Marooned with Alexis: How to Rebuild Adtech Without the Bullsh*t

She’s not here to pivot or pander — she’s here to gut the system that treats fraud as a rounding error.

Pesach Lattin (ADOTAT)
May 12, 2025

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I Left a Burning Building and Landed in a Dumpster Fire

Some people pivot into tech with wide eyes and idealism. Alexis Hochleutner? She pivoted with smoke in her hair and ash on her heels.

🧯 She came from equity investing — real finance. The kind with spreadsheets that don’t lie (much), where “value” means more than just a CPM on a PowerPoint. But in 2008, when the market went full meltdown and banks were collapsing like wet cardboard boxes, she had what we’ll politely call a “career epiphany.” The day before her wedding, the banking system collapsed. Most people would take that as a sign to run for the hills, open a kombucha truck, or learn goat herding.

Instead, she jumped into ad tech — a field that looked new, exciting, and, in theory, safer. That’s the punchline. Because if finance was a burning building, then adtech was a dumpster fire actively being fed lighter fluid by middle managers yelling about cross-device attribution.

She didn’t ease in. She launched herself into the deep end — right into a startup that built its own ad network and looked promising enough to be acquired by Google. Which it was. Except, well, she wasn’t.

🚪 When the acquisition deal closes and you don’t get a badge, just a nod and a severance package, that’s adtech saying: Thanks for playing, please exit through the LinkedIn post.

Did she bail? Of course not. She doubled down.

🧠 Alexis found her way into Google anyway, landing in the trenches of dynamic creative strategy and eventually becoming one of the few brave souls tackling viewability, brand safety, and ad fraud for the DoubleClick platform. In other words: she was on the front lines of every panic attack in digital advertising for the last decade.

She was there when YouTube became ground zero for brand safety meltdowns. Remember those moments when ads showed up next to extremist content and CEOs lost their minds on Slack? She was already awake. “We were up all night,” she’s said, describing those fire drills. Not metaphorically. Literally. Because adtech has no business hours when a pre-roll lands in the middle of terrorist propaganda.

⚠️ And just when she thought it couldn’t get more absurd, she joined Meta. You know — right around the time the words “Cambridge Analytica” became a permanent fixture on cable news. That wasn’t just bad PR. It was moral combustion wrapped in a blue hoodie and denial. What do you do when your employer becomes the global symbol of privacy invasion? If you're Alexis, apparently you dig in deeper and try to fix it from the inside — like trying to patch a sinking ship using PowerPoint and good intentions.

Let’s be honest: at this point, most people would’ve rage-quit the industry, written a Medium post titled “Why I Left Adtech,” and started a yoga brand. But Alexis? She kept going. Amazon. T-Mobile. Another day, another flaming dashboard.

What makes her different — and let’s be clear, she is different — is that she still thinks this broken industry is worth fixing. Like a mechanic who falls in love with the clunker that keeps throwing rods on the freeway, she actually believes in rebuilding it. Even if the industry itself seems hellbent on self-sabotage.

She says she’s a fixer. And God help her, she means it.

🧨 The tragedy of this story isn’t that Alexis stayed. The tragedy is that so few people like her are left. The ones who know the guts of the system, the flaws in the math, the truth behind the metrics — and still want to fix it. Not pivot to fintech. Not write a ghostwritten LinkedIn book. Not sell courseware on “branding for thought leaders.”

No. Alexis wants to make it better. Even if it means staying up all night again. Even if it means getting steamrolled by some new fraud ring wearing a CTV costume. Even if it means fighting for nuance in a world hooked on dashboards and buzzwords.

This isn’t a career. It’s a war memoir written in RFPs, Slack threads, and Google Sheets.

👀 Coming up next: why advertisers love to scream “FRAUD!” but still sign off on MFA-ridden media buys... and how Alexis thinks we can finally do better — one broken metric at a time.

The Supply Chain of Shame: SPO, Fraud, and Blame Games

Let’s be blunt: Supply Path Optimization (SPO) is supposed to clean up programmatic advertising. Instead, it's become the digital equivalent of putting a “Live, Laugh, Love” sign over a landfill.

Everyone talks about “transparency” — platforms, buyers, even vendors who can’t define it without a glossary. But when it comes time to actually map the madness? That’s when eyes glaze over, laptops overheat, and someone quietly suggests “revisiting this in Q4.”

🎯 Alexis Hochleutner spells it out: the problem isn’t tech. It’s willpower.“There’s just so much data,” she explained. “If you look up something like AOL on wellknown.dev, the supply paths are completely unimaginable.” Translation? The number of middlemen between your media dollar and an actual human seeing your ad would make a mobster blush.

🔍 Let’s break this down:

Trade desks have too many doors — and no one’s checking who’s walking through them.
MFA sites are crawling into plans like bedbugs in a roadside motel, and half the industry shrugs because the CPM looks reasonable.
Advertisers? They’re playing whack-a-mole with blocklists while pretending it’s strategy. “Which sites should we exclude today?” is not a media plan. It’s a crisis reaction.

And here's the dirty secret no one wants to talk about: bundling. One line item, 40 sites. You think you're buying premium inventory — but you’re also buying four dating apps, a cryptocurrency forum, and some guy’s blog about air fryers. This is domain spoofing’s more legal cousin, and it thrives because agencies want neat, easy media plans — not 30-page spreadsheets that ask hard questions.

🧨 Hochleutner doesn’t lay blame solely at the feet of buyers. She’s clear: everyone’s responsible. But the system is set up to reward shortcuts. Platforms that could clean house don’t — because the mess makes them money. Agencies that could ask hard questions don’t — because clients don’t ask either. And publishers just want to sell their inventory before it spoils.

Then there’s the Super Bowl moment — the Kanye West stunt that torched brand safety dashboards in real-time. It wasn’t just controversial. It was a masterclass in how SPO fails when culture moves faster than code. A domain can be clean at noon and toxic by 12:05. By the time anyone reacts, it’s too late — the ad’s run, the screenshots are viral, and the brand manager’s in a fetal position on Slack.

💥 SPO should be the firewall. But today, it’s a vending machine with no lock — and fraudsters know the code.

Brand Safety’s Human Toll: What Happens After the Headline

Let’s be clear: brand safety isn't a checklist. It’s a trauma response dressed up in KPI language. And while the industry likes to treat it like an abstract product category — full of dashboards, verification vendors, and pitch decks in navy blue — for the people inside the machine, it’s something very different.

👩‍💻 Alexis Hochleutner knows this intimately. She didn’t just work on brand safety at Google — she helped lead the product strategy and commercialization for it across DoubleClick. And if you think that sounds boring, you’re probably not picturing the Tiger Teams.

You should.

Tiger Teams were the last line of defense between a YouTube monetization scandal and a full-blown advertiser exodus. When news broke that major brands were running ads next to extremist content — think terrorism videos, hate speech, conspiracy rants — Alexis and her colleagues weren’t in “crisis communications.” They were in war rooms, racing to patch blacklists, run diagnostics, call engineers, and do all of it while legal, PR, and product leadership shouted from opposing directions.

🕒 “We were up all night,” she recalled. “It was constant.” Not metaphorically. Not figuratively. Literally — overnight sessions where teams scrambled to triage what had already happened because there wasn’t time to build something better for what might happen next.

This wasn’t just “fixing bugs.” This was saving brand trust in real time — under public scrutiny, internal pressure, and the gnawing knowledge that bad actors were innovating faster than the platforms protecting users.

And here’s the part no one wants to talk about: the psychological toll. Everyone discusses the technical complexity of content moderation. Few discuss what it does to the people doing the work. “Consultants who had to view the worst content every day weren’t doing great,” Alexis said plainly. And neither were the full-time employees watching their platforms monetize hate speech faster than they could flag it.

This wasn’t isolated to YouTube. When Alexis later joined Meta, she walked straight into the post-Cambridge Analytica fog, where the word “privacy” became radioactive and the only certainty was public distrust. “There was nothing I could do to retroactively fix it,” she said. “That was one of the most painful parts.”

💡 Brand safety isn’t just about where an ad runs. It’s about whether a company has the institutional ethics and structural capacity to take responsibility for what it monetizes. That’s why the failures cut so deep. Not just because ads showed up next to bad content — but because entire systems were exposed as reactive, not preventive. And the people inside those systems were the ones absorbing the shock.

Let’s be honest: most CMOs don’t lose sleep over pre-roll placement. But the engineers and policy leads inside the platforms? They do. The emotional labor of policing the internet — in real time, at scale — is enormous. And unlike earnings reports, there’s no slide deck for moral exhaustion.

🎯 Brand safety, in practice, often comes down to trying to put out a wildfire with a spreadsheet. An ad slips onto the wrong video, a watchdog group tweets it out, a Fortune 500 client hits pause — and suddenly, Alexis and her team were the firewall between order and mass brand migration.

That’s the real story behind the sanitized headlines. The quiet collapse of ethical frameworks, the burnout, the 2AM war rooms, and the overwhelming sense that no one ever really built the infrastructure to do this right.

💥 What You’re Missing in ADOTAT+: “Pay More for Less, Demand Receipts”

The fraud? Not a glitch. It’s the business model.
The dashboards? Selling you peace of mind, not real protection.
And those "premium" impressions? You might as well be buying beachfront property on a pixel farm in Nevada.

Alexis Hochleutner doesn’t want your sympathy. She wants your receipts.

This ADOTAT+ exclusive isn't just another exposé. It’s a manifesto for the post-bullshit era of adtech — where buying less actually gets you more, fraudsters get cut off at the bidstream, and MFA sites get thrown into the algorithmic dumpster where they belong.

Inside This Paid Feature:

✅ How verification companies quietly normalized fraud
✅ Why your DSP is overpaying for junk and underpricing quality
✅ The real reason AppLovin might (maybe) be a hero
✅ And yes, why LinkedIn influencers might be more dangerous than click farms

Stop optimizing for fantasy. Start buying like it’s your money on the line.
👉 Unlock the full article in ADOTAT+ — for people who give a damn.

Stay Bold, Stay Curious, and Know More Than You Did Yesterday.

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Marooned with Alexis: How to Rebuild Adtech Without the Bullsh*t

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