When your streaming ad says content_genre: replaced_underscore_mean, you've got a Nick Stark problem.

Nick Stark's Slack DMs look like a crime scene. Not the kind with yellow tape and forensics, but the digital kind—where missing metadata leaves bloodless carnage across revenue reports. He doesn't flinch when he describes it. Four years of this will do that to you.

He's the CEO of GoGoCTV, which sounds like it should involve cartoon characters and bright colors, but is actually the plumbing that keeps the entire streaming advertising ecosystem from collapsing under the weight of its own incompetence. The problem he's solving isn't sexy. It won't win awards at Cannes. But without it, your Super Bowl ad doesn't run, and someone's getting fired.

This is the story of the man who fixes what everyone else pretends isn't broken.

Four years ago, Stark was running the ads business for one of the large OEMs—the kind of company that makes the devices you stream on but never think about. He was in the data streams, watching ad requests come through like he was reading the Matrix. Except the Matrix was broken.

Content genre? Missing.
Content rating? Gone.
IP addresses, device IDs, the basic infrastructure of digital advertising—AWOL.

Sometimes the data wasn't just missing. Sometimes it was actively lying. Fields would say replaced_underscore_mean where actual information should be. It was gibberish dressed up as metadata, and it was everywhere.

“We would just continually see a lot of missing data,” Stark tells me, with the flatness of someone who's explained this too many times to people who should already know better. “IP address, device ID, really critical things of information that we need to be able to give to advertisers to make it enticing for them to buy.”

Here's where it gets expensive.
A single missing piece of metadata—just one—reduced revenue by 90 percent in cases he witnessed.

Not 9 percent.
Ninety.

One field goes dark, and a campaign that should generate a million dollars brings in a hundred grand. The rest just evaporates into the digital void, like it was never real money to begin with.

But the industry kept moving.
Kept pretending the plumbing worked fine.
Kept building higher and faster on a foundation that was rotting from the inside.

GoGoCTV is not another dashboard. Thank God for that.

The ad tech world is drowning in dashboards, each one promising to be the single source of truth while showing you seventeen different versions of the same lie. Stark's pitch is simpler and more brutal:

Ad operations as a service.

They're the people who go into your streaming infrastructure and actually fix the pipes.

“Sanitizing the data cesspool everyone else pretends is a spa,” is how I'd describe it. Stark's too polite to use those exact words, but the metaphor holds. Everyone's acting like CTV infrastructure is a luxury resort when it's actually a Superfund site. GoGoCTV shows up with hazmat suits and gets to work.

They're not in the business of making things look pretty.
They're in the business of making things work.

Fixing metadata.
Auditing ad server configurations.
Making sure that when someone says they have a 50–50 inventory split, it's actually 50–50.

Not 70–30 with someone pocketing the difference.

The unglamorous work.
The work that has to happen before anything else can.

Because here's the thing about plumbing: you don't notice it until it stops working.
And by then, you're already standing in sewage.

“Data is the rocket fuel to the rocket,” Stark says, and I can hear him saying this to clients, to partners, to anyone who'll listen. It's his mantra. His north star. The thing he's built an entire company around.

But the lie people tell themselves—the lie that keeps Stark's business running—is that their CTV ad stack is set up properly. That the deals they signed are being honored. That the 50–50 split in the contract is actually happening in the ad server.

It's almost never true.

“It's very, very common for us to see commercially where somebody's done an inventory split,” Stark explains, “and when we go in and we actually test the plumbing and make sure that that is all set up correctly,” he pauses, “it's not.”

Sometimes it's inadvertent. Someone bumped something in the ad server. A configuration drifted. A tag got updated and nobody checked.

But sometimes—and Stark says this carefully, like he's already talked to lawyers about it—“we've actually seen some scenarios where people are just taking inventory, they're not even contractually allowed to do that. And they're just taking inventory and pocketing all the revenue themselves.”

That's not a bug.
That's theft.

And it's happening because nobody's checking the plumbing.

This is Part 1 of a five-part series on Nick Stark and the infrastructure crisis in CTV advertising. We're just getting started.

Coming up: How dirty data costs real money. Why leadership in chaos requires different rules than leadership in order. The metrics the industry worships that might be completely wrong. And what happens when AI decides what makes you cry.

But first, we had to start here.

With the plumbing.
With the unglamorous work.
With the man who looked at the flaming junkyard of CTV metadata and said, “Yeah, I can fix that.”

Because before you can reach for the stars, someone has to make sure the rocket fuel isn't just replaced_underscore_mean.

You’re staring at dashboards like tea leaves, trusting IVT scores you can’t audit, optimizing campaigns into early graves, and calling math “magic” because PowerPoint told you to. Somewhere in the stack, inventory is being blocked, reshaped, or quietly siphoned off, and everyone agrees not to notice because noticing has consequences.

ADOTAT+ isn’t about prettier charts or louder buzzwords. It’s about who benefits when systems stay broken, why complexity keeps getting rewarded, and which “protections” are actually punishments in disguise. If your takeaway from CTV right now is attention metrics and AI hype, you’re missing the money trail, the power wall, and the part where the dashboard eventually goes dark.

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