Starting this month, ADOTAT is becoming the publication of record for advertisers.

That's a bigger claim than "independent newsletter," and it comes with a real shift in how we publish.

There is no publication today that serves the advertiser specifically.

The trade press serves vendors and agencies, and they don’t hide it. The analyst firms serve the platforms. The newsletters serve whoever pays for the sponsorship slot.

The advertiser, the person actually spending the money, has been the audience nobody is built for.

That's the gap ADOTAT is filling. The work we do, the Scorecards that name winners and losers, the vendor analysis nobody else will publish, the takes that don't survive in advertiser-funded outlets, only makes sense if the advertiser is the customer.

Not the vendor buying ad slots.

Not the agency hoping for favorable coverage.

The advertiser, paying for analysis they can't get anywhere else.

Yes, this has made us unpopular in certain rooms. The adtech world does not love ADOTAT right now. Vendors we've called out, agencies whose pitches we've taken apart, trade press peers who would rather we stayed quieter, the noise has been real. Good. That's what independence sounds like when it's working. A publication that everyone in the industry loves is a publication that has stopped being useful to the people writing the checks.

To do the job properly, the work needs to live where the advertisers are: in the members edition.

The free edition continues. You'll still get a weekly piece, the lead analysis, the headline takes, the work that introduces what we're covering and why it matters.

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The why, in one line: independence is the product. The more we focus on serving the advertisers who pay for it, the more independent the work gets, and the more valuable it becomes. And yes, the more uncomfortable it makes the people who'd rather we wrote nicer things about their boss.

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Publication of Record for Advertisers
April 28, 2026 | Marketing in the Age of AI:What Has Actually Changed (And What Hasn't)

THE ADOTAT NOTE
Presented by Troutman Amin LLP
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Free Edition
This version includes selected reporting...

I just spent the last few weeks talking to ten CMOs across enterprise SaaS, retail, financial services, and B2B tech. Different industries, different scales, different pressures. I asked all of them the same opening question: what has AI actually changed about your job in the last twelve months?

The answers were more interesting than I expected. Not because they were dramatic. Because they weren't.

The keynote-stage version of this story goes something like: AI is transforming marketing, the funnel is dead, search is dead, attribution is dead, and if you are not deploying agents by Q3 you are already behind. The version I heard from working CMOs is quieter. AI has changed real things, but most of what they thought it would change still looks remarkably similar to the way it looked in 2023.

This is Part 1 of a three-part series. Before we talk about what to expect next or where the smart money is going, we need an honest baseline. Three things have genuinely shifted. Three things have not. And the gap between the hype and the data is wider than most vendor decks would suggest.

What has actually changed

1. The content production ceiling has lifted.

For the entire history of personalisation, the constraint was never data and never targeting. It was production capacity. You could segment a thousand ways and still only ship three creative variants because that is all the agency could turn around in time.

That ceiling has come down. Generative AI is now embedded in roughly 58% of marketing functions for content production, and the practical effect is that producing the fiftieth variant of a campaign asset costs almost what producing the second one used to.

That does not mean the work is automatically better. Scaled mediocrity is still mediocrity. But the economics of personalisation have genuinely changed, and that change is structural, not cyclical. The CMOs I spoke to all flagged this as the single biggest operational shift in their function over the past year. Not the strategy. The cost curve.

2. Discoverability has fragmented, and the platform you optimised for last year is already wrong.

Every CMO I spoke to brought up LLM visibility unprompted. The honest numbers tell a more interesting story than the headlines do: AI referrals are still a fraction of a percent of total traffic, but they convert at 6 to 8 times the rate of Google organic, and the platform mix is shifting faster than any channel in recent memory. ChatGPT's dominance has already cracked. Gemini is climbing fast. The CMOs who optimised for one platform eighteen months ago are redoing the work.

[ The full breakdown, conversion rates by platform, the share-shift data, and why Reddit and Wikipedia matter more than your owned content, is in the members edition. ]

You're reading the free edition. ADOTAT+ is where the work happens.

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If your competitors are reading ADOTAT+ and you aren't, you're planning with less information than they are.

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