About this episode

Shawn Jensen discusses the flaws in the digital ad industry and presents his vision for a privacy-first advertising model.

On this episode of The ADOTAT Show, Pesach Lattin sits down with Shawn Jensen, Founder and CEO of Profila, the Swiss startup that's spent eight years building what they call zero-knowledge advertising, a privacy-first AdTech architecture where consumer data never leaves the device. Jensen doesn't pull punches. He calls CPM a vanity metric, says the $700 billion digital ad industry forgot to ask the customer what they want, and argues that the entire surveillance-based targeting model built since 2005 is a $50 billion-a-year fraud problem dressed up as innovation. We get into declared intent vs inferred intent, why GDPR and the EU AI Act are closing the walls on programmatic, and what Jensen thinks AdTech looks like in 2036 if he wins. This is the conversation the AdTech industry has been avoiding for a decade. Now it's on the record. 🎯 WHAT WE COVER: 00:00 Cold open: meet the Swiss founder who thinks AdTech is dumb 01:43 What is zero-knowledge advertising, explained for CMOs 03:18 Declared intent vs inferred intent: lead indicator vs lagging indicator 03:47 ACE: the Agentic Intent Classification Engine, explained 05:24 OpenRTB integration and why Profila isn't a rip-and-replace…

People in this episode

Host: Pesach Lattin

Guest: Shawn Jensen

Topics covered

• zero-knowledge advertising
• privacy-first AdTech
• consumer data management
• programmatic advertising
• digital ad industry
• surveillance-based targeting
• future of AdTech

Keywords

• AdTech
• CPM
• consumer data
• programmatic
• GDPR
• surveillance
• digital advertising
• privacy
• future of advertising

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Profila, GDPR, EU AI Act, ACE, OpenRTB

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