How to Survive the Digital Thunderdome

Lead generation—the unsung, over-exploited, and wildly misunderstood bastard child of performance marketing. It's the space where transparency is a buzzword, ethics are as optional as a salad at a Texas steakhouse, and the only thing moving faster than the money is the finger-pointing.

Sean McCormick, a man so transparent about transparency he probably discloses his therapy notes in business meetings, sat down with ADOTAT to break it all down. And let me tell you, it was equal parts enlightening and horrifying—kind of like realizing your Uber driver is live-streaming your ride on TikTok.

The Piñata Problem: Why Vendors Are the Industry’s Favorite Punching Bags

If you’ve worked in lead gen for more than five minutes, you already know the deal: vendors exist to be blamed for everything. Bad traffic? It’s the vendor’s fault. Poor quality leads? Definitely the vendor’s fault. Your marketing team went on a bender and approved a campaign using stock photos from 2008? Shockingly, also the vendor’s fault.

This is what Sean calls the “vendors as punching bags” phenomenon, but let’s be honest—it’s more like vendors as piñatas. Advertisers take wild swings, hoping to knock out something sweet, but mostly they just smash the system and demand a refund when the candy turns out to be broken Jolly Ranchers and unwrapped peppermints.

McCormick shared a classic horror story: a client accused his company of fraud, set off the alarm bells, and—get this—never actually followed up when it turned out they were nowhere near the problem. Just radio silence. Not even a “Hey, sorry about that. Hope your reputation recovers.” Nope. Because in this industry, apologies are about as common as LinkedIn influencers who don’t use the phrase “hot take.”

The Gas Station Sushi Dilemma: Advertisers Want Champagne on a Tap Water Budget

One of the biggest problems in performance marketing? The hilarious disconnect between what advertisers demand and what they’re actually willing to pay for.

They want premium, high-intent, top-tier leads—the advertising equivalent of a dry-aged filet mignon. But they want to pay gas station sushi prices.

Let me spell it out for those in the cheap seats: you cannot demand Michelin-star-quality audience engagement and then bargain-hunt your way to success like it’s Black Friday at a liquidation sale. It just doesn’t work.

Advertisers clutch their pearls over fraud and low-quality leads, yet gleefully sign contracts with vendors offering a 90% discount and promising “guaranteed conversions”—which, let’s be real, is just a polite way of saying “we will shove this traffic through whatever sketchy means necessary to make your dashboard look pretty.”

And when these cut-rate campaigns inevitably implode? Suddenly, it’s everyone else’s fault. The vendors are unethical. The platforms are negligent. Mercury is in retrograde. Never mind that the client refused to pay for transparency tools or ignored every warning sign flashing like a Vegas strip billboard.

McCormick had the perfect analogy: it's like complaining about food poisoning after you willingly bought sushi from a gas station.

The 5 T’s of Trust: What Happens When the Industry Ignores Them

Sean has a neat little framework he calls the Five T’s of Trust:

1. Truth – Tell it like it is. Shocking, I know.

2. Transparency – If your campaign strategy looks like a tax evasion scheme, rethink your choices.

3. Traction – Results matter, but so does how you get them.

4. Trajectory – Slow and sustainable beats fast and fraudulent.

5. Trust – The big one. And currently, the rarest commodity in adtech.

And yet, advertisers and vendors alike seem determined to torch this framework and roast marshmallows over the flames. Because let’s be honest—short-term wins feel better than long-term integrity.

This is why the industry keeps circling the drain with fraud, sketchy arbitrage, and a complete inability to separate real traffic from a bot farm in Belarus.

So what happens when the Five T’s are ignored?

👉 Vendors get thrown under the bus.
👉 Advertisers act shocked when their bargain-bin media buys underperform.
👉 Regulators start sharpening their knives, ready to treat lead gen like the next financial crisis.

And honestly, the industry deserves it.

So What’s Next? A Reckoning or a Reset?

McCormick doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, but he does make one thing clear: if the industry doesn’t clean up its act, someone else will do it for them.

And trust me, you do not want the government stepping in to regulate lead gen the way they regulate banking. Because if you think compliance is a nightmare now, wait until the FTC starts treating ad networks like Wall Street hedge funds.

Bottom line?

• If you want transparency, pay for it.

• If you want quality, stop cutting corners.

• If you want the industry to survive, act like you give a damn about ethics before regulators force you to pretend you do.

Otherwise, we’ll all be stuck in an adtech dystopia where fraud is rampant, vendors are disposable, and the only ones winning are the people selling overpriced compliance software.

And frankly, that sounds exhausting.