Half the industry yawned. Scrolled past. Clicked the little thumbs up on LinkedIn and went back to arguing about whether attention or clicks is the better KPI. Very important stuff. Critical industry discourse. Really moving the needle.

The other half? They called me. They emailed me. They DM'd me at midnight. And what they told me wasn't a yawn. It was a crime blotter. A thick one. Multiple sources. Multiple incidents. Multiple companies. And one name that kept surfacing like a dead fish in a punch bowl at every single happy hour in this industry for at least a decade.

Let's call him F. That's one of his initials. Maybe he'll read this. Maybe he'll call his lawyer. Maybe, and I say this with a sincerity I almost didn't think I still had, he'll do the right thing before this goes any further. Because it is going further. Much further.

The road this is traveling has one destination and he is not going to enjoy arriving there.

I've already had a call out to the editor at the Wall Street Journal's advertising desk. I'm doing this right. Dotting the i's. Crossing the "what in the name of everything sacred is wrong with this industry." The women involved are talking to me.

Carefully. Thoughtfully. With receipts.

Scroll LinkedIn right now. Go ahead. I'll wait.

You'll find them. Post after post. Smiling headshots. Conference lanyards catching the light. "So excited to be attending!" "Can't wait to connect with everyone!" The enthusiasm. The energy. The personal brand, maintained with the grim determination of someone who knows their boss is watching their activity feed.

Some of those women wrote to me.

The same women.

And what they told me privately is nothing, nothing, nothing like what they posted publicly. Because what you post publicly when your company paid for your ticket and your boss expects you to perform enthusiasm is not the same as what you type to a stranger at midnight when you finally feel like someone might actually listen.

What they told me privately:

"I know someone is going to grab me."

"Last year a man followed me back toward my hotel. I had to pretend I was meeting someone in the lobby just to shake him."

"I'm already planning what I'm going to wear so I get the fewest comments about my body."

"I'm not drinking. I cannot afford to not be completely alert for every single minute of this event."

These are not anxious newcomers catastrophizing before their first big conference. These are seasoned industry professionals. Women who have built careers, grown companies, closed deals, navigated this ecosystem for years. Women who are going back, again, because their job requires it. Because the business happens there.

Their "looking forward to meeting you" is a costume.

Underneath it is a survival plan, assembled carefully, worn invisibly, carried the entire trip.

And the conference organizers know this. They have to know this. You cannot run a major industry event for more than five minutes without understanding that women are navigating something the men at your conference simply are not.

They just decided that's not their problem to solve.

Someone else's liability.

The hotel's issue.

The attendee's responsibility to manage.

They built the temporary city.

They just didn't build it for everyone.

Here's where I have to be honest with you. Brutally, uncomfortably, no-spin honest.

I understand the apathy from the conference owners. Because I lived it.

I ran huge events. I made serious money in this industry. In the aughts, we had dancers at our parties. We hired "sexy cops" in costume to hand out fake tickets at our booth. We thought it was creative. We thought it was edgy. We thought it was the kind of memorable marketing moment people would talk about.

We were right. People talked about it. Just not in the way we thought.

What we were actually doing, what I was actually doing, was hanging a neon sign above the entrance that said: women here are props. Women here are set decoration. Women here are part of the experience, not participants in it.

I am not absolved by the fact that everyone was doing it. Everyone was doing it. That was the entire problem. The water was so polluted nobody could remember what clean tasted like.

But here is the thing about me: I grew up. I looked back at what I had helped normalize and I felt the specific, clarifying shame of someone who should have known better and didn't. That shame turned into something useful. I changed what I said. I changed what I wrote. I changed what I'm willing to put my name on.

Not everyone took that turn.

Some of them are still running conferences.

Ari Paparo. Christian Muche. David Amrani. Scott Howe.

And every other CEO with a major conference on the calendar in the next few weeks.

I reached out. My media inquiries evaporated into the void. None of you went on record. None of you responded. None of you sent so much as a "thanks for reaching out, we'll get back to you," which is the absolute minimum human courtesy extended by even the most mediocre PR operation.

None of your conferences have a sexual harassment policy. None of you have a safety committee. Not one of you has a designated reporting process for attendees who experience assault or harassment at your event. The next few weeks will bring thousands of people, many of them women with survival plans already drafted, into spaces you are responsible for. And you have built exactly nothing to protect them.

I am not asking you to solve a century of institutional rot overnight. I am asking you to do the bare minimum that any responsible organizer of any gathering of human beings should do as a matter of basic decency.

A policy. A process. A person. Someone an attendee can walk up to and say "something happened to me" and have that person know exactly what to do next. A code of conduct with actual teeth. A reporting mechanism that isn't a QR code linking to a PDF nobody will ever open. Badge revocation. Real consequences. Today, not after the lawsuit.

I am not your enemy. I am offering to help. I will work with any of you, publicly, on the record, to build something that actually protects the people attending your events. I will give you credit. I will write about the progress. I will tell the 32,000 agency, adtech, and marketing executives who read this newsletter every single day that you took this seriously when you didn't have to.

Call me. Email me. DM me. The address is at the bottom of this piece and it has been there every single time.

So far: nothing. Zilch. The sound of extremely expensive silence.

The silence hurts. Not just me. The women going to your conferences with survival plans in their pockets. The ones who wrote to me at midnight. The ones whose "looking forward to seeing you!" is a performance of safety they do not feel.

They are waiting too.

I went and looked at multiple conferences in this industry. Not just Cannes. Multiple events, multiple organizers, multiple scales. I looked for sexual assault policies. Ombudsman programs. Reporting mechanisms. Anything that would signal to an attendee that the people running the event understand that thousands of humans are walking into an environment that researchers describe, clinically and without drama, as a textbook high-risk scenario.

I found zero. Not one. Not a page. Not a paragraph. Not a sentence buried in an FAQ underneath the parking instructions.

Zero.

And it's not like I was holding these conferences to an unreasonable standard. I wasn't looking for a SWAT team or a trauma center. I was looking for a name. A phone number. A staff member with a title that includes the word "safety." Anything that would tell a woman at one of these events: if something happens to you here, here is what you do.

Nothing.

Here's what the research says, and before you scroll past, understand that these numbers come from conference safety and public health researchers, not activists:

Roughly 60% of women in professional conference environments report experiencing some form of harassment at least once in their careers. About a quarter report unwanted sexual attention at a specific event. Formal reporting sits at around 1 to 3 incidents per thousand attendees, which sounds reassuringly low until you understand that researchers estimate actual incidents run four to ten times higher. Most people don't report. Most people never will. Because they have already watched what happens to the people who do.

Apply that to a typical industry event. 2,500 attendees. Forty to fifty percent women. That's 1,000 to 1,250 women over three days. Conservative estimates put harassment incidents somewhere between 10 and 25. Incidents meeting the legal definition of sexual assault: 2 to 7. Formal reports filed: maybe 1 to 4.

And the conferences have zero infrastructure to handle a single one of them.

Not because they couldn't build it. Because they decided not to.

The conference operators will reach for the "we didn't know" defense the moment this gets uncomfortable enough to require a response. I want to pre-empt that.

They know.

The legal liability dodge, the idea that if you don't formalize a policy you can't be blamed for enforcing it, is not ignorance. It is a strategy. A stupid, backwards, legally indefensible strategy that modern legal counsel consistently argues against, but a strategy nonetheless. Having a policy protects you. Lawyers will tell you this. Apparently nobody is listening.

The venue-handles-it excuse is even worse. Yes, the hotel has security. Yes, the city has police. And when a woman is grabbed at your official networking party by someone wearing your lanyard, she is going to tell your staff. Who have no policy to follow and no training to fall back on and will probably smile nervously and suggest she speak to the hotel manager.

The "publishing a policy signals we have a problem" concern is exactly as absurd as it sounds. Installing a fire alarm does not mean you believe your building is on fire. Not installing one means you have decided fire is not your responsibility. That is now your position, in writing, by omission, forever.

And the operational headache argument, that a real policy requires trained staff, reporting channels, documentation, investigation procedures, escalation to law enforcement, is true. It does require those things. They take time. They cost money. They require someone to actually care enough to build them.

The conferences chose not to.

Every single year. They chose not to.

I'm going to let someone else speak now. Because I have been doing a lot of the talking, and the person who deserves the microphone is the one who actually lived this.

She sent me this message. I am publishing it with her permission. Because this is exactly the kind of testimony that gets buried in HR folders and NDA agreements and "we looked into it and found no policy violation" emails, and it deserves to be read by every person in this industry, slowly, without skimming:

"One individual's behavior was ultimately the reason I chose to leave. After raising concerns multiple times with leadership and HR, and not seeing any action taken, I felt the healthiest and safest option for me was to move on. It was incredibly difficult to watch the situation unfold, and insult to injury as I continued to see this egotistical bully rise professionally in the industry. I also suffered the 'industry retaliation' that scared so many other women to speak up, or sometimes worse, made people feel they had to play his game to advance. I refuse to ever play that game. Everyone loses in the end. These patterns are painful and discouraging, and they shouldn't continue. I appreciated your willingness to speak up. We need more men in this industry to do the same."

Read that again. Slowly. From the beginning.

She raised concerns. Multiple times. To leadership. To HR. The people whose literal job description includes handling exactly this situation. And nothing happened. Not a conversation. Not a warning. Not a performance review footnote that might have given her some signal that anyone in power had heard her.

So she left. A job she presumably worked hard to get. A company she believed in enough to try the official channels rather than just walking out. She did everything right. She followed the process. She trusted the institution. And the institution failed her so completely, so thoroughly, with such spectacular indifference, that her only remaining option was to remove herself from the environment.

And then she watched him get promoted.

"Insult to injury" is the most restrained possible description of that experience. I would have used different words. Several of them. Loudly.

She named something that doesn't get discussed enough: the retaliation isn't always dramatic. It isn't always a firing or a public confrontation or a screaming match in a conference room. Sometimes it's quieter and more corrosive than that. A meeting you stop getting invited to. A project that quietly goes to someone else. A reference that is suddenly, inexplicably, lukewarm. A reputation, carefully, deniably, professionally undermined one whispered conversation at a time. Death by a thousand small exclusions. The industry closing ranks around the man and showing the woman the door she should probably use.

She refused to play the game.

She paid for it anyway.

And he kept rising. Kept collecting the stages and the titles and the handshakes. Kept being the name everyone whispers about and nobody says out loud because saying it out loud costs more than the silence.

Until now.

A former C-level executive, someone who sat in the rooms, who knew the players, who watched this industry from the inside for years, told me about a conversation she had recently with a platform partner executive. Someone who had to meet with [redacted]. Had to. Not chose to. Not requested a meeting. Was required to sit across from someone she found threatening because he had the access and the relationships and the leverage that make "no" professionally expensive.

It was not a good meeting.

She told her boss.

You want to know what her boss said?

"Well, if he didn't do it to you, let it go."

Let. It. Go.

That is the policy. That is the official, spoken-out-loud, said-to-another-human-being policy of a company in this industry in 2026. Not: we'll look into it. Not: thank you for telling me, I'm concerned. Not even the bare minimum corporate non-answer of we take these matters seriously and will investigate appropriately.

If it didn't happen specifically to your body in your specific meeting, let it go.

Which means: someone else's experience doesn't count. Someone else's discomfort isn't data. Someone else's documented pattern of behavior is only relevant when it lands on you personally, and even then, probably, let it go.

This is exactly how patterns survive for a decade. This is the mechanism. One person knows. Tells another person. That person tells their boss. The boss does the math, cost of action versus cost of inaction, and decides inaction is cheaper, cleaner, and less likely to end up in a deposition. Rinse. Repeat. For ten years. While he gets promoted.

She also said something I want to put in large letters and nail to the door of every conference office in this industry:

"Not everyone should be crucified for their worst moments. But if it's a pattern of behavior, these people should be gone from the industry."

That is the most reasonable, fair, measured standard I have ever heard applied to this question. Not a witch hunt. Not zero tolerance for a single bad joke told at a holiday party in 2009. A pattern. Documented. Reported. Known. Deliberately ignored.

Gone.

It is not a complicated standard. It is the same standard that applies to every other sustained professional failure in this ecosystem. Miss your numbers consistently: out. Commit fraud: out. Burn a major client relationship badly enough: out.

Harass and intimidate and prey on women for ten years while everybody looks carefully in the other direction?

Raise his salary. Give him a keynote.

She's right about one more thing and I want to make sure it lands with the weight it deserves:

There is no trust when you have predatory behavior. Not for the women in the room. Not for the clients forced to take the meetings. Not for the companies whose names are attached to him. Not for the conferences that keep putting him on stage like he is a feature and not a liability dressed in a sport coat.

The trust does not exist. Everyone is just performing trust because the alternative, saying out loud what everyone knows, costs more than the performance.

That math is changing.

I need you to stop and actually absorb what you just read across the last several sections.

The woman who walked away from her career because HR shrugged and closed the file. The platform executive who brought a legitimate concern to her boss and received a masterclass in institutional cowardice as her response. The multiple women who found my LinkedIn post like a lighthouse in a fog they had been navigating completely alone. The ones with paper trails. The ones with screenshots. The ones who filed formal complaints and then watched those complaints dissolve into the corporate ether like a promise made during a budget meeting.

They are all talking about the same person. “F”

One person. One name. One pattern that has been running continuously for at least ten years, known throughout certain corridors of this industry the way everyone knows which restaurant has a rodent problem but nobody posts the review because the owner plays golf with the health inspector and you still need a table at that restaurant sometimes.

And that person is speaking at an industry event. Soon. As a guest of honor.

Not as a cautionary tale. Not as a warning. Not as the before picture in a sensitivity training presentation. As a guest. Of honor. Someone sent him a formal invitation. Someone designed an event graphic with his headshot and posted it on LinkedIn. Someone wrote the words "we are thrilled" into a press release with their own hands and felt absolutely nothing while doing it.

He will walk to a microphone in front of a room full of people, some of whom have their own stories about him that they have never told anyone because they watched what happened to the ones who did, and the room will applaud.

This is not a malfunction in the system.

This is the system. Running exactly as designed. Protecting exactly who it was always built to protect.

I know who he is. I know which event. I know the date.

The clock is ticking considerably louder than it was last week.

While we're here, while I have your attention, while the industry is doing its very best impression of a golden retriever who cannot locate the treat sitting directly on top of its own nose, let me introduce you to two more recurring characters in this particular grotesque theatrical production that somehow keeps getting five-star reviews on Eventbrite.

First: The Conference Grandpa.

You know the type. Silver hair. Elder statesman energy. The kind of man who gets described as "a legend" and "a character" in the same reverent breath, as if surviving long enough to attend the same conferences for thirty consecutive years is a credential that should come with a keynote slot, a lifetime achievement plaque, and complete immunity from basic standards of human decency.

A woman told me what he said to her. Twice. At industry events. Twice.

He looked at her and said, and I want you to read this slowly and let it fully marinate in whatever part of your brain processes genuine disbelief:

"If I was younger, I would be in bed with you right now."

Put down whatever you are holding. Sit with that sentence.

He told her, at a professional conference, where people were ostensibly gathered to discuss media, advertising, and the future of the open internet, that the singular obstacle standing between her body and his intentions was not her feelings. Was not her consent. Was not basic professional decency or the fact that they were surrounded by colleagues with badges and tote bags and business cards. Was not the foundational concept that she is a human being and not a hotel minibar he gets to help himself to whenever he feels like it.

His age. That was the obstacle. His age.

As if she should file that away as a compliment. As if the correct professional response to a man announcing his hypothetical sexual intentions toward you at a business event is a warm smile and "thanks so much, really appreciate that, let me grab your card."

She wanted me to add something. And she is entirely, absolutely, one hundred percent right to add it.

Even if he were younger, she would not be in bed with him. Not in this dimension, not in any adjacent dimension, not under any reconfiguration of the space-time continuum that the most creative physicist alive could dream up on their best day.

He has said this to her twice. He keeps showing up at BeetTV. He keeps getting quoted. He keeps getting invited. People keep finding it "charming." They call him a character. They laugh. They shake his hand. They put his face on their content and their panels and their highlight reels.

It is not charming. It is a man who has decided, after decades of the industry signaling that his behavior carries no consequences whatsoever, that women at conferences exist as an audience for his desires. That showing up long enough earns you the right to say whatever crawls into your head to whatever woman is standing close enough to hear it.

He confused longevity with a license. And this industry handed him that license every single time it laughed and moved on.

He is at every event. Every. Single. One. You cannot swing a branded tote bag at any major adtech gathering without making contact with this man. He has a podcast. He is quoted with the regularity and reverence usually reserved for central bank governors and Nobel laureates. He is described as an expert, a thought leader, a wise man of the adtech tribe, a guru in a fleece vest dispensing wisdom to anyone with a press badge and fifteen minutes to spare.

And he talks about his conquests.

To women. In the industry. Repeatedly. His sexual history in this business, offered up in professional conversation like a portfolio deck nobody requested, like a case study in a pitch meeting you did not schedule and cannot leave, like a LinkedIn recommendation written entirely about himself that he has decided you need to receive right now, at this conference, while you are trying to get to your next panel without making eye contact with anyone who might stop you.

This man has looked at women who share his professional world and concluded that the appropriate use of that proximity is a narrated tour of his own sexual history featuring their colleagues as supporting characters.

He is on your conference agenda. He is in your podcast feed. He is probably listed as a moderator. He is probably being introduced right now by someone using the word "thrilled" to a room full of people, some of whom have heard the conquests speech and have been trying to forget it ever since.

Here is what ties all of these men together. The BeetTV grandfather with his hypothetical bedroom invitations delivered twice to the same woman who did not ask for them either time. The podcast bro and his unsolicited highlight reel. The [redacted] who drove a woman out of her job and got a salary increase for the trouble. The guest of honor whose name is on an event graphic somewhere right now, probably adjacent to a sponsor logo from a company with a very robust, very prominently displayed public commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

None of them think they have done anything wrong.

That is the rot. That is the black mold behind the drywall that the industry keeps repainting over and calling a renovation. These are not men who know they are predators and are carefully concealing it. These are men who have been told, over and over, by every promotion and every invitation and every standing ovation and every HR department that quietly closed the file and went back to processing benefits enrollment, that what they are doing is fine.

Quirky, even. Colorful. Part of the charm and texture of the industry. Just how it is. Just how it has always been. Just how it will keep being as long as the money flows and the panels get filled and the sponsors stay happy and nobody has to have a conversation that makes anyone in the room feel bad about themselves.

The industry did not just fail to stop them.

The industry built the greenhouse. Watered it religiously. Fertilized it with silence and NDAs and "let it go" and "that's just how he is." Harvested the crop and then served it at the official after-party with a DJ and an open bar and women in pasties on a stage.

And now the industry wants to furrow its brow and wonder aloud how we got here.

Here is how you got here. You chose this. Over and over and over again.

Every time a boss said "if he didn't do it to you, let it go." Every time a conference organizer put a known predator on a stage because he drives registrations and fills seats. Every time a company raised a predator's salary after receiving documented complaints about him. Every time a room full of people who absolutely knew better handed a man a microphone and applauded anyway.

Those were not accidents. Those were not oversights. Those were decisions, made consciously, by people with the power to make different ones.

The women in this industry did not make those decisions.

They just kept showing up anyway. Survival plan in their pocket. LinkedIn post already drafted. Smile practiced in the hotel mirror before they walked into the room where everyone knew and nobody said anything.

The least this industry can do is stop making them carry that alone.

And the least I can do is keep writing until it does.

It started the way it always starts in this industry. A casual conversation. The kind that happens at the margins of things, quietly, between people who trust each other just enough.

I mentioned to a friend, someone who had recently left a company in this space, that I was thinking about interviewing F. Industry perspective. The usual.

She stopped me cold.

"No," she said. "That person is a predator. He spoke to me like I was an object. Constantly."

One source. I noted it and kept moving.

Then a client told me they had been forced to meet with him. Not asked. Not invited. Forced. Required by their own company to sit across from someone they found threatening because he had the relationships and the revenue attached to his name and those things matter more than whether the people in the meeting feel safe.

Then a third woman from the same company reached out.

So I posted something on LinkedIn. Vague. Careful. I said I had heard that someone at a particular company was being accused of predatory behavior. I named enough without naming everything.

Within hours, someone who had worked there two years ago messaged me. Privately. She said she was ready. She wanted to expose someone at that company. I spelled out the last name in my reply.

She confirmed. Same person. Same company. Multiple incidents.

This time she had filed reports. She has the emails. She has the documentation. She did everything this industry tells victims to do: she reported it, she followed the process, she trusted that the institution would respond.

The company did nothing. Less than nothing. They didn't ask him to leave. They didn't investigate in any meaningful way. They didn't even produce the convincing performance of taking it seriously. They raised his salary. They gave him more responsibility. They handed him more power and more access to more people and sent him back out into the world with the company's implicit endorsement stamped on his forehead.

The industry did what the industry always does.

It protected the revenue and buried the receipts.

I didn't want to write this piece. I wanted to write about CTV measurement or retail media or something that wouldn't require me to spend my evenings reading messages from women describing their survival strategies for events that are supposed to be about business.

But here we are.

Same industry. Same problem. Same silence. Same men collecting the invitations and the introductions and the applause. Same women writing to me at midnight because their own companies have ordered them to stay quiet and they have nowhere else to go.

Same people who will, after this publishes, go to their Slack channels and make jokes about what a problem I am. Like they did last year. Like they will do next year if nothing changes. They will call me difficult. They will call me a troublemaker. They will say I'm being unfair, I don't have the full picture, I don't understand the complexity of these situations.

I understand the complexity perfectly.

The complexity is that predators are profitable and victims are not. That is the entire complexity, laid bare, with nothing left to hide behind.

I am calling on Ari Paparo, Christian Muche, David Amrani, Scott Howe, and every other conference owner reading this: work with me. Publicly. On the record. Build the policy. Create the process. Hire the person. At least put up a sexual harassment policy. Pretend you care. Even if you don’t.

Put a structure in place before the next event so that the women attending your conference with survival plans in their pockets have somewhere to go if something happens.

I will help. I will give you credit. I will tell 35,000 industry executives that you led when leading was hard. No one will know that I had to force you to care.

My contact information is below. It has been there every single time.

The women who wrote to me at midnight are watching.

The clock is running. And yes, I increased my insurance this week before writing this. I am ready.

The Rabbi of ROAS is still here. Still taking your call. Still waiting.

[email protected] - 505-932-9060