Well, look who’s sticking around. Apparently, you’re into this—so we’re doubling down. Turns out, I actually enjoy grilling people on-camera and off, and I’ve picked up more than a few things along the way. So, on Sundays, brace yourself for the unfiltered version—personal stories, journeys, and all the stuff you definitely didn’t sign up for but won’t want to miss.

Welcome to ADOTAT Unfiltered—where buzzwords go to die, PR fluff gets roasted, and the only spin is the brutal truth. Expect raw insights, hard-hitting industry realities, and just enough weekend wit to keep your neurons firing.

For less than whatever overpriced, pumpkin-flavored nonsense Starbucks is shilling this season, you’ll get the stuff they don’t want you to know—deep dives, behind-the-scenes scoops, and the kind of no-BS analysis you actually need.

Your Sunday inbox deserves better. Mondays can wait.

Let’s kill the fantasy right up front: This isn’t a brotherhood. It’s a spreadsheet with a smile.

You think you’re building something noble — a startup, a team, maybe even an empire of “disruptive scale.” But somewhere between your shared WeWork kombucha and the handshake deal at some overpriced rooftop in SoHo, you realize the thing you were actually building was a trust fund for someone else's betrayal.

Let me tell you about Andrew. And no — I’m not changing his name. Because this isn’t fiction, and he doesn’t deserve anonymity. I’ve hired him. I’ve fired him. I’ve forgiven him. More than once. Which, in this business, practically makes me a rabbinical saint.

First time? Money “went missing.” Vanished like third-party cookies.
Second time? A payout that was meant to hit my bank account detoured mysteriously into his.

Third time? I found out he was working with another company the whole time. Said it wasn’t a conflict. Said we were “friends.”

“Friends.”
That’s the word they always use right before the betrayal. Right before the double-invoicing, the ghosted emails, the sudden NDAs from companies you didn’t know were even in the room.

But Andrew isn’t the point. He’s just the archetype. Because here’s the real headline:The vast majority of personalities in this industry are not great people. Many are really horrible, bad people.

They’ve simply learned that pretending to be your “friend” is the fastest way to monetize your trust.

They call it “collaboration.”
They call it “synergy.”
What they mean is: “You’re useful to me until you’re not. And I’ll be smiling right up until I invoice your failure.”

And before you say, “Not everyone is like that,” let me stop you right there.

I’ve been in this game for decades. I’ve kept the receipts — and I don’t mean metaphorically.

I know the major investor who hires prostitutes in Cannes every single year for his clients.

I know which one has a preference for “barely legal” escorts — and brags about it over dinner like it’s a networking strategy.

I’ve watched executives snort coke in one suite and post LinkedIn selfies about “mental health and mindfulness” before brunch. One Hulu employee won’t even do an interview because I know his secrets.

I’ve been to private parties where the only thing more rampant than fraud was the smell of NDAs burning.

The rot isn’t in the code.
It’s in the culture.

We love to romanticize this industry. We talk about innovation like it’s a religion. We post “partnerships” like they’re wedding announcements.

But the truth?
Partnership in ad tech is just temporary utility dressed in friendship drag.
Most of these guys would sell you out for a speaking slot and a decent sushi platter.

You think the guy high-fiving you at the DSP mixer is your ally?
Try missing a payment or winning a deal he wanted.
Suddenly, you’re not “my brother” anymore — you’re a “risk profile.”

I’ve seen co-founders dissolve partnerships over a single investor meeting. I’ve seen best friends go to court because one forgot to disclose “side consulting.” I’ve seen decks lifted, domains stolen, and entire client rosters mysteriously migrated overnight.

So let me say it clearly, especially for the kids in the back:

These aren’t your people. They’re people who happen to share your WiFi password this quarter.

The men and women you drink with in Vegas? They’re not coming to your funeral.
They’re coming to your client roster when you’re six feet under and your LinkedIn says “Open to Work.”

Now, that doesn’t mean everyone is a sociopath wrapped in swag.
There are good people in this business. But they’re rare. They show up quietly. They stick around when there’s nothing in it for them. They don’t post quotes about leadership — they lead.

And until you find those people?
Here’s the rule:

Because if you’re not careful, you’ll wake up realizing the only thing more optimized than your funnel was the performance of your “friend” who quietly sold your roadmap, stole your margin, and called it “just business.”

Let’s shift gears — but not too far. Because betrayal doesn’t always wear Prada and handshake you at a rooftop bar in Cannes. Sometimes it’s written in Python and hiding behind a dashboard that looks like it was designed by a UX team high on 5-Hour Energy and delusion.

Just like your so-called “partner” funneled your friendship into their Venmo, the algorithm is siphoning your budget into oblivion with the same sociopathic indifference.

You didn’t just get played by a person.
You got played by a glorified logic tree, a soulless if-this-then-that machine pretending to be your co-pilot — but really it's a drunk raccoon slamming your Mastercard into every vending machine on the internet.

Let’s call it what it is:
You’ve handed over your media dollars — not to a strategist, not even to a platform — but to an automated abstraction of greed, engineered not to grow your business, but to simulate movement while bleeding your bank account dry.

Here’s what the pitch was:
🧠 “We use AI and machine learning to optimize outcomes in real-time.”

Here’s what you actually bought:
💸 “We threw your budget into a black box with 47 middlemen, half of whom are spoofed exchanges running out of an abandoned building in Latvia.”

And that pretty little dashboard you stare at during your Monday morning meetings?
It’s not a performance report — it’s an Ouija board for marketers.

You see:

You don’t see:

And you definitely don’t see the algorithm quietly allocating more dollars to Site A — because it has a higher click rate. Why? Because bots click. Humans don’t. But the algorithm? It doesn’t know that. It’s not programmed to care.

It sees numbers.
It reacts to numbers.
It feeds itself based on numbers.

📉 So when your campaign starts underdelivering?
It doesn’t pause. It doesn’t ask questions. It doesn’t call you to say, “Hey, something seems off.”
Nope. It doubles down. Cranks up the pacing. Bids harder. Floods more dollars into the very inventory that’s ripping you off.

You know that feeling when your credit card gets stolen and the thief buys $600 of gas and a banana?
That’s your campaign every day. Except you’re the one authorizing the transaction — and the banana is a viewability metric with no definition.

Let’s talk fraud detection for a second.
Because surely — surely — the industry built safeguards, right?

Oh, sweet summer child.

Yes, we have fraud detection. We have algorithmic fraud detection.
Which is like installing a bouncer at the club who only checks IDs for people wearing red shoes.

The bad guys? They know this game.
They’re building bots that mimic mouse movement, page scrolls, and fake engagement more convincingly than most interns.

Newsweek — yes, that Newsweek — used malicious off-the-shelf code to spoof 100% viewability.
And vendors didn’t catch it. Because they weren’t looking for it. Because they were too busy selling “protection” that works like a condom made of spiderwebs.

These systems were not designed to detect truth.
They were designed to generate reports that look impressive at QBRs.

📊 “Look, our IVT is under 2%! Viewability is over 90%!”
🚨 Translation: “We don’t know where your ads ran, but we can make the charts look like we do.”

And don’t even get me started on real-time bidding. It’s not real, it’s not timely, and it’s only bidding in the way a rigged auction bids.
You’re in a room full of fake bidders, fake items, and fake outcomes — and the house always wins.

But here’s the kicker:
The system isn’t broken.
It’s working exactly as it was built — to move money from marketers to machines without anyone stopping to ask if it actually worked.

Because here's the truth most folks don’t want to say out loud:

🧠 There is no algorithm for trust.
🤖 There is no AI for ethics.
📈 And the best optimization strategy might just be pulling the plug.

If the first betrayal came from the human partner — the friend who turned business into a backstab — and the second came from the machine you trusted to scale your reach, the third betrayal is far more insidious. Because this one? You signed up for it. You opted in.

You walked into the elevator, noticed there were no buttons, and told yourself: “This must be innovation.”

We are now living — no, operating — in a world governed by black-box automation, where decisions that shape multimillion-dollar ad campaigns are made by systems you don’t control, optimizing toward outcomes you don’t define, based on logic you can’t interrogate.

It’s not just that the ad tech stack has gotten too complex. It’s that we’ve stopped asking where we’re going. The elevator moves. It makes noise. The doors open sometimes. So we assume: “Progress.”

But let’s ask a different question:
Who programmed the route?

Let’s get something painfully clear: algorithms are not strategic.
They don’t think. They don’t pause. They don’t call you up and say, “Hey, this doesn’t feel right.”

They are math machines — blindly efficient, ruthlessly literal, and entirely unconcerned with nuance.

We treat them as oracles, but they’re more like deranged interns who were told:
“If a campaign is underperforming, spend more money and make the charts go up.”

So they do. And they do it quickly, enthusiastically, and with zero moral hesitation.
The machine never stops to ask, “Is this fraud?” or “Should we spend $300K on a dating app no one’s ever heard of just because it shows a high win rate?”

That kind of judgment?
That’s what humans are for.
And guess what? We’ve been outsourcing that judgment in exchange for dashboards that make us feel “data-driven.”

The deeper you go into this world — whether you’re running a holding company trading desk or a boutique media agency — the more you see a recurring theme: Everyone’s performing competence.

You’ve got C-suite executives pointing at reports that show “viewability up 10%,” while ignoring that it’s been gamed by hidden iframes and ghost domains.
You’ve got CMOs touting AI-powered optimization while struggling to explain what “optimized” even means when every input is garbage.

And you’ve got ad ops teams so swamped by platforms, APIs, and pixel audits that they’ve forgotten to ask the most basic question:
Did anyone actually see the ad?

We are drowning in KPIs that don’t correlate with outcomes. We are optimizing toward motion, not impact.
And while we’re busy chasing lower CPAs and higher CTRs, we’re losing the plot entirely — there is no business value in winning an auction for attention that doesn’t exist.

Would you trust your life to an elevator that has no buttons, no emergency brake, and no visible operator?

That’s what we’re doing when we hand over ad budgets to black-box systems.
Not just programmatic platforms — but the entire constellation of AI-enhanced, machine-augmented, fraud-deflecting, identity-agnostic optimization layers that now form the modern ad stack.

And here’s the catch:
None of these systems have ethics.
They can’t discern when a user is a real human or a headless browser.
They don’t know that a pageview in a mobile game with zero content value isn’t worth the same as a premium publisher’s homepage.
They just go where the numbers are high.

If click-through rates spike — even if they’re from malware-infected Android emulators — the algorithm says, “Fantastic, more of that!”

If a supply partner delivers 100% viewability — even if it’s fabricated with JavaScript trickery — the machine says, “Send the budget.”

We’ve created a system where moral decisions are replaced with mechanical calculations, and then we act surprised when the results feel hollow, or worse, fraudulent.

Let’s look at incentives.

The entire industry is built on fail-forward logic — where underperformance doesn’t trigger reform, it triggers more investment in new tools to mask the old failures.

We’ve stacked layers of tech and terminology to obscure the fact that most campaigns don’t work.
Not because the idea is bad.
But because the plumbing is broken — and the plumber is an algorithm that’s been told “scale or die.”

This isn’t a call to go back to spreadsheets and fax machines. Automation is essential. Algorithms are powerful.
But what we need is a return to intentionality. To strategy. To thinking like humans, not dashboards.

Ask yourself:

Because right now, we’re in an elevator that moves fast, flashes lights, and plays lovely hold music.
But there are no buttons.
No manual override.
And no one’s quite sure who decided where we’re going — or if we’ll like it when we get there.