Marketing, Media & Adtech

Ashkan Karbasfrooshan built one of the biggest channels on the planet from Montreal. 17 billion views. 40 million subscribers. Fifteen years without a dollar of outside money. Six of those years, he lost money and took out a second mortgage. Now he wants to do something harder: bring Major League Baseball back to Montreal. A team that left in 2004. A four-billion-dollar price tag he doesn't have. A stadium that doesn't exist. And a plan that's mostly phone calls and a refusal to ask anyone's permission. In this episode we get into all of it. The "10-year overnight success." The four-quadrant theory of using AI without torching your own brand. Cyrus the Great as a management consultant. Why he picked Montreal on purpose. The permission fallacy that built an empire and might just build a ballpark. And the desert-island question that ends with him choosing his wife, his daughters, and a Shih Tzu named Lily over Warren Buffett and every investor in his phone. The dog, for the record, has no idea she won. Funny, occasionally feral, and weirdly moving by the end. 🎙️ This is the ADOTAT Show. 🔔 Subscribe for more conversations with the people building the future without waiting for permission.

Frazer Locke has 34 years of retail and ad tech scars. He spent a decade inside Amazon building the ads machine before anyone took it seriously, and now he's SVP of International Sales at TripleLift, the creative SSP trying to keep retail media from becoming an unwatchable Blade Runner hellscape of infinite ads.In this episode of the ADOTAT Show, Pesach Lattin sits down with Frazer to talk about what's actually broken in retail media (even though he's too British to use that word), why frequency capping is a sanity check the industry is failing, what he learned from Seth Dallaire in the early Amazon Ads trenches, why Aldi and Lidl might be the dark horses nobody's watching, and whether full funnel measurement is real or just a really convincing PowerPoint slide.We also strand him on a desert island with Superman, Tom Hanks, and a British comedian you've never heard of. It goes exactly how you'd expect.🔥 WHAT WE COVER: 0:00 - Intro 0:56 - Who is Frazer Locke 2:42 - Career journey from Sainsbury's to Amazon to TripleLift 3:51 - What's broken in brand-consumer relationships 5:29 - The refresh ad problem nobody asked for 7:08 - When ad tech rewrote the retail playbook 8:37 - Retail media internationally vs the US 9:54 - If 1991 Frazer walked into today's office 11:23 - What separates real integration from bolt-on media 13:12 - Creative tech: innovation or automated mediocrity 16:02 - Is TripleLift still just an SSP? 17:50 - Cultural vs technological barriers to creative innovation 19:02 - Does contextual advertising actually work? 19:56 - AI-generated dynamic supermarket shelves 20:26 - The Aldi and Lidl retail media dark horse theory 21:40 - Retail media gold rush or cable TV fragmentation? 22:06 - Does full funnel measurement actually exist? 25:47 - Is retail media brand building or a click casino? 26:43 - Sacred cows: what would Frazer burn down? 28:16 - Programmatic transparency or smarter ways to hide fees? 30:35 - Will most DSPs exist in 10 years? 31:36 - If publishers and advertisers swapped roles 32:30 - Leadership across continents and time zones 33:28 - LinkedIn leadership vs real leadership 34:42 - Are we over-romanticizing culture? 35:32 - Desert island companions 39:04 - AI takes over: first question to robot overlords 39:29 - What the island teaches about ad tech 40:02 - What drives Frazer when the decks close 41:23 - The Seth Dallaire mentor lesson 44:00 - Frequency capping as industry sanity check 44:44 - If not advertising, then what? 45:22 - Legacy: what Frazer wants to be remembered for📰 READ THE FULL BREAKDOWN on ADOTAT.com — including the ADOTAT+ deep dive on what Frazer was too diplomatic to say out loud, why he really left Amazon, and whether "creative SSP" is genius positioning or a holding pattern.👉 Subscribe to ADOTAT+ for the inside baseball: [link]🎙️ THE ADOTAT SHOW — where we cut through the buzzwords, the hype decks, and the endless talk of revolutionary solutions to talk about who's actually moving the needle in advertising. Hosted by Pesach Lattin.Be bold. Be curious. Know more than you did yesterday.💼 SPONSORS: Troutman Amin LLP — the ad tech lawyers who actually get it Incremental — measure what actually moves the needle#retailmedia #adtech #programmaticadvertising #amazonads #triplelift #retailmedianetwork #CTV #connectedTV #digitaladvertising #SSP #DSP #commercemedia #creativetechnology #marketingstrategy #brandbuilding #walmartconnect #ecommerce #advertisingtechnology #mediaplanning #digitalmarketing #marketingpodcast #adtechpodcast #retailmedia2025 #futureofadvertising #programmatic #supplypathooptimization #nativeadvertising #frequencycapping #adindustry #mediainnovation #retailmedianetworks #offsite #amazon #tesco #aldi #Lidl #marketplaceLoaded with the high-search-volume terms: retail media, programmatic advertising, Amazon Ads, connected TV, DSP, SSP, digital marketing, e-commerce, creative technology, and brand building.

Gaming is the single largest media channel on the planet. Bigger than streaming. Bigger than social media. Bigger than CTV. 3.5 billion people play at least one game every month — that's 90% of everyone connected to the internet. And yet the advertising industry has spent the last two decades pretending gaming doesn't exist. In this interview, I sit down with Itamar Benedy, the founder and CEO of Anzu, the company pioneering programmatic in-game advertising with native 3D ad placements inside video games. After eight years building Anzu, Itamar says they haven't even hit 1% of the journey — and explains why that's both the most honest and the most terrifying thing a founder can admit. We dig into why "the year of gaming advertising" has been promised every single January since the Blackberry era and never delivered. Why brands are finally moving budget into gaming — some because the performance arbitrage is undeniable, others because every other channel is collapsing under them. And some just because McKinsey told them to. We break down the infamous Netflix campaign disaster — when Netflix ran ads inside games telling players to stop playing and go watch Netflix — and why that's the perfect case study for everything brands get wrong about gaming audiences. The irony? Netflix is now a gaming company with an ad-supported tier as its fastest-growing revenue line. Itamar explains why lumping 3.5 billion people into one category called "gamers" is the laziest move in media buying, why in-game advertising is essentially digital out-of-home but with actual measurement and targeting, and why the gaming industry sabotaged its own advertising potential for years by going to war with the companies that make advertising work. This conversation is essential viewing for CMOs, media buyers, brand strategists, ad tech professionals, and anyone trying to understand where attention is actually going in 2025 and beyond. ABOUT ITAMAR BENEDY: Itamar Benedy is the founder and CEO of Anzu, a leading in-game advertising platform that delivers programmatic, brand-safe ad placements rendered natively in 3D within video game environments. Anzu works with major brands and game publishers to bridge the gap between where audiences spend their time and where advertising dollars actually go.

Bob Lord: The Quantum Computing Defector Who Escaped Advertising, Spent 8 Years Learning How Technology Actually Works at IBM, and Then Came Back to Burn Down the FTE ModelHere's a career arc that sounds like a fever dream: He ran Razorfish, sold it to Microsoft, sold it again to Publicis, became president of AOL during Verizon's $4.4 billion acquisition, then completely abandoned advertising to become a senior vice president at IBM where he got "steeped in large language models, neural networks, quantum computing" and learned to track a single product floating somewhere in the South China Sea. Now he's back as President of Horizon Media—one of the largest independent agencies in the country with $10 billion in billings—and he has some thoughts about why everything is broken.In this wide-ranging conversation, Bob Lord walks us through the career nobody plans, the lessons that shaped how he operates, and why he thinks the entire agency compensation model is a dying relic that's holding the industry hostage.We get into:The great escape and return: Why would anyone leave advertising at the top of their game, spend nearly a decade at IBM learning about quantum computing and supply chain software, and then voluntarily come back to an industry that had only gotten more chaotic in his absence?The damning comparison: At IBM, Lord could track a single product across global supply chains and tell you exactly when it would dock in San Francisco. Meanwhile, back in advertising? "I still couldn't tell a marketer how their campaign ran in the last week. Something went wrong."The Rube Goldberg problem: More ad tech vendors. More data companies. More martech platforms. More confusion. More complexity. Less clarity. The industry spent a decade building an elaborate machine and forgot what it was supposed to be making.The FTE model must die: Lord is pitching clients on performance-based compensation tied to actual business outcomes—not marketing qualified leads, not downloads, but actual transactions. Cars sold. Internet packages purchased. Widgets moved. "If I can swap out technology and cut the staff by a third—shouldn't that be the model?"The boots story: How a 19-year-old Bob Lord on a GM factory floor learned the hard way that not everyone operates from goodness—a lesson that's guided his trust-but-verify approach for four decades.Growth and comfort don't coexist: The mantra he picked up from IBM's Ginni Rometty that sounds like a LinkedIn platitude but that Lord means literally. He talks about being in the "muddy middle" at Horizon—knowing where he wants to go, not having all the answers, watching everyone's role change in real time.The first P&L: The exhausting, trial-by-fire experience of running a $20 million business in North Carolina with no idea how to hire, fire, or run a sales department—and why he keeps putting himself through these sink-or-swim moments decade after decade.

Local TV has been written off as plumbers, pizza shops, and leftover budgets for far too long. Jason Manningham is here to explain why that take is lazy, expensive, and wrong. In this episode of The ADOTAT Show, Pesach Lattin sits down with Blockgraph CEO Jason Manningham to unpack the part of the TV ecosystem everyone pretends to understand and absolutely does not. We dig into why local advertising is actually a $170B market, why zip codes are a blunt instrument, and why proximity and household identity outperform the buzzword soup most decks are built on. This conversation covers: Why local TV is bigger than national TV, and why brands keep missing it Household identity vs “targeting a person” on a shared screen Why IP targeting is mostly fiction and why geo still matters when done right Attribution dashboards as cosplay and the limits of last-click thinking Currency wars, outcomes measurement, and why Nielsen isn’t the whole story What AI gets wrong about TV and why the real world still matters Why most “performance TV” claims collapse under basic scrutiny No hype. No vendor theater. Just infrastructure, incentives, and the uncomfortable math underneath modern TV advertising. Sponsored by: Troutman Amin LLP – When ad tech deals get complicated, regulated, or quietly risky. Incremental.com – Because lift beats vibes, and proof beats promises. This is The ADOTAT Show. Stay Bold, Stay Curious, and Know More than You Did Yesterday.

Founders love telling you they’re “building the future.” Most of them are really just building new ways to charge you for the same old chaos. On this episode of The ADOTAT Show, Pesach Lattin runs a rare double-header: Amol Waishampayan (the product philosopher behind Full Throttle AI) and David Regn (the guy who helped build Stream into a 27-year force of nature without lighting the building on fire). Together, they walk straight into adtech’s identity problem and do the unthinkable: talk like adults. Topics include: First-party identity: why the industry treated it like optional kale until the cookies started entering hospice care “95%+ confidence” household identity: less magic, more math, way more uncomfortable truths Third-party data: useful, sure… if you enjoy navigating by fog Mid-market miniaturization: why measurement is finally getting shrink-wrapped instead of locked behind enterprise gates Automation: the kind that replaces five humans and three spreadsheets, not the kind that needs constant supervision and snacks Leadership delusion: why “tools” won for so long and “outcomes” got avoided like an audit Desert island adtech: no dashboards, no WiFi, just coconuts and the terrifying realization you might need common sense Also: Flash nostalgia, Newgrounds deep cuts, and Pesach attempting to strand two executives on an island for content. Because this is what passes for “media” now. Stay Bold, Stay Curious, and Know More than You Did Yesterday.