And not in the “optimistic post-it note” kind of way.

Not because the economy suddenly started behaving, or the third-party cookie resurrected itself like some Frankenstein’s monster made of hashed emails and false hope.

Not because Mercury is out of retrograde—whatever that means to the folks who think astrology explains Q2 numbers—but because I got to spend a surprisingly fast, but insight-dense interview with Jean-Marc Papin, the Senior Vice President of Media Technologies and Sustainability at Horizon Media.

It’s a serious title for not so serious guy.

And yes, before anyone asks: this is the second time Jean-Marc has joined me on ADOTAT, and he’s the second French guest in a row.

No, this isn’t part of a Parisian coup.

There’s no underground plot to replace all American media executives with men who know how to pronounce “programmatique” correctly.

If there were, in fact, such a coup, Jean-Marc would probably be the one coordinating it quietly, armed with a renewable data stack and a Net Zero roadmap coded in Python.

But conspiracies aside, here’s why Jean-Marc matters. Or at least, should matter quite a bit to you. He’s not just another C-level executive talking about ESG because some DECK told him to. This is a guy who actually built Horizon Media’s identity platform from scratch.

And then—because clearly, sleep is optional—he pivoted and led the company’s sustainability charge, applying lessons from nuclear power, chemical engineering, and regulated industries into the most unregulated industry of them all: advertising.

Let’s pause there. Because the phrase “built from scratch” in ad tech is usually code for “we stitched together six vendor dashboards and called it proprietary.”

That’s not what happened here. Jean-Marc took real data chaos—unstructured, disjointed, non-consensual in every sense—and turned it into something coherent.

Something resilient.

Something that worked for both the brand and the user.

He didn’t start with a blueprint. He started with a business problem. Horizon’s analytics team needed data they didn’t have access to, and instead of spinning in circles like most companies do, Jean-Marc leaned in and said: fine, I’ll build it myself.

And he did. Welcome to the Blue Platform.

If you’re waiting for a slick metaphor here that I wrote at 1 am, don’t worry—it writes itself.

Identity in ad tech has always been a dumpster fire wrapped in a buzzword. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, until we both turn blue from the frustration.

But Jean-Marc didn’t pour water on it. He rebuilt the fire pit and added a wind turbine. And when I asked him why he keeps choosing the hardest path—why he seems to run toward the chaos when everyone else is looking for the nearest compliance officer—he didn’t flinch.

“I always take the most complicated option.”

Not because it’s dramatic. Not because it looks good in a keynote. But because, as he put it, chaos is where ownership happens. In messy systems, people are forced to figure things out, take initiative, and—shockingly—innovate. He’s seen the alternative. He started his career at Accenture, where everything was documented, processes were pristine, and the systems worked too well. And yet, he described it as alienating. A little too clean. A little too predictable.

And here’s the thing about chaos—Jean-Marc doesn’t fetishize it. He doesn’t glorify dysfunction. He’s not saying everyone should wing it. What he is saying is that without some friction, without some ambiguity, people stop thinking. They stop questioning. They stop building. And ad tech—this fragile, fragmented ecosystem of proxies and acronyms—needs more people willing to sit in that discomfort and say: this isn’t working, but it could. Let’s fix it.

But Jean-Marc didn’t stop at identity. He took that same mindset into sustainability. Now, if you’re rolling your eyes thinking “great, another executive saying 'green' while flying business class to Cannes,” stop. Jean-Marc was in the sustainability game before the IAB put out their first carbon measurement toolkit. He was doing this back when Europe was still fighting over nuclear phobia and America was just beginning to pretend climate change wasn’t a hoax. He’s seen the frameworks. He’s lived the regulation. And now he’s applying it to media—an industry that generates more carbon than you’d think, but less accountability than you'd hope.

In our conversation, we joked about desert islands. I stranded him on one—with a rogue AI named Barry, a Cannes jury full of self-important consultants, and a bad Wi-Fi signal just to make it real. And who did he say he’d bring with him? Not the pitch doctors. Not the folks with perfect LinkedIn profiles. He said he’d bring the doers. The builders. The people who know how to both engineer the plane and fly it.

And yet—here’s where it gets good—he hates the expression “building the plane while flying it.” Why? Because he’s actually built aircraft. And flown them. And he knows the engineering skillset and the pilot skillset are not the same. They’re both essential. They’re both real. But don’t mix them up. That’s where people get lost. That’s where companies crash.

Jean-Marc brings clarity to the chaos. But he doesn’t clean it up to the point of sterility. He believes in systems. But he doesn’t worship control. He believes in ownership, experimentation, resilience—and yes, the occasional French accent to throw people off balance.

So if you’re waiting for the industry to stabilize, to regulate itself into maturity, to deliver clarity with a QBR and a handshake… keep waiting. Jean-Marc isn’t. He’s already moved on to the next problem, the next system, the next space where a little structured chaos might just spark the next big thing.

The rest of the interview? We go deep into the desert island philosophy, why ad tech egos are somehow bigger than nuclear engineers’, how moving his family to the U.S. changed his entire leadership style, and the one lesson he hopes his kids—and team—will remember him for.

Stay Bold. Stay Curious. And Know More Than You Did Yesterday.

You care about the people behind the platforms, the weirdos building identity graphs from duct tape and nuclear compliance playbooks.

You care about what happens before the press release, after the investor calls, and somewhere between a rogue AI named Barry and a Cannes judge with an espresso habit.

That’s what ADOTAT+ is.

Not just industry news—we’ve got that, once a week.

Not just analysis—we’ve got that too.

It’s where the curtain gets ripped down, the PR scripts get tossed out, and we get to the real stuff. The "how it actually happened" stuff. The nuclear-paranoia-meets-adtech-optimism stuff. The late-night Slack meltdown that became a billion-dollar product. The battles behind Blu.

The people who would make it onto Jean-Marc Papin’s raft—and the ones who’d get left floating on a pitch deck.

But here’s the thing: we don’t take ad money from the usual suspects.

We don’t play nice just to keep access.

We exist because independent voices matter.
We exist because this industry has too many parrots and not enough translators.
We exist because sometimes you need someone to say, “That platform is built on hopes, dreams, and recycled buzzwords,” while handing you a real map.

And if you’ve ever thought, “I’m so damn tired of the spin,”
then guess what?
You’re one of us.

So if you liked this story…
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If you believe this kind of writing, this kind of journalism, deserves a seat at the table...

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We’re personal. We’re messy. We’re relentless.
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And we’ll keep doing it—with your support.

Stay Bold, Stay Curious, and Know More than You Did Yesterday.