Hi.

Let's start there, because most newsletters in this space open with a headline dressed up as a personality, and I'd rather just talk to you.

The industry got interesting again this week, and I mean that as a professional compliment, not a vibe. I've got a company's own referee answering yes-or-no questions about a standard he half-invented. A "currency" whose math depends entirely on which nine months you're willing to ask about. And a diner ad that ran so many times I could recite the jingle before I found out the restaurant's address wasn't even in the creative. That's not a slow news week. That's the whole beat finally earning its keep.

More on all of it as the week runs. First, some housekeeping and some history, because a few of you keep asking how ADOTAT actually started, and the honest answer is funnier than the LinkedIn version.

Here's the thing nobody selling you a "founder story" webinar will admit: ADOTAT wasn't a business plan. It was the exhaust from my consulting work. I'd write down what I was seeing, mostly for myself, with zero publication-grade editorial standards, because it wasn't a publication. It was a personal blog that happened to have very strong opinions about programmatic waterfalls, which, if you know me, tracks.

I've retired twice. Neither one stuck. Somewhere in one of those retirements the blog turned into a podcast, and the podcast started pulling numbers that made no sense for a hobby. Why? Because I didn't have sponsors to protect, which is not a humble brag, it's an accounting problem. Independence cost more than the people I was theoretically competing with. It still does. It only became an actual business when we put up the paid side, when readers made it clear they weren't paying for more headlines. They were paying to know what people in this industry actually say once they think the microphone's off.

A friend, Barry Green, forwarded me a complaint about somebody else's newsletter recently. I clicked over bracing for the usual trade-press mediocrity. Instead I found a company that had raised real, serious, embarrassing amounts of money to be, and I'm using their own language here, a publishing house. The output read like a press release photocopied until the ink faded, then photocopied again. The "analysis" was the press release's own talking points wearing a slightly different hat. You could lift a phrase from the "story," drop it into a search bar, and watch it pair, almost every single time, with the release it was allegedly reporting on. That's not journalism. That's a fax machine with a Twitter account.

This isn't new, by the way. Early television wasn't sponsored, it was built by the sponsors. I learned this form Ed Papazarian in his new book. Soap companies literally produced the soap operas carrying their name. We spent decades clawing our way out of that arrangement because everyone eventually agreed it was a conflict of interest wearing a cardigan. A lot of B2B trade press in ad tech has quietly wandered back into that exact building. If you have to keep pushing the same idea to keep the lights on, you can't afford the idea that contradicts it. Not a moral failing so much as a structural one. The effect on you, the reader, is identical either way: you think you're getting reporting when you're getting a distribution channel with a masthead glued on.

I made up the term "ad tech mafia" myself, a while back, to describe something real: a small circle of people who decide who's "in the know" in this industry and who gate access accordingly. Some people took it as an insult instead of a diagnosis. Fair. I write with a sharp elbow, that's the brand. But the term was never about who's cool. It's about who controls the pipeline of what counts as insider knowledge, and who gets frozen out of it on purpose, including, some days, me.

Which brings me to the part where people occasionally imply I've never actually built anything in this industry, only written about the people who did. That's just factually backwards, and a little insulting, and I'm allowed to say so. I've been in this industry over thirty years, since I was a kid slapping banner code on websites for beer money. I helped build platforms. I worked inside open exchange and RTB back when both were still arguments happening in real conference rooms, not case studies with a logo on them.

Not being in whatever room you mean doesn't mean I wasn't working. It usually means I was in a different one, building the thing you're now standing on.

Since a few of you asked what's in the pipeline: the piece on why every "AI changes advertising" claim collapses into either an arbitrage window or a relabel job, no third option, runs this week. So does the follow-up on agentic buying standards, where I put the same six questions to both sides of the AdCP-versus-IAB-Tech-Lab fight and, refreshingly, got real answers from both. VideoAmp's currency math is still getting tested against actual invoices, not press-release arithmetic. The MRC accreditation series keeps going, because "we're MRC accredited" is doing an enormous amount of work for a claim that, in most cases, describes something that technically does not exist. And somewhere in Phoenix there's still a diner running the same CTV ad twenty-plus times that I have not let go of, because I don't think a single person can honestly tell that owner whether it worked.

None of this is boring. That is the entire point of this letter.

While I'm being upfront: the ADOTAT Show is dark for the next two Mondays. Nothing broke. Nobody quit. Nobody got sued. Yet. Season 10 is coming, and I'd rather you get a rerun of an episode you actually liked than a rushed one you'll forget by lunch. So for two weeks you're getting the good ones back, the episodes people forwarded to their bosses with zero context attached, which is my favorite genre of email to receive. Behind the scenes we're locking the new intro and finalizing the lineup so Season 10 isn't just the usual suspects saying the usual things in a slightly nicer chair. Back the first Monday of September.

Speaking of people who've actually built things: happy birthday to Brian O'Kelley. The man made real money doing this and has said publicly he only intends to keep a fraction of it, giving the rest away. That is a rarer instinct in this industry than good API documentation, and I don't say that lightly.

And I'll admit it: I'm still a little amazed at how well the new site design landed. The LinkedIn response has been genuinely warm, which is not a sentence I get to write often about anything with the word "redesign" in it. Thank you for noticing. We built it so you'd actually read the thing, not just scroll past it and feel vaguely informed.

Going to be a great week. Read closely.