🗣️ Intro to Fred Godfrey: The Most Honest Man in Adtech (Possibly)

Fred Godfrey doesn’t do polite fiction. He’s the kind of guy who shows up to an ad tech dinner party, drops a truth bomb in the hummus, and then calmly offers you a fork.

He opens with a question that should haunt every CMO’s quarterly check-in: “Is it a not knowing or is it not wanting to know situation?” Fred likens it to his unused gym membership—a truth you ignore until it quietly auto-renews your failure.

And that, dear reader, is the state of modern media buying.

Once clients do learn what’s possible with dynamic creative that actually performs, they stop hedging and start spending. “Every one of our mainstay clients increases their budgets with us by almost a hundred percent year on year,” Fred said, barely pretending it’s not awkward to say out loud. “And they have done that for five years.”

It’s not ego. It’s exposure. The moment you stop pretending impressions are a KPI and actually track outcomes, everything changes

Fred gets it—no one wants to be the agency that’s just cheap enough to keep. “Media buyers need to hit real thresholds now—actual outcomes, ROAS, all those initials that really matter,” he said, punctuating it like someone who’s been in more than a few pitch rooms.

Origin’s approach? Make them look like geniuses. “Our job is to make you the hero for your client,” he explained. “You don't want the revolving door of people going in and out just looking for the cheapest agency. You need an agency that helps you hit your mark—and makes you look good doing it.”

And yes, the creative helps. A lot.

Fred doesn't think a strong brand is useless—he just knows it’s not a free pass anymore. “A lot of people still think they can run generic creative, get clever with targeting or frequency, and squeeze out incremental gains,” he told us. But that’s the old playbook. The final desperate flip of a yellowing binder from 2014.

What actually works? A story people want to watch—and a placement smart enough to make that story relevant without making it creepy. “You need to look at the story itself. What we do is show people what happens if you do both—manage the media smartly and build a truly dynamic creative framework.”

It’s not enough to optimize around fragments. You have to optimize the whole damn narrative.

Let’s be honest: DCO has a branding problem. Most “dynamic” campaigns are just static ads with a badge and a timestamp. Fred knows this, and he knows where it gets weird. “We all made that mistake in the past,” he said, smirking. “No one wants to turn on their TV and see an ad say, ‘Hey Johnny, we hear it’s your 41st birthday—and that you and your neighbor Carl both suffer from ED.’”

Instead, Fred wants DCO that creates real, meaningful moments. Think mortgage rate changes by zip code. Think lawn care ads that reference the actual rainfall in your county. “It’s about creating a value exchange between the viewer and the brand. Something you don’t expect to see on TV, but that actually feels like it belongs.”

The secret? It still starts with the same “hero” ad. You just surgically enhance it—not slap a chyron over the actor’s face with a weather warning.

Origin’s approach involves watching every frame, every transition, and asking: “Where can this story be enhanced?” Not how can we add a gimmick, but how can we respect the narrative and still make it feel alive?

Because Fred just told you the part your DSP rep won’t. You’ve been optimizing for efficiency when you should’ve been optimizing for resonance. You’ve been layering tech on top of garbage creative and wondering why it doesn’t work.

You’ve been pretending not to know.

Fred’s here to make you know—and once you do, like his clients, you won’t go back.

Let’s stop pretending.

The advertising industry has become the digital equivalent of an episode of Hoarders—only instead of newspapers from 1992 and expired jars of mustard, it’s 143 creative variations of a single “Buy Now” ad, desperately hoping one of them might accidentally drive a 0.03% uptick in CTR.

It’s not strategy. It’s creative clutter.

Fred Godfrey has had enough.

“What you’re seeing,” Fred explains, “is a desperate attempt to squeeze the remaining fragments of success out of a very old playbook.” And if that sounds harsh, it’s because it is. He’s not here to pat the industry on the back. He’s here to pry the ad world’s fingers off the decaying corpse of “personalization at scale” and tell it the hard truth:
You’re not optimizing. You’re overproducing. And worse—you’re boring people to death.

Let’s call it what it is: efficiency theater.

The performance metrics look good in a dashboard. The media team can send a neat PDF to the client. And somewhere deep in a cavernous agency server farm, a robot is generating new ad variants like it’s printing coupons in 2006. But nothing actually resonates.

Fred puts it plainly: “A lot of people still think they can have generic creative, but if they just get clever enough—get even more dweebish with the targeting or the frequency or some form of data usage—they can manufacture efficiency by avoiding waste. That’s not the next level. That’s the last gasp of the old one.”

Let that one marinate.

Because what Fred’s getting at isn’t just a creative problem—it’s an existential one. We’ve mistaken “busy” for “better.” More variations, more personalization fields, more audience segments… and somehow, still less effectiveness.

Dynamic Creative Optimization was supposed to be the Holy Grail—the thing that finally merged storytelling with performance, that gave us the tools to talk to individuals without losing the soul of the story.

But most executions today? Fred likens them to someone duct-taping a weather ticker onto a car commercial. “We’ve done campaigns where the entire ad was dynamic from soup to nuts,” he says, referencing their work in financial services. “Every pixel shifted in real-time. But most brands don’t want to go that far. They want the live-action celebrity. The bigwig driving the Ram off a cliff. And they want us to layer on something ‘dynamic.’”

Here’s the problem: you can’t layer intelligence on top of incoherence.

Fred again: “You can’t just slap a DCO overlay on a generic ad and expect it to work. If you’re hiding key storytelling moments, if you’re covering the actor’s face with a countdown timer, you might as well not run the ad at all. You’re making the most expensive content on the screen irrelevant.”

At Origin, they approach every creative frame-by-frame. Literally. “We look at every transition and ask: where can this story be enhanced? Where can this moment deliver more without breaking the narrative?” It’s less “A/B test the CTA” and more “operate with surgical precision.”

The goal? Dynamic storytelling that feels natural. That belongs. That surprises without shouting. That speaks without stalking.

Because—Fred’s words again—“People will look again if you give them something they didn’t expect to see on TV. But they’ll only engage if it feels like it’s meant to be there.”

Here’s where things get even juicier. We’ve let the idea of “optimization” become a crutch. A shield against accountability. A technical alibi for creative failure.

Fred’s not here for it.

“The problem is,” he says, “most people think optimization means running faster, not thinking harder. But all the tweaks in the world won’t fix a story that doesn’t connect. A/B testing 27 versions of a weak message doesn’t make it strong. It just makes it more consistently forgettable.”

And forgettable is expensive.

Especially in a world where attention is the currency, not impressions. If your ad blends into the background, your brand doesn’t get remembered. If your message feels like an afterthought, it gets treated like one.

Fred’s teams run campaigns that are deeply responsive—but not robotic. “If you’re running a campaign for a brand like Miracle-Gro,” he explains, “and the rainfall levels in different counties are wildly different, you should be talking about that. That’s relevance that matters. Not inserting a city name for the sake of personalization.”

This isn’t personalization for its own sake. This is relevance with intent.

And that brings us to the big truth:

Fred sees it clearly: “People aren’t opposed to advertising. They’re opposed to being interrupted by things that feel irrelevant. DCO, when done right, creates a value exchange. It feels like the brand gets it. It rewards attention. It gives something back.”

It’s not just a technical evolution. It’s a philosophical one.

You are not an Excel spreadsheet with a logo. You are a marketer. A communicator. A storyteller. You’re supposed to move people—not just track them.

Fred’s throwing the flag on creative hoarding not because he’s tired of bad ads (he is), but because he knows it’s costing you more than money. It’s costing you attention, trust, and the opportunity to be unforgettable.

And if you’ve been spending your time trying to squeeze 0.03% more out of your 9th variation of “Shop Now”? You’re overdue for a creative intervention.

Because in this industry, safe is the riskiest move you can make.

💔 The Emotional ROI of Saying Less

Let’s get one thing straight:
The best ads don’t sell the product.
They sell the pause.
The goosebumps.
The "wait, what was that?" moment that lives in your brain like a squatter with excellent lighting and a decent sound mix.

Fred Godfrey knows this deeply. Because somewhere between his brutally efficient media strategies and hard truths about DCO, the man also carries an ad from the 1980s about cold wash detergent in his emotional archive.

“I was five or six,” Fred said, setting the scene. “We were watching James Bond on our big Trinitron TV. Then this ad came on—it was just blue writing moving across a black screen that went, ‘brrrr.’ That’s it. That’s all it did.”

Months later, Ariel released the world’s first cold wash detergent. The mystery was solved. The payoff clicked. The brand earned a permanent lease inside his skull.

“It trusted the viewer. It trusted the message. It wasn’t desperate. And here I am, 35 years later, still talking about it.”

Let’s be honest: Can your latest programmatic auto-deployed mid-roll claim the same?

Modern marketers have algorithm poisoning. Everything has to be "optimized," tracked, and micro-personalized into oblivion. So they forget one key thing:

Fred puts it plainly: “The best ad should sell nothing. It sells emotional attachment. It sells the need to discover more—but doesn’t shove it down your throat.”

It’s a radical idea in an industry obsessed with metrics, but it’s the kind of truth that sticks.

Fred points to Macy’s as a brand that still gets it. Their holiday ads? Not pushing product. Not screaming SALE. Just… stories.

“They’re inspired by the British department stores—Marks & Spencer, John Lewis—the ones that tell a beautiful, emotional tale that ends with no product mention at all,” Fred explained. “But by the end, you feel this weird, nostalgic obligation to shop there.”

It’s storytelling that works because it whispers, not shouts.
It earns attention instead of demanding it.
And ironically? That’s what builds commercial gravity.

You’d think Dynamic Creative Optimization would be the enemy of emotion. You’d be wrong—if, and only if, you know how to wield it like a scalpel instead of a sledgehammer.

Fred’s version of DCO isn’t about jamming in ZIP codes or shuffling 200 product images. It’s about amplifying resonance without sacrificing narrative.

“When you get it right,” Fred says, “DCO can help you say more by saying less. You can make the story hit harder because you’ve made it relevant—not by being creepy, but by being timely and considerate.”

Imagine an ad for winter coats that adapts subtly based on the first snowfall.
Imagine an insurance spot that shifts its tone the week after a major weather event.
Not in-your-face targeting.
Just thoughtful, human storytelling that lands at exactly the right moment.

It’s easy to chase the dopamine hit of a click. It’s harder to chase the afterglow of attention.

Fred’s approach? Build ads like songs.
Some verses linger.
Some lyrics sting.
And when done right, they stay in your head long after the final frame fades.

“We’ve become so obsessed with performance that we’ve forgotten ads used to be art,” Fred says. “Now it’s all just ‘best practices’ and two-second pre-rolls. But guess what? The audience notices when you actually care. They know when something’s been made with heart.”

Because your fifth variation of “Free Shipping!” isn’t the problem.
Your lack of soul is.

It’s not that ads don’t work anymore.
It’s that most of them stopped trying to matter.

Fred’s here to remind you that an ad with no CTA can convert better than an ad with three—if it earns emotional equity first.

If you're not subscribed to ADOTAT+, here's what you missed:

🧪 The Innovation Bluff: What DCO Gets Right—And What Everyone Else Is Still Faking

Fred Godfrey doesn’t hold back:

✨ If you care about building ads that people remember—instead of auto-generated spam with better lighting—this one’s a must-read.

➡️ Go paid. Get smart.
Subscribe to ADOTAT+ now.
Also? We’re unpacking the one thing you can’t fake with AI: actual leadership.