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.

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.”

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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In the grand, delusional fantasyland that is performance marketing, advertisers love to declare their unwavering commitment to transparency. They say it loudly, proudly, usually at a conference while clutching an overpriced coffee and nodding earnestly at a PowerPoint slide filled with words like brand safety and high-intent traffic.

And then—without fail—they turn around and pick the absolute cheapest vendor they can find.

Sean McCormick has seen this spectacle play out so many times that he could probably set it to music. If there were an anthem for this industry, it wouldn’t be a stirring call to innovation—it would be a tragicomedy about how advertisers demand filet mignon while bargain-hunting like they’re raiding a liquidation sale.

“Clients demand transparency,” Sean said, “and then they pick the cheapest vendor like it’s Black Friday at Walmart.”

There it is. The entire problem in a single sentence. Advertisers talk about quality and integrity the way people talk about flossing—important in theory, but let’s be honest, largely ignored in practice.

Instead of investing in vetted, premium lead sources that actually deliver the real thing, they gravitate toward the lowest-cost option, the one with the shiniest deck and the most absurd promises. They want cheap and high-performing. They want massive scale and zero fraud. They want the advertising equivalent of gas station sushi—marginally edible, dubiously sourced, and destined to cause regret.

And then, like clockwork, they act shocked when their campaign results look like a dumpster fire at a seafood market.

In the world of performance marketing, there are two types of people: those who claim they want transparency and those who actually pay for it. These two groups rarely overlap.

Advertisers say they care about brand safety. They say they won’t tolerate fraud. They say they are investing in long-term, sustainable lead generation. And yet, when the time comes to sign a contract, they become possessed by the spirit of a bargain-hunting suburban dad at a Best Buy clearance event.

They ask for guaranteed results, a massive scale, and—best of all—a low, low price that makes absolutely no sense if you have even the faintest understanding of market economics.

Sean, who has spent years watching this play out, has stopped being surprised.

“I’ve heard stories of companies literally randomizing sub-IDs so advertisers can’t figure out where their traffic is coming from,” he said. “And the best part? The clients don’t even want to know. They just want the numbers to look good.”

That’s the real kicker. It’s not just that advertisers choose bad traffic. It’s that they actively avoid understanding where their traffic comes from because ignorance is easier than accountability. If you can’t see the problem, you don’t have to fix it.

Sean has war stories.

One of his favorites? The client who hit the panic button over supposed fraud. It was a five-alarm fire—full stop, all traffic paused, emergency meetings called. The client was convinced something sinister was happening.

Then? Silence.

No follow-up. No apology. Just… nothing.

Turns out, Sean’s company wasn’t even remotely involved in the fraudulent activity. But did the client ever acknowledge that? Of course not. Because in performance marketing, vendors are the piñatas—there to be beaten, blamed, and discarded when the inevitable happens.

The reality is, cheap media buys always end in tears. Low-cost traffic providers are not magicians. They are not defying economic principles out of the kindness of their hearts. They are cutting corners, laundering bad traffic through shady networks, and praying that nobody asks too many questions.

And when it all blows up? The advertisers scream about fraud.

But let’s be honest—they knew what they were buying.

There is no mystery here. If you want high-quality traffic, it will cost you. If you want full transparency, you will need to pay for that, too. And if you refuse to pay for either, what you will receive is a steaming pile of garbage traffic—chock full of bots, recycled leads, and people who have about as much interest in your product as they do in the terms and conditions of a software update.

Sean doesn’t sugarcoat it.

“If you’re not willing to pay for quality, don’t act surprised when your results are garbage,” he said. “That’s not fraud. That’s just what happens when you prioritize cost over conversions.”

But advertisers? They don’t listen. They keep throwing their budgets into the abyss, hoping that this time will be different. They cling to the fantasy that they can get cheap, high-quality, high-converting, fully transparent traffic, despite all evidence to the contrary.

They buy gas station sushi and complain about food poisoning.

They cut costs to the bone and blame the vendor when their leads don’t convert.

They demand transparency while actively avoiding the truth.

And so the cycle continues.

Well, one of two things.

The industry can either grow up—accept that quality costs money, stop treating vendors like disposable punching bags, and invest in long-term, sustainable partnerships.

Or?

The government will step in and regulate the hell out of performance marketing, treating ad networks the way they treat Wall Street hedge funds.

And trust me—you do not want that.

Sean summed it up with brutal simplicity.

“If we don’t clean up our act, we’ll get regulated the way finance is regulated,” he said. “And at that point, we won’t have an industry left to argue about.”

So the choice is clear. Pay for quality. Demand transparency—and actually mean it. Or keep living in denial, keep chasing cheap traffic, and keep acting shocked when it turns out that Walmart sushi doesn’t sit well.

Your move, advertisers.

Sean McCormick isn’t some doe-eyed optimist preaching about ethics like it’s a TED Talk for people who do yoga on paddleboards. He’s been in the trenches of performance marketing long enough to know that ethics aren’t just some feel-good slogan—they’re a survival strategy. Because in this industry, you either clean up your act or you get wiped out when regulators come swinging.

“If we don’t clean up our act, we’re going to get regulated like the banking industry,” Sean said. “We can’t keep selling the 10% fruit juice, 90% water model. It doesn’t work.”

In other words? You can’t keep pretending you’re running a premium lead gen business when most of what you’re selling is repackaged garbage. At some point, advertisers wise up, regulators step in, or your own bad decisions catch up with you.

Sean has one simple rule:

"Do the right thing and you’ll always have a job."

It sounds almost too wholesome for the cutthroat world of lead gen, where clients want filet mignon at gas station sushi prices and fraudsters run around like carnival barkers promising guaranteed conversions. But for Sean, it’s more than just a mantra. It’s a business strategy.

“There should be ethical requirements to own a business. There should be ethical requirements to join organizations. Hell, even to attend industry trade shows,” Sean said. “If you’re in this industry and you’re not willing to play fair, you’re part of the problem.”

And he’s right. Because if the industry doesn’t regulate itself, the government will.

If you think the FCC, the FTC, and every other three-letter agency are going to sit around and let lead gen remain the Wild West of digital marketing, you’re delusional.

“We are slowly inching toward being regulated like finance,” Sean said. “If we don’t start making compromises on growth and profitability in exchange for sustainability and ethics, we’re done.”

This isn’t some abstract warning. The One-to-One Consent rule almost became law, and even though it got struck down, that was just the beginning.

So what’s the takeaway?

The smartest players in the game aren’t just selling leads anymore. They’re consulting on strategy, optimizing for real performance, and actually providing value. If your entire business model is based on hoping advertisers never check where the leads came from, you’re not in business—you’re running a scam.

Sean has built his career on transparency, trust, and long-term relationships. That’s why he’s still here. And that’s why, in his words:

“Do the right thing, and you’ll always have a job.”

The question is: Will lead gen companies finally take that advice? Or will they keep kicking the can down the road until they wake up one day and realize the road is gone?

There’s a moment in Office Space that every performance marketer knows in their soul. The printer—stubborn, infuriating, utterly broken—gets dragged into a field and beaten to death with baseball bats. If there were justice in the digital ad industry, we’d do the same thing to fraudulent traffic sources. But instead, we keep plugging them back in, swearing this time will be different, only to watch them jam the system all over again.

Sean McCormick has been around long enough to see this absurd cycle play out over and over. Fraud doesn’t just exist in lead gen—it thrives. And yet, every time it happens, advertisers act surprised, as if they weren’t complicit in the process from the very start.

“We were running a campaign,” Sean recalled. “I think it was for NEC and MassTort. And we had the five-bell alarm go off—pause all traffic, fraudulent activity detected. So we pause, check in with the client constantly. No news. No news. No news.”

Then, out of nowhere, a friend in the industry calls him.

“Hey, did you hear about XYZ company?”

Turns out, there was fraud—just nowhere near Sean’s traffic. The problem was so far downstream it had nothing to do with them. And yet? The client never came back to say, Oops, our bad!

“That happens all the time,” Sean said. “People get falsely accused, falsely blamed, for things they had no part in. If you don’t have thick skin in this business by now, you’re in the wrong business.”

That’s the scam within the scam. Fraud happens, and advertisers need a scapegoat. Instead of doing the work to figure out where the bad traffic is actually coming from, they hit pause on their vendors, hold a dramatic internal meeting, and then move on as if nothing happened.

Fraud isn’t just getting worse—it’s getting smarter. Bots no longer just click on ads in some basement server farm; they mimic real user behavior. They scroll. They hover. They interact just enough to make it look real to an untrained eye. By the time traditional fraud detection catches up, bad actors have already moved on to a new scheme.

“I’ve heard stories of companies randomizing sub-IDs so advertisers can’t figure out where the traffic is coming from,” Sean said. “And the best part? The clients don’t even want to know. They just want the numbers to look good.”

That’s right—many advertisers actively avoid asking hard questions. They want to see big traffic numbers and low costs because that’s what they promised their boss. Whether those leads are real people or a sophisticated network of bots isn’t their problem.

Clients will swear up and down that they want quality and transparency, but the second fraud rears its head, they reach for the same tired excuses:

Sean doesn’t mince words about the reality of lead gen fraud.

“When clients want quality and complain, but they’re not willing to pay more for top-quality traffic, that’s a problem,” he said. “It should be a red flag to any network, any agency, any publisher. If there’s no increased upside on performance and there’s no transparency on the results you’re driving—that’s a bad client.”

And yet, the cycle continues.

Everyone loves a deal. No one loves getting conned.

But somehow, advertisers keep falling for traffic sources that promise cheap, scalable, high-intent leads—three things that, when combined, never exist in reality.

“Look,” Sean said, “if we’re not doing the little things in this industry to keep us moving forward, then what are we doing here? It just doesn’t make sense to me.”

Yet every day, media buyers greenlight shady traffic sources, ignore warning signs, and play dumb when it all collapses.

And when it does? They look around for someone else to take the fall.

Sean has a simple philosophy: If you want quality, pay for quality. If you want transparency, don’t cut corners.

“I don’t think we’re gonna solve fraud overnight,” he said. “But it starts with advertisers actually caring about where their leads come from. It starts with networks standing up to bad clients and saying, ‘No, we’re not playing this game anymore.’”

In other words, if lead gen is ever going to get its Office Space moment—where we take a metaphorical baseball bat to the fraud machine—someone needs to be willing to stop plugging it back in.