⚡ Welcome to the Great Adtech Magic Show. Step right up, folks! Watch as a room full of grown adults slap an “AI-powered” sticker on workflows from 2009 and call it “the future.”

✨ But behind the curtain? It’s Oz Etzioni quietly shaking his head and reminding us all that what most adtech companies are peddling isn’t artificial intelligence — it’s artificial importance. And I mean, the guy should know. He’s CEO of Clinch and spends his days knee-deep in the guts of automation, figuring out what’s real and what’s just smoke, mirrors, and a bored intern clicking buttons behind the scenes.

Oz didn't mince words. “Most of it is just simple automation,” he tells me, “and a lot of it can’t scale.” Translation? The so-called AI running your media campaigns is probably no smarter than the auto-fill on your Gmail.

💡 Oz drops the hammer here: “A lot of partners and vendors claim to have automation, but there’s a ton of manual labor happening behind the scenes.” That’s right. Somewhere, some poor junior ad ops guy is furiously uploading assets into a DSP while your dashboard proudly beams, “100% automated.”

And if you thought the AI label meant some slick machine learning model predicting the future of your brand’s reach, think again. According to Oz, most of what’s passing as AI in adtech today is closer to a “series of if/then statements” than any actual intelligence.

➡️ If click, then pray.
➡️ If impression, then check box.

🎩 It’s like strapping a fedora on a Roomba and calling it a data scientist.

Automation should be liberating marketers from the grunt work — but instead, most teams are still chasing tasks like it’s an episode of Kitchen Nightmares with Gordon Ramsay screaming in the background.

Oz hits the nail on the head: “People have a misconception. They think the machines are going to take their jobs.” Instead, what automation should be doing is freeing humans up to do what machines can’t — strategic thinking, creative ideation, big picture planning. You know, the stuff you told your parents you’d be doing when you said you work in advertising.

Instead, most of the industry is trapped in the Groundhog Day loop of uploading 57 variations of banner ads into siloed platforms and calling it “cross-channel.”

Oz breaks it down further:

You’re not training a self-aware HAL 9000 to run your campaigns — you’re relying on glorified macros and rigid decision trees. Meanwhile, vendors are pitching you the AI revolution like they’re selling timeshares at an airport Marriott.

Even worse? Some of this so-called automation isn’t even automated. It’s manual labor disguised as AI. Think a Wizard of Oz situation, but instead of a wizard, it’s Kevin from ad ops frantically working behind the curtain.

So what is Oz actually building over at Clinch? Turns out, something that might actually be worth the AI badge.

Clinch’s CoPilot isn’t trying to automate creativity out of the process — instead, it’s focusing on aligning creative strategy with media strategy, something marketers routinely mess up when juggling a thousand platforms, KPIs, and team silos.

Instead of just saying, “Here’s some AI, go wild,” Oz and his team built an agent that speaks your language. Literally. You can talk to it like a colleague, and it will sift through historical data, campaign objectives, and platform capabilities in milliseconds to help you craft a real strategy — not just auto-churned ad copy with the charisma of a beige filing cabinet.

🎙 “You can speak to the system, prompt it, and it builds a strategy with you as you go,” Oz says. So basically, it’s the first AI tool that doesn’t feel like it’s rolling its eyes every time you type in “boost ROI.”

Why is everyone clinging to these janky tools like they’re security blankets from childhood?

Because change is scary, and let’s face it, most agencies are still allergic to risk. It’s safer to stick with your Franken-stack of tools duct-taped together across media, creative, and analytics silos.

Oz points out the cognitive dissonance: “People think they’re omnichannel, but they’re running multi-channel. Different teams. Different data. Nothing is connected.”

It’s the difference between a well-rehearsed orchestra and three drunk guys playing kazoos in a subway tunnel.

Are we on the verge of true end-to-end automation, or just headed deeper into buzzword bingo territory?

Oz sees a fork in the road. Some brands will finally unify their workflows and unlock real efficiency. Others will keep throwing money at tools that do little more than slap lipstick on a pig.

And while everyone else is out there confusing macros for machine learning, Oz and Clinch are actually laying down the pipes for an industry that doesn’t just automate tasks — it automates the right tasks.

✅ Automation done well makes humans better.
❌ Automation done poorly makes interns cry.

The takeaway? If your platform is just adding steps and calling it “intelligent,” you’re being played like a kazoo at a middle school talent show.

Sure, Oz Etzioni can talk shop about automation and AI until your coffee gets cold, but let’s crack open the human layer — the man behind the macros.

You want to know Oz’s secret sauce for powering through adtech chaos? It’s not meditation or yoga — it’s chocolate. Lots of chocolate.
“Besides chocolate? I’d say basketball,” he admits, before immediately pivoting back to chocolate like a true connoisseur. Honestly, this guy’s snack table probably looks like Willy Wonka’s boardroom.

When I stranded him on a hypothetical desert island — because that’s what we do here — Oz packed the essentials:
“Sunglasses, a knife, and a bathing suit,” he says. No phone. No GenAI-powered survival app. Just a guy, a blade, and a plan.
Also? “I’d probably end up building a surfboard out of palm trees.” Snowboarding, surfing — as long as it glides, Oz is in.

Turns out, running Clinch isn’t exactly like piloting a fighter jet. “It’s a whole different ballgame,” Oz laughs. “But the biggest takeaway from the Air Force? It’s all about managing people. Tech is amazing, but companies rise and fall on people.”
And unlike the Air Force, no one here gets court-martialed for missing a Slack notification.

If Oz could snap his fingers and buy any company tomorrow? “The Trade Desk,” he says, deadpan.
Why? “They’re visionary, they’re innovative, and they complete the workflow right after where we leave off.”
Basically, he’d like to own the part of the industry that doesn’t make him want to scream into a dashboard.

Ready for this? It’s delightfully blunt and probably applicable to your dating life too:
“Don’t get into the situation in the first place.”
That’s what one of his Air Force instructors told him. “At the time, I thought it was a joke. But later, I realized, it’s all about thinking 10 steps ahead.”
A nice reminder that avoiding the dumpster fire beats having to put it out.