Sunday Edition: ADOTAT Unplugged

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.

📉 When “Innovation” Feels Like Gaslighting

Or: Why Your Gut Instinct Is Now Called “Non-Actionable Sentiment”

You ever feel like you’re living in a corporate remake of Gaslight, except instead of a suspicious husband dimming the lights, it’s your CMO telling you your 20 years of experience “doesn’t scale”?

Welcome to modern marketing—where AI is the messiah, experience is a liability, and “innovation” is the magic word people shout before they blow up your role and replace it with an intern using Midjourney and a Ring Light.

Let’s talk about the very real workplace phenomenon where “innovation” isn’t about ideas—it's about erasure.

🔄 The Innovation-Gaslighting Paradox

We all want to be innovative. We need innovation. What we don’t need is weaponized innovation—the kind that justifies toxic culture, bad decision-making, and the slow gaslighting of everyone over the age of 38.

Here’s how it plays out:

• 🙃 Dismissing Ideas: When seasoned professionals share an idea and get told, “We’re looking for something more forward-thinking,” translation: Too experienced, not trendy enough.

• 🔁 Shifting Goalposts: Strategies get rewritten every other week because “the landscape’s changed.” But somehow, the KPIs stay the same—and you’re still behind.

• 📉 Undermining Competence: Tried-and-true tactics? “Outdated.” Experience? “Legacy baggage.” You’re no longer “seasoned”—you’re “slow to adopt.”

• 💬 Jargon Avalanche: Innovation becomes a smokescreen of buzzwords. Suddenly, the guy who says “intent-based vertical relevance” three times in a row is a visionary, and the person who actually knows how to sell to humans is labeled resistant to change.

🧠 Real Quote, Real Talk

“We’re not trying to replace you with AI—we’re trying to augment your work.”
— a real tech CEO, moments before restructuring half the senior marketing team

Let’s decode that: "Augment" = "undermine but make it sound empowering."

According to a 2024 study from Deloitte, 67% of professionals over 45 feel their skills are being "re-evaluated for relevance" after AI adoption. That’s consultant-speak for: We’re not sure if you belong here anymore.

📊 The Hard Data Behind the Buzzword Theater

Some facts to chew on between LinkedIn dopamine hits:

• 80% of age-diverse teams outperform on decision-making. (HBR)

• 43% of execs override AI recommendations due to gut instinct. (McKinsey)

• 70% of marketing pros over 50 feel actively ignored in creative discussions. (AARP)

• Only 8% of companies have an age-inclusive workplace policy. (WEF)

• And yes, burnout is now a full-blown pandemic: 68% of marketing workers say they’ve experienced it in the past year.

We keep saying we value diversity. But apparently, that stops when it comes to people who remember when cookies were more than a tracking mechanism.

🦖 The Myth of the Obsolete Expert

This industry doesn’t have elder statesmen—it has exhausted, strategically ghosted ex-VPs who quietly update their LinkedIn to “consultant” while some 28-year-old gets a Forbes 30 Under 30 profile for running a Q4 TikTok campaign.

You didn't become outdated. The culture did.

Real innovation isn’t built by erasing what came before—it’s built on it. We’re in danger of raising an entire generation of marketing leaders who think attribution starts at the point of view count.

🛠️ What Real Innovation Culture Looks Like

Enough doom. Let’s talk solutions:

✅ Psychological Safety: Employees should be allowed to challenge ideas—even “innovative” ones—without fear of being labeled resistant or irrelevant.

✅ Clear Definitions: Stop using “innovation” as a buzzword. Define it. Operationalize it. Otherwise, it's just another shiny excuse to reshuffle people.

✅ Mentorship Without the PR Gloss: Bring back real mentorship. Not a Slack channel. Not a monthly “coffee roulette.” We’re talking about cross-generational, mutual learning with shared stakes.

✅ Respect Experience as Infrastructure: Every company’s future is built on the scaffolding of its past. If you tear it down without understanding it, all you’re doing is making noise.

🔥 Final Word

Here’s the real kicker: Most of what you see on LinkedIn is a truism, written by a junior copywriter, edited by ChatGPT, and wrapped in AI-glazed performative nonsense.

Meanwhile, the people who actually know how to make money—quietly, methodically, sustainably—are being told their instincts are obsolete.

It’s not just offensive. It’s inefficient.

Because when the chaos hits—and it will—it’s not your shiny new tech stack that’s going to save you. It’s going to be the person who’s been there before and knows where the bodies are buried.

🧵 TL;DR:
We don’t need more innovation theater.
We need people who remember what the show’s supposed to be about.
And maybe—just maybe—we should stop treating experience like a problem to be automated away.

Stay Bold, Stay Curious, and Know More Than You Did Yesterday.
Want to tell me I’m wrong or pitch me your AI thing for the 438th time? Hit reply. I’ll read it—if you’re human.

The Stats Don’t Lie. They Just Get Ignored.

The Quiet Crisis of Age, AI, and Burnout in Adland

You don’t need a trend report to know something’s off in this industry. Just look at the meeting room—or the Zoom grid. The seasoned marketers are vanishing. The juniors are exhausted. And everyone’s pretending AI is going to solve it instead of making it worse.

Start with this: 43% of executives override AI-driven recommendations based on gut instinct (McKinsey). That’s not stubbornness. That’s experience refusing to be bulldozed by probability scores and synthetic insights.

Yet despite that, 70% of marketing professionals over age 50 say they’ve been passed over for opportunities due to their age (AARP). And only 8% of companies have any age-inclusive workforce policy at all (World Economic Forum). So let’s not pretend this isn’t systemic.

Meanwhile, the research is clear: age-diverse teams outperform on decision-making 80% of the time (Harvard Business Review). But nearly half of older workers in tech say they’re actively excluded from key projects (SHRM). That’s not just bad optics—it’s bad business.

This is not just a vibe. It’s a measurable fault line. And we’re tap dancing on it.

The marketing workforce skews younger than nearly any other professional sector. About 79% of marketers are under 45. Only 20.4% are between 46 and 65, according to 2024 demographic data. The center of gravity in most marketing departments hovers around the 26–35 age bracket. The result? Groupthink disguised as innovation, and strategic memory loss across entire orgs.

Now layer in AI. The generative AI advertising market is projected to grow from $3.39 billion in 2025 to $8.1 billion by 2029, at a 24.4% CAGR. It's showing up everywhere: in creative, analytics, personalization, content production, even voiceovers. 68% of agencies now use AI tools for daily tasks (Forrester). 52% of creatives worry AI will replace parts of their jobs (Adobe), while 61% of strategists say it helps cut busywork (WARC). Those can both be true—and that contradiction is at the heart of the current mess.

Burnout? It's not a phase. It’s the baseline.

• 67% of ad professionals report experiencing burnout (Campaign 2023)

• 58% feel overwhelmed, 56% feel undervalued, and 50.8% are emotionally exhausted

• Middle managers are the most crushed group: 61.2% say they’re overwhelmed (Deloitte)

• And younger staff aren’t exempt—72% of under-35s in agencies report burnout (IPA, 2023)

So what does that leave us with?

A workforce that’s under pressure, underpaid, and increasingly under surveillance by software that's allegedly "freeing up creativity." Older professionals are pushed out. Younger ones are burning out. And the tools meant to help are often just raising the bar for output without fixing anything cultural.

We’ve got an ageism problem. A burnout problem. A credibility problem. And slapping “innovation” over it like a glossy pitch deck isn’t going to fix any of it.

This isn’t a trend. This is the foundation cracking. And pretending otherwise is just bad strategy.

Experience vs. Automation: Can You Scale Wisdom?

Why Instinct Still Matters in an AI World

AI is very good at pretending your mid-level strategist is a genius. It can write a B-minus thought leadership post in 15 seconds, optimize a media buy, and summarize your 73-slide pitch deck better than the person who made it. But let’s be honest: it’s still terrible at nuance.

It can’t read the room.
It can’t sense hesitation in a client's voice.
And it definitely can’t tell you why that campaign is about to implode because of a subtle cultural shift you noticed on TikTok three weeks before anyone else did.

This is the fundamental disconnect. AI can scale content. AI can scale workflows. But wisdom? No. You can’t scale it. You can only share it. And too many companies are mistaking one for the other.

🤖 The Limits of Automation

AI thrives on structured input and pattern recognition. It’s great at doing what it's told, and occasionally, predicting what you might want next. But that’s not wisdom. That’s just very fast mimicry.

Wisdom lives in the uncomfortable space between what’s obvious and what’s necessary. It’s:

• Knowing when to trust the data and when to question it

• Understanding that ethics and efficiency are not the same thing

• Making a call when you don’t have enough information, and still being right

It’s not something you get from a dashboard. It’s something you get from years of screwing up, learning, and doing it again—better.

🧓 The Irreplaceable Value of Instinct

What we call “gut instinct” is just pattern recognition layered with memory, context, and emotional intelligence. It's built over time, not fine-tuned on labeled data.

Think about it:

• The senior creative who knows an idea won’t land, even when the metrics say otherwise

• The brand strategist who spots a trust issue before it tanks a deal

• The media buyer who’s seen a “guaranteed ROAS” pitch 200 times and knows which levers to pull—and which ones are nonsense

This is the stuff that keeps businesses alive. And it’s being undervalued at precisely the moment we need it most.

🔄 What Real Innovation Culture Looks Like

Here’s the part people like to skip over: mentorship isn’t a checkbox.
It’s not two days of “shadowing” followed by a Slack channel called #wisdom-wednesdays. It’s intentional knowledge transfer, from someone who’s done it the hard way, to someone who hasn’t yet. And it only works when there’s trust, time, and mutual respect involved.

If you want real innovation?
Hire someone with scars.
Then actually listen to them.

🧩 Augmentation, Not Replacement

The best future isn’t one where AI replaces decision-making. It’s one where it frees humans to make better decisions. AI can handle the noise. Let people focus on the signal.

✅ Use AI for repetitive tasks and rapid analysis
✅ Use humans for strategy, interpretation, and judgment
✅ Build teams that value insight, not just output

Because innovation isn’t just about speed—it’s about knowing where to go next, and why.

Bottom line:
You can automate everything but experience.
You can’t code for wisdom, and you definitely can’t prompt for instinct.
The companies that understand that will win. The ones that don’t?
Well, let’s just say no amount of machine learning will save them from their next PR crisis.