The Aperiam Podcast

Iván Markman joined Mediaocean in May 2026 as its first President and COO — a role that didn't exist before he took it. He joins Corey Ferengul and Joe Zawadzki to explain what Bill Wise hired him to fix.Iván traces a path from Overture and Yahoo through MarketShare and Neustar to running search, ad tech, and Edgecast at Verizon Media, where he helped turn the business around ahead of the Apollo sale. He describes Mediaocean as two halves of the same problem: Prisma, the financial backbone moving a couple hundred billion dollars of media and reconciling it to the penny, and the Flashtalking, Innovid, and 4C side serving roughly a trillion impressions a year across social, CTV, and everything between. The company buys no media and sells no media — Iván compares the position to Visa.The conversation turns to what actually makes agentic advertising work. Iván argues the scarce asset isn't the model, it's deterministic data and deterministic pathways — and that Mediaocean owns a second data set nobody else has: not the client's campaign data, but the data about how the money and the impressions actually moved. On MCP, he notes the important letter is the C.He also covers the integration reality behind the marketing, why he asks every founder for their "investor scorecard" rather than a pitch, Mediaocean AI Ventures, and where the next dollar goes: building.

Corey and Joe talk with Brian Wiener — a 30-year digital veteran behind 360i and Profitero — about why he started 37Arc, a "workflow intelligence" company helping CMOs rewire marketing and sales for the AI era. They dig into why most AI pilots fail, how 37Arc uses a voice AI agent to interview entire marketing departments at scale, and why chasing shiny objects beats companies that actually map their workflows first.

Performance marketing used to be about who could do the most manual work across the most platforms. Anna Stepura, co-founder and CEO of Adlyse, says that era is over — and the teams still operating that way are already falling behind.In this episode, Anna joins Corey Ferengul and Joe Zawadzki to break down why she built Adlyse as an agentic operating system sitting above Google, Meta, TikTok, OpenAI, and every other channel — not inside any one of them. She unpacks why platform-native AI is inherently biased toward getting you to spend more, why it now takes 21 cross-platform touchpoints to convert a customer (up from seven), and how Adlyse runs 100 different hypotheses before making a single optimization recommendation.They get into the creative remixing loop, the 24-day trust arc from human-in-the-loop to autopilot, agent-to-agent advertising, OpenAI ads as an emerging channel, and why the platforms themselves are actively opening their APIs rather than closing them — because agentic buying is the future they're building toward too.

Jonathan Frohlinger, CEO of Big Happy, joins Corey and Joe to talk creative as ad tech's most neglected variable, why digital out-of-home is finally having its moment, and how Big Happy built a category-leading business without a big VC round.

Marketing measurement has long been treated as a planning exercise — but LiftLab's John Wallace is changing that. Corey and Joe sit down with the Founder & CEO to dig into why incrementality is the only measurement that matters, how the Skims TikTok experiment led to a 3x spend increase, and why most MMM outputs are blind to what's actually happening on your campaigns day to day. John also breaks down PlatformSense — LiftLab's new product that injects real-time platform signals into an incrementality foundation — and makes the case for why the best marketers treat BAU as the enemy.

The media market is broken — and it's broken by design. In this episode, Corey and Joe sit down with Marc Guldimann, co-founder and CEO of Adelaide, to unpack why digital advertising operates like a classic "lemon market," where buyers can't assess quality so sellers have no incentive to provide it. Marc explains Adelaide's AU metric — a placement-level quality score built on attention research and outcome validation — and how it's beginning to function as a genuine market currency, moving from the buy side to the sell side much like credit ratings did in financial markets. The conversation goes deep on the financialization of media: forward contracts, securitization, and why a CMO who can't answer "what will it cost to reach my audience in six months?" is structurally disadvantaged compared to every other executive in the boardroom.

Mike True, founder and CEO of Prescient AI, joins Corey and Joe to discuss how the company built a modern media mix modeling platform — starting with an unlikely origin measuring Cardi B's streaming performance during COVID. Mike covers why MMM has had a resurgence, how Prescient is helping brands move from static quarterly budget reviews to dynamic weekly optimizations, and why search is dramatically over-credited in most media mixes. The conversation also gets into where brands should be putting more dollars right now, the emerging complexity of TikTok Shop and omnichannel measurement, and what measuring AI-driven discovery channels like AEO will require next.

George Popstefanov, founder and CEO of PMG, (also Koddi, Further, and the Momentum Group), joins Corey and Joe to discuss how he's built and managed a portfolio of independent, technology-first companies across advertising, commerce, and data. George walks through the three pillars that define every business he builds and how those principles drive everything from product development to acquisition strategy. The conversation covers how PMG's Ali operating system and Alli Marketplace are becoming central infrastructure for Fortune 500 brands navigating the shift to agentic marketing. George also addresses the AI cost reality check hitting enterprise organizations, the gap between AI usage and AI impact, and why he believes education at the C-suite level — not technology deployment — is the single most important first step for companies trying to transform.

Corey Ferengul and Joe Zawadzki are joined by Shane Shevlin, co-founder of Bedrock Platform and a veteran of IPONWeb and the early days of programmatic, to discuss what it looks like to build a next-generation media buying platform from the ground up in the agentic era. Shane walks through Bedrock's core mission — making deal-based trading work more effectively at lower cost — and how a multi-agent system called Pathfinder is creating a compounding intelligence loop that learns from every trader decision. The conversation covers how AI development has collapsed what used to be multi-month builds into days, why sell-side decisioning is reshaping the relationship between buyers and publishers, and how an agent surfacing unexpected auction clearing price data by state actually rewrote Bedrock's own product roadmap. Shane also shares his thinking on YouTube as broadcast-quality inventory, the challenges of entering the US market as a European company, and why the natural language command line may soon make the traditional DSP interface obsolete.

Corey Ferengul and Joe Zawadzki are joined by Filippo Gramigna, co-CEO of OneTag — one of the only globally scaled programmatic companies founded in Europe. Filippo walks through OneTag's decade-long evolution, from its origins as a DSP to building a bespoke SSP for Procter & Gamble, pioneering traffic shaping before the term existed, and repositioning multiple times as the market evolved around curation. He explains the company's recent acquisition, Aryel, and how they see a unique fit. The conversation also covers how OneTag is approaching AI pragmatically, why blurring DSP/SSP lines might be inevitable, and what Filippo wishes more brands and agencies understood about cutting through the noise in a crowded market.

In this episode of the Aperiam Podcast, Corey and Joe are joined by Todd Sawicki, founder and CEO of Gumshoe.ai, to explore one of the most consequential and least understood shifts in marketing today: how AI search is changing the way brands are discovered, recommended, and perceived. Todd breaks down why the concept of "ranking" is obsolete in an LLM world, what it actually means for an AI to have brand preferences, and why the brands that win will be the ones that treat AI like a digital sales rep they need to train. He also explains why growth marketers — not search teams — are the ones best positioned to capitalize on this, and why your customer personas are probably outdated the moment they're printed.

In this episode of The Aperiam Podcast, Corey and Joe sit down with Andrew Covato, founder of Growth by Science, to tackle one of marketing's most persistent challenges: measurement. With over 15 years of experience at Google, Meta, Netflix, and Snap, Andrew breaks down why so many brands are still wasting ad dollars on outdated attribution methods, why simply "throwing AI at it" won't fix broken measurement foundations, and what a smarter approach actually looks like — starting with the fundamental question: what would happen to your business if you turned off your ads? Whether you're a scrappy DTC brand or a multinational with nine-figure budgets, this conversation delivers a practical, no-nonsense framework for building a measurement program rooted in science, not vanity metrics.

Hosts Corey Ferengul and Joe Zawadzki are joined by Joe Hirsch, founder and CEO of Swivel, to explore AdCP—the Ad Context Protocol. AdCP represents a new standard for agentic ad buying in the advertising industry, drawing inspiration from the Model Context Protocol (MCP). As AI agents become more prevalent in advertising operations, the need for standardized protocols has never been more critical.In this episode, the Joes dive into the technical foundations and practical implications of this emerging standard, discussing how AdCP aims to streamline and standardize the way AI agents interact with advertising platforms and execute media buys.