I'm at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting right now. California. The weather is aggressively pleasant, almost smug about it. The lanyards are crisp. The coffee is adequate.

Shaking hands. Smiling at people I half-recognize. Nodding at panels like the content is penetrating my skull. The circuit. You know the circuit.

Nothing's on fire. Nobody's thrown a chair. The WiFi works. By conference standards, we're crushing it.

And look—people here are smart. Good conversations are happening. Deals are getting sketched on napkins. Old friends are reconnecting over $27 wine. That part matters. This industry still runs on handshakes and "let's grab lunch." Always will.

But here's my problem.

I'm an hour in and I'm getting déjà vu. Like someone took a podcast I recorded in 2023, changed the names, and is presenting it as a keynote.

Because everyone here is talking about things I wrote two years ago.

Here's what I'm hearing. On stage. In hallways. Everywhere.

Quality matters now."

"We need to clean up the supply chain."

"Too much garbage inventory."

"AI can help fix quality."

Groundbreaking. Very 2024-core.

And here's the kicker—someone told me even MediaPost is talking about transparency now.

MediaPost.

What's next? The adtech bruh gods descending from their Williamsburg lofts to admit they scammed us all? Some guy in a Patagonia vest on stage saying, "Yeah, so, about those impressions... funny story"?

Maybe we'll get a LinkedIn post. Heartfelt. Lots of paragraph breaks. "I built a company on arbitrage and fraud, and here's what I learned about authenticity." Forty thousand likes. A book deal.

I kid. Mostly.

Back in 2023, I wrote that programmatic was bloated. Those incentives were broken. That half the ecosystem was just toll collectors with nicer dashboards. That we'd built a Rube Goldberg machine for shuffling pennies while everyone took a cut.

The response? Polite.

Head tilts. Small smiles. The verbal equivalent of "bless your heart."

"Cute newsletter."

"A little negative, maybe?"

"Long-form is dead."

"Blunt doesn't scale."

Translation: You're making people uncomfortable. Please stop.

I kept writing anyway. What was I gonna do, learn to code?

So here I am. ALM 2026.

What was heresy is now a panel. What got me head tilts is now a keynote with mood lighting. "The Future of Quality" is a sponsored event with passed appetizers and a LinkedIn step-and-repeat.

Same ideas. Better fonts. Bigger rooms.

This industry has the institutional memory of a goldfish that just closed a Series B.

Say something early? You're negative. Not a team player.

Say it two years later with a sponsor logo? You're a visionary. A thought leader.

Timing beats accuracy. Every. Single. Time.

You knew this was coming.

Every panel. Every deck. Every hallway conversation that ran out of things to say.

AI.

Bad inventory? AI. Fraud? AI. Low attention? AI. That weird smell in the convention center? Probably AI.

I'm not anti-AI. It's useful. It's going to change things.

But can we say the quiet part out loud?

Quality is not a technology problem. It's an incentives problem.

You don't need another layer of machine learning to fix a system that pays everyone by the impression regardless of whether a human ever saw anything.

You don't need better AI. You need fewer middlemen.

But "stop buying garbage" doesn't keynote well. "Fire your vendors" doesn't get you a sponsored cocktail hour.

So we get another dashboard. Another layer on top of the layers. Optimizing chaos instead of having less chaos.

Earlier today, Matt Wasserlauf came up to me.

He said: "You're one of the few guys who actually says it like it is."

I appreciated it.

But it's been rattling around my head all afternoon.

Because that's not really a compliment. It's an indictment.

If "says it like it is" is remarkable, something's broken.

Most people here aren't liars. They're just... smoothing. Softening. Positioning. Calibrating their opinions to the room, the client, the LinkedIn algorithm.

There's what you think.

There's what you say on a panel.

There's what you tell your board.

There's what you tell yourself at night.

Somehow these are all different things.

There's a difference between truth and something that invoices well.

I'm not here to trash ALM. It's fine. Good, even. People showed up. Standards got announced. LinkedIn is getting fed.

But I keep thinking:

We've been "starting here" for thirty years.

When do we get to the middle? When does something get done?

Or is "It Starts Here" just code for: "Let's not talk about what didn't work last time"?

Starting over isn't a strategy. It's a tell.

Anyway. That's the free version.

Everything above is cocktail party safe. The Adotat+ version is what's actually happening:

This is the part that doesn't fit in a LinkedIn post.

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