Liz DeAngelis from Brainlabs joins Pesach Lattin on the ADOTAT Show to tear apart everything the ad tech industry pretends is working. From programmatic advertising's broken incentives to why attribution is theater, why video completion rate is an emotional support KPI, and why cheap never actually means efficient, this conversation pulls no punches. Liz has seen it all. Mobile app marketing. The Ad Council's COVID-19 vaccine campaign. Growth at Monks. And now leading programmatic strategy at Brainlabs where she's asking the questions nobody wants to answer: does any of this actually drive business impact or are we just funding a swamp? We get into the Pinterest CTV Scientific acquisition and what it means for intent-based TV buying, why "performance CTV" is a branded concept and not a real capability, why Google can't reconcile its own platforms, why display advertising destroyed itself through measurement, why agencies can't figure out which team owns new channels, and what actually breaks first when growth outpaces maturity. Plus: hustle culture is dead, founder intuition is bullshit, and the opinion Liz softens in public but holds privately is that advertising has ruined a lot of the internet.

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.

Sam Bloom, Head of Partnerships at PMG, returns to the ADOTAT Show for round two. Either that's heroic or deeply concerning. In this episode, Sam gets brutally honest about the AI hype cycle flooding ad tech, why most "agentic" tools are just the same old crap with a .ai domain, and how to tell the difference between real innovation and vendor theater. He breaks down his two-question filter that every pitch must pass, explains why 70% of agency time disappears into work nobody enjoys, and reveals why he fears two people in a garage more than the big holding companies. We also dive deep into CTV's graduation from high school (still figuring out laundry), why attention metrics are overrated, the coming tsunami of AI slop hitting connected TV, and how retail media is becoming identity infrastructure for a post-cookie world. Plus: the transparency paradox, why CMOs keep signing deals with agencies whose profits depend on opacity, and what happens when agencies disappear entirely. 🔥 IN THIS EPISODE: 00:00 - Intro 02:15 - The AI Hype Cycle: Sorting Wheat from Slop 08:30 - Sam's Two-Question Vendor Filter 12:45 - What "Agentic" Actually Means (And How It's Abused) 18:20 - The 70% Problem: Why Agency Work Sucks 24:00 - Mental Health in Advertising 28:15 - The Garage Threat: Why Small Teams Win 35:40 - What AI Cannot Replace 42:00 - CTV: Graduating High School 48:30 - Why Attention Metrics Are Overrated 54:15 - The AI Slop Tsunami Coming to CTV 59:00 - Retail Media as Identity Infrastructure 1:05:30 - The Measurement Reckoning: Killing Last-Click 1:12:00 - The Transparency Paradox 1:18:45 - What Clients Actually Need 1:24:00 - The Agency Extinction Scenario 📢 SPONSORS: Troutman Amin LLP - https://www.troutmanamin.com/ Incremental - https://www.incremental.com/ 🎙️ ABOUT THE ADOTAT SHOW: The ADOTAT Show with Pesach Lattin. Where ads get torched, truth gets told, and the industry pretends not to read us. Stay Bold. Stay Curious. Know More Than You Did Yesterday. 👉 SUBSCRIBE for weekly episodes with the sharpest minds in advertising, media, and ad tech. CONNECT WITH US: 🌐 Website: https://www.adotat.com 📧 Newsletter: https://new.adotat.com 🐦 Twitter: https://x.com/pesach_lattin?lang=en 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pesach-lattin/ #AdTech #DigitalMarketing #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #CTV #ConnectedTV #RetailMedia #ProgrammaticAdvertising #MediaBuying #MarketingStrategy #AgencyLife #PMG #SamBloom #ADOTATShow #PesachLattin #MarketingPodcast #AdvertisingPodcast #MediaPlanning #Attribution #Transparency #AdAgency #MarketingTech #MarTech Tags: sam bloom, pmg, adotat show, pesach lattin, ad tech, advertising technology, ai in advertising, agentic ai, connected tv, ctv advertising, retail media, retail media networks, programmatic advertising, media buying, digital marketing, marketing strategy, agency life, marketing podcast, advertising podcast, ai hype, attention metrics, last click attribution, incrementality, media mix modeling, transparency in advertising, principal media, holding companies, marketing technology, martech, cmo, media planning, ad agency, future of advertising, ai slop, streaming advertising