Let's just say it: most of adtech is a confidence game wearing a Patagonia vest.

You know it. I know it. The poor souls staffing booths at Cannes definitely know it, though they'd rather die than admit it before the open bar closes. We've built an entire industrial complex around moving rectangles of pixels in front of eyeballs, and somewhere along the way we collectively decided that slapping the word "intelligence" onto a product name justified another zero on the invoice. Programmatic? Intelligent. Attribution? Intelligent. The dashboard that tells you the same thing your last dashboard told you but in a slightly cooler shade of blue? Wildly, transformatively intelligent. Possibly sentient. Definitely worth a six-figure annual contract.

And yet.

Here's the inconvenient thing nobody at the panel wants to admit between sips of branded sparkling water: there's also a tremendous amount of genuinely useful technology in this space. Real innovation. Tools that save teams hundreds of hours, find audiences traditional methods couldn't locate with a search warrant, keep brands out of the kind of contextual disasters that end careers and generate Axios newsletters. The problem isn't that adtech is bad. The problem is that the signal-to-noise ratio is roughly that of a toddler with a kazoo at a string quartet recital.

So how do you tell the difference without losing your mind, your budget, or your will to attend another vendor lunch?

I went looking for the people who actually have to make these calls with real money, not the ones who tweet about "the future of identity" between speaking gigs at conferences with names that sound like cologne. Over the past few months I've talked to a bunch of marketers who run media at large, regulated, real-budget companies. CPG veterans. Financial services operators. Agency leads who've sat on both sides of the table. The kind of people who've lived through enough vendor pitches to know which ones end in tears.

What follows is what they told me. Some of it will get me uninvited from a few holiday parties. Worth it.

The first filter almost everyone mentioned is rude in its simplicity. When a vendor walks into the room, watch who talks. If only one person can actually demo the product, if the sales rep visibly tenses every time the client lead opens their mouth, if the engineer on the call has been muted for what is clearly a strategic reason, that's a tell. As one operator put it to me: really great teams don't sell phony things. When the whole team can speak fluently to the technology, when nobody is white-knuckling their coffee praying the conversation doesn't drift toward their lane, that's evidence the product is real enough that everyone has actually used the thing they're trying to sell you. Revolutionary concept.

The second filter came up almost universally, and I want to put it on a t-shirt and possibly a tote bag: when someone uses too many fancy words to describe what their technology does, stop trusting the product. Not because the buyer can't follow the jargon. They can. They've been doing this for nearly two decades. They lose faith because the jargon is doing work that the product should be doing. If you cannot explain your value proposition in the actual language of marketing, in plain words about what problem you solve and for whom, then either you don't understand your own product or you're hoping nobody else will notice that there isn't much there. Usually both.

Think about how much of your inbox this single filter would eliminate. Think about how much of your calendar. Think about all the hours of your life you would get back. You're welcome.

The marketers I spoke to also ask vendors a question that, in my experience, separates the grown-ups from the carnival barkers in about four seconds: who are you competing with, and why are you better? Watch the response. Some people answer with confidence and specificity. Others get defensive. Others, and these are my favorites, claim they have no real competitors, which is either a lie or a confession that nobody else thought the problem was worth solving. Both are bad answers. One is dishonest. The other is just sad.

Here is what nobody in the industry wants to say out loud, and what kept coming up in these conversations even when nobody quite said it directly: the adtech market is structurally designed to reward obfuscation. Vendors are incentivized to make their products sound more complicated than they are because complexity supports premium pricing. Buyers are incentivized to adopt complicated-sounding tools because nobody got fired for buying the platform with the most impressive deck. Agencies are incentivized to recommend layered tech stacks because layered tech stacks require agencies to manage them. Everyone in the value chain is being paid, in some small way, to make this harder than it needs to be. It's not a bug. It's the whole business model.

The marketers who survive this are the ones who refuse to play. They ask boring questions. They demand to see the output before they care about the inputs. They want to know who pays, how much, and what happens if the contract evaporates tomorrow and they have to explain to a CFO why the dashboard went dark. They treat shiny objects as suspects, not saviors. They are, in a word, unfun at parties, and they are exactly who you want running your media stack.

The next two parts of this series go deep on the actual evaluation frameworks these operators use: how to structure pilots so vendors prove themselves rather than the other way around, the five-point ROI checklist that gets tools approved by executives who don't speak adtech and don't want to learn, and the genuinely emerging category that the industry has badly under-built (spoiler: it involves AI, but not in the way every vendor in your inbox is currently using the term). That part is behind the paywall, because I have to eat too, and unlike your last DSP, I'm transparent about my pricing model.

But the free takeaway is this. The next time a vendor walks into your office, count the people who can answer questions. Listen for jargon doing the work that proof should be doing. Ask who they compete with. And remember that in a market designed to confuse you, clarity is the most expensive thing on the menu, and you should be willing to pay for it.

Everything else is just a Patagonia vest.

—Pesach

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