Adtech’s Big Short: Jamie Barnard Knows Where the Bodies Are Buried

Jamie Barnard talks about data like a man who’s spent too much time mapping the cracks in the foundation, the kind of guy who doesn’t just know where the bodies are buried—he’s got a list of who put them there. He’s not peddling polite industry euphemisms or carefully hedging his bets for fear of spooking the ad-tech cartel. No, he’s here with a flashlight and a crowbar, prying open the rotting infrastructure of digital advertising and exposing the mess inside.

The internet, he says, isn’t just running on surveillance—it’s drowning in it. Worse, the data propping up the entire system is junk, the ad-tech equivalent of financial products that tanked the global economy in 2008. “They sold subprime mortgages as triple-A,” he says, deadpan. “We’re doing the same thing with data.” Advertisers buy into the illusion of precision, convinced that every cookie, every device ID, every so-called “consented” data point is a valuable asset. In reality? “It’s a house of cards built on bad math.”

And it gets worse. The real problem isn’t just that the data is garbage—it’s that it’s hemorrhaging out of the system at an industrial scale. Data leakage isn’t a side effect, Barnard argues. It’s a business model. “Look at how many vendors touch a single impression,” he says, exasperated. “Publishers aren’t just leaking data; they’re practically giving it away with a bow on top.” The result? An endless game of digital hot potato, where consumer information gets passed from one shadowy third party to another until it’s impossible to trace who knows what, who’s monetizing it, and who’s vulnerable. Every impression is a spark in a fireworks display of surveillance, lighting up the night while users have no clue they’re the ones fueling the show.

Barnard doesn’t just diagnose the rot—he names the enablers. Bloated supply chains. Media buyers drowning in inventory they don’t need. An entire industry that has confused “scale” with “success.” The ANA’s study found that the average media buy spreads across 22,000 sites. Barnard doesn’t bother to hide his incredulity. “You can cut 20, 50, even 80 percent of those publishers and see zero drop in performance,” he says.

Translation? Most of digital advertising is a tax on ignorance, a system where brands keep writing checks to bad actors because they don’t want to admit they don’t actually understand what they’re buying.

But here’s the part that makes Barnard worth listening to—he’s not just another industry doom prophet. He sees the shift. The game is changing, whether the old guard likes it or not. “For years, we measured success by reach and CTRs,” he says. “But we’re finally entering a quality era.” The industry is waking up to the fact that buying cheap garbage at scale isn’t a strategy—it’s a liability. For the first time in decades, there’s a chance to tear down the fraud-ridden, waste-fueled machine and rebuild something better.

And if Barnard is right, the ones who embrace this shift will be the ones left standing when the dust settles.