I could be doing something soothing right now.

Watching cooking shows where adults cry over bread. Organizing my bookshelf by color like it's therapy. Refreshing my weather app pretending I'll actually go jogging.

Normal avoidance. Harmless procrastination. What well-adjusted people do.

Instead, I'm here. Writing. On purpose.

And here's the thing: this is the most enjoyable part of my week.

This is ADOTAT Sunday.

You're still reading. Which means you're either fascinated, offended, or quietly relieved I've stopped writing.

Either way, you're in the room now.

The adtech bros are suddenly finding their conscience. Or at least their crisis PR consultants, which in this ecosystem counts as spiritual growth.

Scroll through their blogs lately and it's all mea culpa theatre. Confessions that read like they were written right after someone got served with a subpoena. "The Age of Outcomes might be fiction."

or "Maybe we don't need ten layers of intermediaries siphoning budgets like a human centipede made entirely of McKinsey consultants."

Sure, no one has yet written "showering at adtech conferences should be mandatory," but at this rate of moral discovery, we'll get there around the time someone admits they've been selling digital snake oil to brands too polite to call it fraud.

Let's cut the shit. This is what happens when people realize the music's stopping and they're holding a bag full of someone else's money and their own bullshit metrics.

What's coming is brutally simple: Reports with actual footnotes. Audits by people who understand how computers work. Lawsuits filed by lawyers who've figured out "it's just an algorithm" isn't a legal defense. Regulators who've stopped pretending they don't understand the con, which was always obvious to anyone not getting paid to be confused about it.

Those glossy, self-graded "outcomes" the programmatic industry has been peddling? They're about to be exposed as self-reported nonsense wrapped in jargon and tied with a bow made of other people's money. The industry has been grading its own homework using invisible ink on imaginary paper.

Andrew Susman, president of the Institute for Advertising Ethics, put it plainly: there are still professionals who treat ethics as something to call in after the crash, never to integrate into the system. That's exactly what we're watching now. The crash already happened. The ethics consultants are getting billable hours.

This is what we've been doing for almost two years now. Exposing the incentives, the grift, the companies quietly bleeding agencies and brands with bloated technologies that do precisely nothing except move money in circles. A digital centrifuge designed to separate fools from their budgets while everyone pretends the spinning itself is the product.

The industry responded in three predictable ways: threats (adorable), silence (strategic), or eventually admitting the problem while rebranding like nothing happened. The corporate equivalent of showing up to the crime scene in a different hat.

And here's the uncomfortable part: A lot of people inside adtech have realized this apparatus isn't good for anyone. Not brands. Not agencies. Not even vendors long-term, because eventually the music stops and someone notices the room is full of people pretending to dance while pickpocketing each other.

Agencies are waking up to the fact that they torched billions in fraud and waste treating "easy to buy programmatic" as a substitute for knowing where their ads actually ran.

They weren't booking ads. They were booking budgets.

Buying the idea of advertising, like buying the idea of dinner and wondering why you're still hungry while your wallet's empty and someone else is getting fat.

We played a role dragging this into daylight, but it wasn't just us. The industry got tired of learning the hard way, which happens when "the hard way" starts involving depositions and discovery. Ethics didn't suddenly descend from heaven. Reality showed up. Reality, that unbearable b-tch, just walked in and started asking questions people had been paid very well not to answer.

What's being sold as "ethical adtech" now is really just a negotiation with gravity. Less about moral purity, more about drawing your own lines before regulators draw them for you in permanent marker across your business model and your forehead.

And that's the tell.

Because real ethics in this space, the kind that might actually mean something beyond conference panel fodder, doesn't start with blog posts or keynote confessions delivered by people wearing the same Allbirds and the same expression of practiced concern.

It starts when you stop treating exploitation, opacity, and self-scored success as sustainable business models instead of what they actually are: a Ponzi scheme where everyone's pretending the mathematics will somehow work out differently this time.

Real ethics means refusing to build the machine even when the machine pays well.

It means anchoring your own red lines, the stuff you won't do even when it's legal, even when it's profitable, even when everyone else at the conference is doing it and getting promoted for it.

Reject manipulation as a goal. Stop exploiting vulnerabilities, compulsions, or the cognitive blind spots of people just trying to get through their day without being turned into a data point in someone else's growth deck.

Treat autonomy as non-negotiable. If your tactic only works when users are rushed, confused, or unable to understand what's happening, that's not optimization. That's predation with a product roadmap.

Separate success from pure extraction. Stop treating "more time captured, more data extracted, more impressions served" as unqualified goods, like you're strip-mining human attention.

Here's what actual guardrails look like, not the pretend kind you put in a deck to make the legal team feel better:

Data minimization as default. Collect only what you actually need. Stop hoarding data like a digital hoarder. Resist speculative profiling. Resist building profiles of people's psychological vulnerabilities just because you can.

Informed choice over opaque consent. Actual opt-out paths that don't rely on dark patterns or learned helplessness.

Stop exploiting vulnerable states. Refuse strategies that target moments of acute distress, addiction, or financial desperation. If your competitive advantage is identifying mental health crises to serve predatory ads, you're not a marketer. You're a ghoul with a targeting algorithm.

Draw the line on manipulation, and actually mean it this time. There's a fairly robust philosophical and regulatory vocabulary around manipulation, dark patterns, and persuasive tech now. Use it internally instead of gaslighting yourself with euphemisms like "engagement optimization" or whatever fresh hell the product team dreamed up to avoid saying "we're tricking people."

Name manipulation precisely. Normal persuasion gives people reasons. Manipulation bypasses deliberation using urgency scams, misdirection, artificially constrained choices.

Audit for dark patterns in every flow. If it's easier to sign up than cancel, you already know what you're doing.

Treat "it's common practice" as a warning, not a justification.

Tell the unflattering truth in rooms that matter. When metrics are soft, when attribution is inflated, when "lift" is mostly selection bias, say so plainly. Be the person everyone rolls their eyes at because you keep pointing out the emperor is naked and also a statistical artifact.

Refuse to launder harmful strategies. Don't write the decks that sanitize surveillance as "relevance" when what you mean is "we're tracking people like the Stasi but with better UX."

Use regulation as leverage. Make it easier for leadership to do the right thing by making it scarier to do the wrong thing.

The deepest risk isn't getting caught. It's becoming numb to what your work is doing to human interiority and public life. The slow death of giving a shit, the comfortable numbness that comes from workshopping the language enough to rationalize anything.

Keep asking the forbidden question: "If users fully understood what this system is doing, would they still consent to it?"

Cultivate external reference points. Read critical work that doesn't get presented at industry conferences. Don't let the normalization loop define your moral horizon.

And be willing to walk. Privately draw a line at which you'd actually leave rather than continue. Because ethics without a credible threat to exit tends to collapse into rationalization.

ADOTAT is here. If you need to talk. If you're seeing something illegal and don't know what to do about it. If you need to be a whistleblower. We can help you find an attorney. We can help you navigate the criminal justice system. We can connect you with people who understand how this works, who've been where you are, who know the difference between speaking up and career suicide.

The tell is always the same. Ethics doesn't start with blog posts. It starts when people stop pretending that exploitation, opacity, and self-scored success were ever anything but a house built on sand during high tide.

The water's coming in. Some people are finally noticing their feet are wet.

Most are just looking for higher ground while pretending they never knew how to swim.

You don't have to be one of them.

Stay Bold, Stay Curious, and Know More Than You Did Yesterday.