The TripleLift SVP spent a decade wiring Amazon's ad machine. Now he's trying to stop the rest of retail media from turning into a Blade Runner dystopia. Spoiler: he's too polite for the job.

Let me set the scene for you. I'm sitting across from Frazer Locke (virtually), a man with 34 years of retail and ad tech battle scars, and I ask him what feels most broken about how brands connect with consumers. And this man, this beautifully diplomatic British gentleman, says and I quote: "I don't want to use the word broken, but I would say there's an opportunity without a doubt."

An opportunity. OPPORTUNITY. The building is on fire and Frazer is calling it a chance to practice our evacuation drills.

I told him straight up: if this was Tinder, there'd be red flags everywhere. The relationship between brands and consumers isn't just imperfect, it's the kind of situationship where one party keeps showing up uninvited with banner ads and the other is slowly reaching for the block button.

But here's the thing about Frazer. Behind all that diplomacy is a guy who actually sees the problem with terrifying clarity. He just wraps it in the kind of language that won't get him uninvited from Cannes. And once you learn to decode the Frazer Locke Diplomatic Translation Protocol, what he's actually saying is enough to make every retail media executive quietly close their laptop and stare out the window.

Frazer's origin story is almost aggressively wholesome. He started working at Sainsbury's as a teenager. Unloading lorries. Stacking shelves. And here's the part that kills me: at 14 years old, he was studying a school course called "Retail Marketing and Distribution." At fourteen. While the rest of us were trying to figure out how to talk to girls and whether we could grow facial hair, young Frazer was apparently mapping out supply chain logistics between chemistry and lunch.

He told me his 15 year old daughter Eliza is now thinking about her career and wants to be a vlogger, and he reflected that at her age he just wanted to be a footballer. "I didn't have a clue what I wanted to do apart from being a footballer or soccer player," he said, before adding that he didn't actually make it as a footballer. Which, and I say this with love, tracks. Because the universe clearly had other plans. It needed Frazer Locke to spend three decades becoming one of the few humans alive who understands both how a supermarket actually works AND how the programmatic pipes behind it are held together with duct tape and good intentions.

He landed at Amazon in 2013, which is when things get interesting. Back then, Amazon's ads business was still called Amazon Media Group and was basically the weird side project that the retail team tolerated the way you tolerate your cousin's experimental jazz band. "Retail was king of the castle," Frazer told me. "Ads was seen as this new project."

He spent over a decade there, watched that side project turn into one of the most dominant advertising platforms on the planet, helped build the international business, and then did something that still kind of baffles me. He left. Voluntarily. To go work at an SSP.

We'll come back to that, because the why matters more than you think.

Okay so here's where we need to talk about the thing that clearly haunts Frazer Locke the way that recurring dream about showing up to school in your underwear haunts the rest of us.

He calls it "the Blade Runner effect" and he brought it up not once, not twice, but three separate times during our conversation. For those who haven't seen the movie, think of that dystopian cityscape where every surface is plastered with glowing ads and the humans look like they've given up on joy. Now open your phone and try to read a recipe for chicken parmesan. See the resemblance?

"Many, many retailers and publishers, folks who have inventory, want to make money," Frazer said, and I could feel him choosing his words like a man defusing a bomb. "At the moment, there's still a lack of guardrails in place from an industry wide perspective."

What he means, translated from British Diplomatic into American Blunt: everyone is shoving as many ads as physically possible into every pixel of digital real estate and nobody has agreed on when to stop.

I told him that someone had just emailed me about a site that started doing refresh ads. You know, where the ad refreshes every few seconds so they can count more impressions. He winced. Actually winced. And then said something about how "we need to think differently about how we monetize the inventory and the bar we hold."

The thing is, Frazer isn't wrong that this needs to be solved collectively. He even floated the idea of some kind of industry alignment, then immediately acknowledged that "it'll never be perfect, let's be honest, there's not going to be a United Nations." At which point I reminded him that the United Nations isn't even the United Nations, and he laughed because what else can you do when the whole system is held together by everyone politely agreeing not to talk about how bad it's gotten.

I shared my own confession: I've basically stopped using recipe sites on the open web. They're unreadable on mobile. The ads have eaten the content. What I do now is throw my ingredients into an AI and ask it to come up with something. You know what I get? A clean recipe. No pop ups. No autoplay video. No ad for car insurance wedged between "preheat oven" and "dice the onions." And yes, I get ads, but I get ads to buy the actual products. That's a fundamentally different experience. Frazer's response? "There you go. That's a prime example." Said with the quiet satisfaction of a man who's been screaming into the void and finally heard an echo.

So let's talk about TripleLift, because Frazer's current home is a genuinely interesting company that has a genuinely confusing positioning problem.

I asked him flat out: isn't calling TripleLift an SSP like calling a Swiss Army knife a butter knife? He smiled and said "we're essentially SSP, we're the creative SSP, that's the moniker that we have."

The creative SSP. I want you to sit with that phrase for a second. It's doing an enormous amount of work. TripleLift started as a native advertising platform, those in-feed ads that are designed to look like they belong in the content around them. They built legitimate technology around this: computer vision that analyzes page layouts, adaptive templating that reformats creatives to fit different environments, and the core idea that ads should be, in Frazer's word, "unobtrusive" to the customer.

From there they've expanded into display, online video, and CTV, all while maintaining this core thesis that creative technology is what differentiates them from every other set of programmatic pipes. Frazer described their approach as having "a very high bar on the ads that we serve" and emphasized that they focus on premium inventory and curation through private marketplace deals.

When I pushed him on whether contextual advertising actually works or is just a fancy word for showing insurance ads under hamster videos, he got a little defensive. "I can only talk for TripleLift," he said. "I've talked about the fact that we have a very high bar on the ads that we serve. So where we do serve the ads, it's based on the contextual environment, it's based on the audiences." Then, with perfect comic timing: "I'm hoping, and I'm pretty sure, that you wouldn't have seen that insurance ad on a hamster video from us."

I love this man. He's defending his company's honor against a hypothetical hamster video and he's doing it with the seriousness of a barrister.

Here's where I asked the question that always makes retail media people uncomfortable. Does full funnel actually exist?

Frazer's answer was honest, which I appreciated, and also slightly depressing, which I expected. "In terms of full funnel measurement, so serving the ads from end to end, measuring that effectively, and then ensuring that that's monitored across the customer's journey, wherever they are... doesn't happen fully."

Doesn't. Happen. Fully. The thing the entire industry has been selling for the last five years as its killer differentiator. Doesn't happen fully.

To his credit, he immediately pivoted to Amazon as the closest thing to a working example, particularly their CTV play where you can run an awareness campaign on streaming, then remarket to the same customer when they're browsing Amazon later. "That now is a reality," he said, and you could hear the genuine admiration in his voice. But then he added the critical caveat: "But that's within the Amazon world."

Within the Amazon world. So full funnel exists, but only if you never leave the Death Star. Fantastic. For everyone else, it's TripleLift and companies like it trying to build the offsite connections that extend a retailer's reach beyond their own walls. Which is necessary work, but let's not pretend it's the same as having the entire customer journey mapped and measured end to end.

One of the most interesting parts of our conversation was when Frazer pulled back the curtain on what retail media looks like outside the US, because Americans have this habit of assuming the whole world runs on Amazon and Walmart and that's basically it.

"I would say there's still some gaps actually in terms of partners that can bring disparate networks together," Frazer said, which is his diplomatic way of saying it's total chaos.

In the UK alone you've got Tesco, Sainsbury's, ASDA, Aldi, Lidl, Ocado, Amazon, eBay and probably twelve other players I'm forgetting, all building their own media networks, all serving overlapping customers, all with different tech stacks and measurement frameworks and absolutely zero coordination between them.

I asked if Tesco was really making moves and Frazer confirmed they're "developing their media arm at a rate of knots" and have been hiring rapidly. I asked if they hired NASA. He didn't deny it.

But the real wildcard? Aldi and Lidl. Frazer flagged them as potential dark horses that everyone in retail media is sleeping on. "If they can really nail how they take their ads business to market from a retail media network, they're going to be a true challenger because of the growth they've seen," he said.

Now I have personal feelings about Aldi because I just discovered the one near us and I'm not going to lie, the German cookies and pastries situation is life changing. I told Frazer this. He confirmed that "the fresh food and a lot of the fresh stuff they do is top notch" and that they shop there too. So now I trust him completely.

I asked Frazer whether retail media is the future of brand building or just another click per impression casino, and his answer surprised me a little.

He's bullish on retail media's role in brand building. No question. But then he said something I think is actually prophetic: "Will it continue to be called retail media? I'm not sure. I think it's a moniker at the moment."

I suggested commerce media. He nodded. Then I said maybe we'll just call it media. "Exactly," he said. "It's just a shiny newish thing that people are seeing as a big opportunity and it is huge."

This is important because it cuts through so much of the hype. Retail media isn't a new category. It's advertising getting closer to the point of purchase, which is what advertising has always wanted to do. The fact that we've given it a special name and built conferences around it and created "heads of retail media" roles doesn't change the fundamental reality that this is just media getting smarter about where transactions happen. Frazer gets that. Most of the industry is still too busy building PowerPoint decks about the "retail media revolution" to notice.

Every ADOTAT guest gets stranded on a desert island with five companions. Frazer's picks:

His wife Liz because she's "very smart and very practical." Note: practical came second. Smart first. This is a man who respects intelligence. Also probably a man who knows his wife might listen to this podcast.

His daughter Eliza because "she's good fun" and would apparently teach Superman how to dance and organize acapella karaoke. The Locke family plays something called "the Alexa game" where they take turns picking songs and sing them together. I now desperately want to be invited to the Locke household for dinner.

Tom Hanks because he's "been there, done that" on the survival island front. I asked what happens when Tom starts talking to a volleyball again. Frazer said he'd allow it "as long as he included the volleyball and didn't ignore us."

Superman, specifically Christopher Reeve, because he could start fires with his laser eyes, fly reconnaissance, and bring back food. I pointed out this is basically cheating at desert island survival. Frazer acknowledged this. He did not care. He also noted that Christopher Reeve "was a Superman in real life as well" and called his documentary "very moving and very inspirational." The man has layers.

Bob Mortimer, a British comedian I had to Google and am now slightly obsessed with. Frazer says he's "a really good storyteller as well as a comedian" and has written novels that are "a bit absurd." British people and their comedy recommendations are a whole genre unto themselves.

When I asked what job Superman would have at camp, Frazer said fire starter with laser eyes plus general reconnaissance and food retrieval. When I asked what surviving on an island would teach him about the ad industry, he delivered the line of the episode: "That I spent too much time selling ads and not enough time learning how to build a fire."

The diplomacy cracked. Just for a second. And what came through was genuinely funny.

Alright here's the deal. Everything above? That's the trailer. The popcorn movie version of our conversation with Frazer. And it's a good trailer, because Frazer is genuinely interesting and the topics matter.

But ADOTAT+ is where we take the gloves off.

In Part 2, we're going deep on why Frazer really left Amazon and what that tells you about the limits of even the best walled gardens. We're going to decode what "creative SSP" actually means strategically and whether it's a winning bet or a holding pattern. We're going to talk about the transparency theater that Frazer was way too polite to call out directly but absolutely hinted at. We're going to explain why the international retail media fragmentation is actually TripleLift's biggest opportunity and why nobody in the US is paying attention. And we're going to talk about the ad tech tax problem that Frazer quietly admitted is getting worse, not better, even as everyone congratulates themselves on transparency initiatives.

This is the inside baseball. The stuff between the lines. The decoder ring for what a very smart, very diplomatic executive is actually telling you when he says things like "there's an opportunity."