Ad tech is full of characters who claim they’re building “superteams” — which usually means they hired a guy who once built a decent Looker dashboard and a woman who posts thought leadership selfies with captions like “Just a girl, her latte, and some optimization goals.” These are not superteams. These are branded hostage situations wrapped in Slack threads.

Adam Potashnick, however, doesn’t traffic in that nonsense. He’s not here to sell you on some over-polished agency mythology about “synergy” or “center of excellence.” He’s here to talk about something a lot more difficult — and a lot more honest. Real teams. Real leadership. And the very real challenge of making brilliant but stubborn ad nerds actually work together without murdering each other via passive-aggressive JIRA tickets.

There’s no one silver bullet to building a team, he tells me. No magical framework or “Chief Happiness Officer” that makes it all click. What matters is mutual respect — not in the HR poster way, but in the real, in-the-trenches sense. People need to understand how they work best, and how their colleagues work differently, and then adapt accordingly. And if that sounds obvious, try sitting through a pitch meeting where three strategists interrupt each other to say the same buzzword.

Potashnick doesn’t want clones. He wants chaos that communicates. His secret sauce is surrounding himself with people who are smarter than him — not just technically, but socially, strategically, and creatively. They have different skill sets, different backgrounds, and very different personalities. But they bring out the best in each other. They don’t compete. They level each other up.

When I asked him about the kinds of people who don’t make the cut, he didn’t hesitate. It’s the folks who don’t understand what their teammates bring to the table. The ones who can't collaborate, can’t trust, and definitely can’t resist sending that 500-word Slack message that should’ve just been a meeting.

This isn’t an abstract philosophy. At Brainlabs, he’s built a structure where deeply specialized people — the kind you don’t want to lose in a reorg — thrive alongside broader generalists who can connect the dots and elevate the thinking. He doesn’t want only “ninjas,” but he’s not allergic to the word either. What matters is how well people work together across practices, not how flashy their LinkedIn banner looks.

I pressed him on a classic scenario: you’ve got two candidates — one’s a certified genius who couldn’t collaborate her way out of a group project, the other’s moderately talented but brings everyone together like a glue stick in human form. Who gets the job? He didn’t even pause. The second one. Every time. Because in this industry, the ability to connect with clients and build trust matters more than lone-wolf brilliance. You can train up technical skills. You can’t train someone to not be a nightmare.

He sees advertising as a fundamentally social industry. Results are great — and necessary — but they’re the byproduct of trust, chemistry, and consistency. You can’t fake that with process decks or “vision boards.” You build that through experience, empathy, and actually giving a damn about the people you work with.

So what’s his dream team look like? He name-dropped Stephen Allan, the legendary former global CEO of MediaCom, who now sits at Brainlabs as executive chair. Charlie Ruppman, a media legend and next-door neighbor from Long Island, who taught him that warmth and approachability win more clients than pitch theater. Sasha Savic, who drilled into him the difference between playing to win and playing not to lose — and who helped him turn MediaCom into a U.S. juggernaut.

In his mind, a superteam isn’t about titles or trophies. It’s about people who make you better just by showing up — and who bring a little fire when the market turns cold.

And of course, we got to the most important question: the desert island test. Who does he take? Andy Littlewood, Richelle Reisner, Catherine Cook, Virginia Hanchar, and Jeremy Hull — all current Brainlabs leaders, all folks he describes as brilliant, collaborative, positive, and impossible not to want in your foxhole (or hammock). These are the people who would not only survive — they’d build a functioning media operation out of coconuts and optimism.

And what about his secret island identity? Without missing a beat, he says it: El Presidente. Sipping something cold in the Maldives. Probably still running performance reports on a palm leaf.

So here’s the takeaway. While the rest of the industry is busy posting vague life lessons and calling themselves “visionaries,” Adam Potashnick is quietly doing the work: assembling teams that deliver, creating partnerships that last, and telling the truth about what it takes to thrive in this very weird, very human, very wonderful corner of the business.

Next time you hear someone say they’re “assembling a superteam,” ask them one thing: Would you survive a desert island with these people?

If the answer’s no, they’re not a team. They’re a branding exercise.

Tone: Wall Street Journal meets a dinner party with good scotch

Let’s cut the polite industry fluff: partnerships in ad tech often come with all the intimacy of a one-night stand and the shelf life of a ripe avocado. The pitch deck is dazzling. The KPIs are aligned. Everyone toasts the “synergy.” Then the campaign stumbles, the finger-pointing starts, and suddenly your “strategic collaborator” turns into a ghost with an NDA.

Adam Potashnick doesn’t play that game.

For him, partnership means standing shoulder-to-shoulder with your clients especially when things go sideways. Not just showing up when the charts are green and the headlines are flattering. He describes a real partnership as one where success is shared — but failure is too. If the campaign underperforms, you're not just emailing a PDF and blaming the weather. You’re staying late, revisiting the data, bringing new ideas, and reminding the client they’re not in it alone.

There’s a moment in our interview where he quietly admits the worst kind of heartbreak in this business isn’t when something fails — it’s when you gave it everything. Lowered fees. Rebuilt the team. Shared the entire roadmap for the next 18 months. And still, the client walked.

That’s not just a missed opportunity. That’s betrayal.

And yet, he’s not cynical. In fact, he welcomes performance-based partnerships — within reason. He’s not afraid to put skin in the game, as long as the terms reflect mutual accountability. You can’t peg success entirely to performance when the brand refuses to evolve, the messaging’s a mess, or the internal politics turn every pivot into a legal review.

That’s the quiet trap in many of today’s “outcome-driven” media deals: they sound rigorous, but they’re often built on sand. You’ll hear words like “agile,” “transparent,” or “nimble,” but there’s rarely a shared definition of success beyond the first QBR.

What Adam wants is alignment before commitment. He’s been burned before by clients who said all the right things and then disappeared the moment the numbers got complicated. That’s why his golden rule is deceptively simple: don’t invest your top people and your best thinking into a relationship unless the client brings the same level of commitment to the table.

He knows the stakes. Agencies are often asked to perform miracles under pressure, then blamed when magic doesn’t happen on schedule. And yet he still believes in the long game — in partnerships where both sides understand the stakes, the risks, and the reality that not everything works on the first try.

Most of all, he understands the real killer in many agency-client dynamics: misaligned trust. When one side assumes the other is hedging, or not fully bought in, the relationship quietly degrades. Ideas stop flowing. Reports get defensive. And eventually, the only KPI anyone cares about is “how fast can we exit?”

That’s why this section isn’t about deliverables. It’s about behavior. About how real partnerships behave when things get hard.

If you’re in sales, partnerships, or strategy, this is the one you forward to your boss the next time a shiny new deal looks good on paper but smells like trouble.

And if you’re that client who thinks performance-based just means “do more with less” — maybe read this twice. With scotch.

What You’re Missing in ADOTAT+

So you skimmed the headlines, chuckled at a few snarky punchlines, and told yourself you’re good. But let’s be honest: you just read the trailer.

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🧠 The Real Leadership Playbook
Not just vibes and virtue-signaling LinkedIn posts. We unpack how actual leadership looks in 2025 — from culture codes that are enforced (not just embossed on the wall) to feedback loops sharper than most quarterly earnings calls.

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Everyone’s selling “AI” like it’s a Costco rotisserie chicken — cheap, fast, and somehow always available. But here? We slice into the marrow of the myth. What’s real. What’s recycled. And why Adam Potashnick is calling out the snake oil one dashboard at a time.

Hint: Most ad tech AI is just spellcheck for Excel.

📉 The Metrics That Actually Matter
Forget CTR fluff. We break down how Brainlabs used real AI (not the generative kind that hallucinates your brand into chaos) to drop Icelandair’s cost-per-booking by 70% — and what made that possible. Spoiler: It wasn’t just math. It was method.

🔥 The TL;DR of Staying Relevant
You want performance? It starts with culture. You want AI that actually delivers? Start with data. You want to stop wasting budget on ad-tech tarot readings? Start reading ADOTAT+.

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