Here is what you need to know about Jared Belsky before you press play.

He has run the Fanta brand at Coca-Cola.

He has run a fertilizer company, which is where he learned to tell his grandmother he sold shit for a living.

He was CEO of 360i, the agency behind the Oreo blackout tweet, which he will not take credit for. He walked away from Dentsu in 2021, sat in a coffee shop with a co-founder who had sold a furniture company he started at fourteen, and built Acadia into a 325-person independent that MediaPost named agency of the year in three.

And in February he did something no other agency CEO in America has done in print. He wrote a column in Adweek announcing that Acadia had taken a rebate from a media vendor and given it back. A six-figure sum.

Fifty-three clients. Pro rata, by a rubric. On the show, he explained it the way you explain something obvious to a child.

"Your agency X. And you spend $500 million on whatever. Property X on behalf of all your clients. Why on earth do you deserve the rebate that you're only able to get because of your stewardship of your clients' money? I didn't understand it, which is why in 2026 we took our rebate. And I'm not going to disclose this particular vendor. We only did one rebate. It was sort of an experiment. We got the rebate and then we redistributed back to our clients pro rata."

He won't name the vendor. It is the only thing in 30 minutes he wouldn't tell me. Everything else came out of him like it had been waiting.

The thing that stopped me was not the $40 billion, which is the number he is known for. It was the float. Acadia does not touch client money. Not the rebate money, the media money.

Since founding, the agency has made its clients pay publishers directly, and it makes its fee, and that is the entire relationship.

"We help them with the invoicing. We help them with the logistics, but no. We almost insist that the publishers bill the clients directly and they pay directly. We just make our fee. You know, there's an old story, how do you not get pregnant? Abstinence. Well, what's the best way to prove that you're not gonna be up to any funny business? Don't touch the money."

I have interviewed a great many agency executives.

I have never heard one describe the core financial mechanism of the agency business as a pregnancy to be avoided. Or at least that’s what I thought he said.

He is funny about it, and he is not joking.

"We are not banks."

It is the most cheerful conversation about fraud I have ever recorded. Press play.

The ADOTAT Show, Season 10, Episode 1: Jared Belsky, Acadia. Full video and audio, chapters and sponsor reads. Free to everyone.