Matt Wasserlauf said at IAB alm that I was one of the only people who told the truth about this industry. Flattering. Also a little bit like being told you were right about the Titanic while standing on the iceberg. Now everyone sees it. Cool. Welcome. I've been here a while. The snacks are terrible and nobody listens, but the view is incredible.

Yesterday we published "The Big Lie: No, You're Not Buying on Disney+" and apparently some of you needed a stiff drink afterward. Two measurement execs. Two different companies. Weeks apart. Zero coordination. Both said the same thing: the open-exchange CTV market is overwhelmingly fraud. Not "has a little problem." Not "needs optimization." Overwhelmingly. Their word. Both of them.

Today we're talking to someone who watched this whole dumpster get loaded up and lit on fire. From inside the building.

Matt Wasserlauf is not a measurement guy or a blockchain evangelist cosplaying as a tech founder. He's an ad guy. The real kind. Thirty-five years deep. He onboarded Procter & Gamble and Unilever into digital video back when "streaming" was mostly a buffering wheel and a prayer. He was on the launch team for Friends at Warner Brothers. He sold Survivor to CBS buyers who told him with a straight face it would never work because it wasn't live.

So when this guy tells you he watched the fraud problem get built in real time, believe him. He literally watched it happen.

His timeline is neat and horrifying:

In the aughts, the bad practices were manual. People cutting corners by hand. Artisanal fraud, if you will. Then programmatic showed up in the 2010s and automated all of it. Every bad manual practice got a robot and a budget.

Millions became hundreds of millions became billions.

That's not a bug. That's a business plan. And Wasserlauf says AI is about to take the whole thing into the trillions. But we'll get there in Part 3. Right now let's talk about why the fire's been burning for twenty years and the whole industry is just standing around it warming their hands.

Here's the line from Wasserlauf that hit me like a truck: "We have been grown and really bred on this idea that waste is inevitable."

Bred. On. It. Like puppies bred for a specific trait except the trait is accepting that your money disappears and calling it normal.

The old Wanamaker quote, "I know 50% of my advertising is wasted, I just don't know which 50%," isn't a fun slide for conferences. It's the operating system of the entire ad industry. It's the reason nobody panics when half the budget vanishes into a void. It's the cultural permission structure that lets every middleman, every fraudster, every opaque supply chain keep cashing checks.

Here's how this connects to yesterday's piece. The reason your DSP can sell you "Disney" that isn't Disney is because the whole industry agreed a long time ago that a massive chunk of spend just... goes away. Like socks in a dryer. Nobody looks for them. Wanamaker said don't bother. So nobody bothers.

Wasserlauf is blunter about it than I expected: "It's a very rich business, this trading in waste."

The publicly traded holding companies? Built on it. The big platforms? He's not subtle about it. Points right at "the big G." They trade on it. Literally. On the stock market. Their quarterly numbers depend on your money disappearing into pipes that nobody audits.

You're not fighting fraud. You're fighting a business model. And the business model has a better lobby than you do.

This is where Wasserlauf draws the sharpest line.

The old definition of performance, the one every media plan is still built on, is reach, frequency, impressions, CPMs. And every single one of those metrics can be faked. Every one of them IS being faked. At industrial scale. Daily. A bot farm doesn't care about your reach goals. A bot farm loves your reach goals. It'll hit them by lunch on Tuesday and generate a gorgeous dashboard proving it.

Wasserlauf's definition of performance is different. Sales. Leads. Humans walking into stores. Bags of coffee purchased by people with mouths.

Real outcomes. Physical world stuff. The kind of results that require an actual human being on the other end of the screen, which is apparently a controversial ask in 2026.

When you measure impressions, fraud hides. When you measure coffee sold, it can't.

Middle of the pandemic. Mike Scalera at Eight O'Clock Coffee is in trouble. His agency keeps running budget through YouTube and Trade Desk like good little media buyers do. Problem: nobody's going to Starbucks. Nobody's wandering grocery aisles. He doesn't need impressions. He needs to sell actual bags of coffee or his brand is toast.

Wasserlauf had just built Blockboard. He asked for a shot. Scalera gave him the classic $50K test and structured it as an A/B/C: Blockboard vs. Trade Desk vs. YouTube. All three measured by Nielsen. Same product. Same window. Same goals.

Results:

Trade Desk: zero lift.

YouTube: zero lift.

Blockboard: 3 to 4x lift. $186,000 in bags of coffee actually sold to actual humans.

Read that again. The two platforms that sit on virtually every media plan in America, the ones your buyer defaulted to because that's what buyers do, produced absolutely nothing measurable. The verified pipe, the one using blockchain smart contracts to pre-verify every ad call before money moves, sold a hundred and eighty six thousand dollars worth of coffee.

That's not a Blockboard ad. That's yesterday's "Big Lie" compressed into a single case study. The premium programmatic pipes produced beautiful dashboards. The verified pipe produced revenue. One of those things pays rent.

Scalera got promoted. Wasserlauf got a founding case study. And the industry got another data point it will spend five years pretending doesn't exist.

In Part 2 below: Follow the Money. We dig into why nobody wants to fix this. The holding companies who profit from opacity. The "fierce resistance" Wasserlauf hit when he went to his old partners at the big four agencies. The lazy buyers running spend from their couches. And why the biggest obstacle to fixing CTV fraud rhymes with "bean counters" and starts with a big G.

The plumbing works exactly as designed. Just not for you.

Everyone else prints charts.

ADOTAT shows you where the bodies are buried.

While trade pubs recycle press releases, we explain how your “premium CTV” buy ends up on a screensaver, a bot farm, or an app that never existed.

Not theory.
Not vendor theater.
Actual plumbing. Actual incentives. Actual fraud.

Stuff you use in meetings.
Stuff that saves money.
Stuff people whisper about after hours.

Because ignorance is expensive.

Because dashboards lie.

Because someone in your org is already wasting 30% of your budget and calling it “scale.”

And because 400 of your competitors already read ADOTAT+ and would prefer you didn’t.

Stay bold. Stay curious. Know more than you did yesterday.