Yes, my Sunday column went out early.

No, this was not a clever experiment in engagement timing, inbox optimization, or whatever other post-hoc justification someone might be tempted to reverse-engineer. It was a mistake. A small one. The kind that happens when systems do what systems always do: move faster than intention and then shrug.

What mattered wasn’t the error.
What mattered was what came back.

Because when the column landed early, it didn’t just get skimmed and forgotten. It triggered replies. Not the performative kind.

Not the LinkedIn-polite kind.

The kind that shows up when people recognize themselves in what you’ve written and decide to stop being careful.

One reader, in particular, didn’t respond to the column so much as use it as an opening. A release valve. His note wasn’t really about me or my argument. It was about the ecosystem the column was circling, the one everyone in this business inhabits every day and pretends not to notice.

He was furious about conferences.

Not abstractly. Not theoretically. Personally.

Buried in his longer note was a paragraph he clearly hadn’t planned to write. It read like an aside, almost an apology for going off on a tangent. Which is exactly why it mattered.

I’m quoting it directly:

“I paid four figures to attend [event name deleted for kindness] and spent most of the time in carpeted ballrooms listening to the same handful of speakers recycle the same ten slides. I literally saw Terrance Kawaja give the same speech he gave at the last five conferences he funds. Guess what? CTV is growing. Measurement is hard. Lessons the audience absorbed years ago. The only real conversations happened at the bar, which is why it was louder than the panels. The panels were scripted sales pitches in $1,500 seats, delivered with the urgency of an airline safety video.”

That wasn’t outrage.
That was exhaustion.

Four figures don’t buy curiosity. Four figures buys expectation. It buys the right to assume that someone, somewhere, is going to say something that wasn’t already obvious before you booked the hotel. Instead, what he got was familiarity dressed up as expertise, repetition sold as reassurance.

And notice what bothered him most wasn’t that the panels were wrong. It was that they were predictable. That the truths being offered were so well-worn they barely qualified as insights anymore. That the audience already knew them. Had known them. For years.

This is not an industry starved for information.
It is an industry addicted to safety.

His comment about the bar wasn’t a joke. It was diagnostic.

The bar is louder than the panels because that’s where the truth is allowed to show up without permission. That’s where people admit, quietly, that they don’t really believe half the dashboards they present. That’s where they talk about waste, about MFA, about opaque fees, about which vendors they trust and which ones they tolerate because changing would be more painful than staying.

Noise follows honesty. Always has.

Onstage, the industry performs coherence. It speaks in complete sentences, with slides and logos and carefully curated optimism. Offstage, it admits contradiction. It acknowledges that the system is more fragile, more wasteful, and more self-protective than anyone is willing to say under stage lights.

This isn’t hypocrisy.
It’s conditioning.

It would be easy to turn this into a critique of conference programming. To blame recycled speakers, timid moderators, or lazy content teams. That’s the comfortable explanation, because it suggests the problem is cosmetic.

It isn’t.

This is not a content problem.
It is an incentives problem.

The industry keeps building stages where only certain sentences are rewarded. You can acknowledge growth. You can gesture toward complexity. You can nod gravely about transparency. What you cannot do is follow those ideas to their logical endpoint, because the endpoint makes people uncomfortable.

No one is paid to explain where the money actually goes.
No one is invited back for tracing how much of a dollar quietly disappears before it reaches anything resembling quality media.
No one builds a sponsorship deck around making the largest sponsors squirm in their seats.

So instead, we get performance.
We get reassurance.
We get familiarity.

After more than a decade of talking about transparency, the industry has perfected the art of discussing it without letting it change anything.

We have reports.
We have benchmarks.
We have frameworks and curricula and task forces and initiatives.

And yet, most buyers still cannot answer a basic question without adding qualifiers and footnotes:

How much of my spend actually reaches real media, in front of real humans, with outcomes that can be independently verified?

The honest answer remains deeply inconvenient. Less than half. On a good day. And everyone in the room knows it, which is precisely why the conversation rarely stays there for long.

Transparency, as practiced, has become reputational decor. It signals seriousness without imposing cost. It allows everyone to say the right words while leaving the pipes exactly as they are.

What that reader’s aside captured, almost accidentally, is the distance between the ceremony and the numbers.

Between the language of progress and the mechanics of money.

Between what gets said onstage and what gets admitted over a drink, quietly, when no one is recording.

The industry does not lack intelligence.
It lacks consequence.

Until transparency carries real economic weight, until proof is portable and auditable, until incentives reward clarity instead of comfort, we will keep staging conversations that carefully avoid the final sentence. We will keep paying premium prices for familiar truths delivered safely.

And we will keep pretending that the loudest room in the building isn’t telling us exactly where the real conversation already is.