Rob Rakowitz has always lived in the uncomfortable center of the advertising ecosystem—the place where optimism, governance, brand safety, and industry politics crash into each other. During his time leading GARM, he became a lightning rod. Some praised him as a steady hand in a volatile space; others wrote what can only be described as long-form subtweets masquerading as analysis.

That tension didn’t happen by accident. It followed him because he does something rare in marketing:

He tells the truth plainly, without checking who might flinch.

Now, as Head of Marketing at Vidmob, Rob has shifted that candor toward an even larger challenge: convincing the industry to stop treating creative like an artistic afterthought and to start treating it as the primary driver of performance.