It's Cyber Monday. It's 30 degrees in Dallas, Texas. Sam Bloom is sitting in his office wondering why the weather is broken and whether the entire ad industry is about to follow suit.

He's not hiding from it. "It's hard not to feel that there's change everywhere right now in our industry," he tells me, then adds with unexpected candor: "I have just as much anxiety as everyone else."

Not the good kind of change. Not the butterfly-emerging-from-cocoon kind. The fast fashion kind. The kind where last season's hot take is already in the clearance bin and nobody can tell who's actually building something real versus who just slapped .ai on their domain name and called it innovation.

I asked him to translate. Is this change like a butterfly? Or change like a dumpster fire that glows a different color each quarter?

No hesitation. "We are in fast fashion."

Sam Bloom is Head of Partnerships at PMG. He's also a third-generation advertiser. Let that sink in. Three generations of his family have watched this industry reinvent itself, eat itself, and reinvent itself again. He thinks of advertising like a forest. Deforestation happens. Reforestation follows. Circle of life. Hakuna matata. Except right now we're in what he calls a massive cycle.

Translation: the trees are coming down fast and nobody's entirely sure what grows back.

"There will be a changing of the guard," he says. "For certain."

For certain. He says that a lot. It's his tell. When Sam says "for certain," he means "this is obvious to anyone paying attention but I'm too polite to say you're an idiot if you haven't noticed."

I've had Sam on the show before. He came back. Either that's heroic or deeply concerning. His PR team is probably updating their resumes as we speak.

Here's the thing about Sam. He's been in enough rooms to know when the emperor has no clothes. He's also polished enough to point it out without getting uninvited to the next dinner. That's a skill. In an industry where everyone's either a cheerleader or a doomsayer, Sam is something rarer. He's realistic.

And right now, his realistic take is this: we are drowning in AI claims that are mostly nonsense.

Remember the early programmatic days? Every company that walked in the door said they were a DSP. Sam would go around back to the SSPs and check receipts. "I would go talk to the SSPs and say, hey, tell me about the bids in the backend. What do you see?" The answer was always the same. "The bids are the same." Which meant one thing: "Nope, they're an ad net." Same tech. Same ad networks wearing a fancy hat.

We're in that exact moment again. Everything coming at us says it's AI. Says it's agentic. Says it's transformational. Sam's response? Prove it.

Because right now, he says, "it takes a lot of energy to sort the wheat from the slop."

Slop. That's the word. Not chaff. Slop. Because chaff implies something natural. Slop implies someone made a mess and is trying to serve it to you anyway.

So what actually impresses him? What passes the Sam Bloom smell test?

It comes down to two questions. "I love it when a company comes and says, hey, here's the problem we're trying to solve," he explains. What catches his eye is when AI "can do something that you couldn't do before, or make something way easier, or solve a legitimate problem."

That's it. Two questions:

Does it solve a problem that couldn't be solved before?

Does it make something dramatically easier?

If the answer to both is no, you're wasting his time. And yours.

The problem, Sam says, is that we're in "the first inning of all this stuff" and there's a mad rush "to go build things that look AI or look agentic, but it's really the same old crap."

Same old crap. His words. On the record.

But here's where it gets interesting. Because Sam isn't anti-AI. He's anti-theater. He actually sees massive opportunity in automation. He just thinks everyone's aiming at the wrong target.

And then he said something I didn't expect from a senior agency executive. On the record. In an industry that treats burnout like a badge of honor.

"I really worry about the mental health of people in our business," he told me, "because it is a lot of long hours."

He connected the dots in a way I haven't heard before. The problem isn't AI replacing people. The problem is people doing work that should have been automated ten years ago. Trafficking. Auditing. Reporting. Billing. The stuff that eats most of everyone's time and brings approximately zero joy to anyone's life.

"I want there to be joy in this job," he says. "It's a super fun industry and it's super interesting. But I also think we shouldn't spend 70 percent of our time on planning, buying, trafficking, reporting, billing." He pauses. "All that stuff sucks and nobody wants to do it."

Joy. In advertising. Revolutionary concept.

But don't mistake his optimism for naivety. Sam has fears. Real ones. And here's the part that should make every holding company executive choke on their oat milk latte.

He doesn't fear the big agencies.

He fears two people in a garage.

"I generally don't fear the big agencies," he says, leaning in. "I actually fear the two gals or the two guys in the garage that are building something from the ground up more than I fear the big ones."

Why? Purity. Scarcity. No legacy tech debt. No "transformation initiatives" that are really just reorganizations with new PowerPoint templates. Just people building AI-native tools from scratch because they don't know any other way.

"Scarcity," he says, "creates a lot of creativity."

That sound you hear is a thousand middle managers justifying their existence.

We covered a lot of ground. CTV. Retail media. The death of cookies (a death of a thousand cuts, he calls it). The transparency paradox. The thing about clients saying they want transparency and then signing deals with agencies that operate like black boxes. Sam has thoughts. Strong ones. He doesn't do principal media at PMG and he's happy to explain why other agencies do.

We talked about what happens if agencies just... disappear. His answer might surprise you. Or confirm your worst fears. Depends on where you sit.

We talked about measurement. About why last-click attribution is a trap. About why incrementality testing matters and why most clients won't do it.

We talked about CTV graduating high school. About the one metric everyone worships that Sam thinks is overrated. (Spoiler: it's attention.) About the coming tsunami of AI slop hitting connected TV and why quality signals are about to matter more than ever.

We even stranded him on a desert island again. He'd bring Netflix. And Dave Morgan. Don't ask.

But all of that is below. For the paying customers. The ones who want the full playbook.

Here's what I'll leave you with. The thing Sam said that should be tattooed on every conference lanyard from now until the heat death of the universe.

"AI is not a strategy," he told me. "It's like saying oxygen is important. Of course. Yes, it's in the air." The real problem? "People emphasize the AI doing things for us versus us telling the AI how to do something. You still need expertise. The AI is not expertise."

Read that again.

Now ask yourself how many pitch decks you've seen this year that violate every word of it.

The real playbook is below. What's actually working. What's theater. How the smartest people in the room are preparing for what comes next.

Part Two: Sam's full framework for evaluating AI claims. The automation opportunities everyone's missing. Why the garage kids are coming for your lunch.

Part Three: CTV's graduation ceremony. The transparency paradox explained. Retail media as identity infrastructure. And what happens when agencies disappear.

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