’s the end of its excuses.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s liberation.

You’ve heard the adtech bedtime story: transparency, accountability, innovation. The problem is, it’s fiction. Behind every “programmatic efficiency” deck lies a money trail that looks more like a mob shakedown than a supply chain. Mattia Fosci doesn’t mince words—he’s seen the pipes, and they leak like a busted hydrant. Half your budget vanishes before the publisher even sniffs it, and everyone in between swears they’re adding “value.” Spoiler: they’re mostly adding invoices.

Inside ADOTAT+, we strip away the polite PR and show you the real economy of digital advertising: who’s skimming, who’s hiding behind “optimization,” and how the Church of CTR keeps the faithful paying tithes to meaningless metrics. This isn’t fraud in the cinematic sense—it’s worse. It’s fraud that got incorporated, trademarked, and given a keynote slot at Cannes.

Fosci’s rebellion isn’t just philosophy—it’s practice. While the industry burns incense to “AI-powered attention,” he’s building systems that actually work, built on integrity and, yes, coconut-sized courage. The free version gives you the sermon; the ADOTAT+ report gives you the receipts, the players, and the uncomfortable truth about what happens when the only honest man in adtech refuses to sell out.