# 35 years in ad tech, one crazy opinion: if we stopped lying, we'd have more fun. | Karsten Weide

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/marketing-media-adtech-6725129/35-years-in-ad-tech-one-crazy-opinion-if-we-stopped-lying-we-d-have-more-fun-karsten-weide
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/marketing-media-adtech-6725129/35-years-in-ad-tech-one-crazy-opinion-if-we-stopped-lying-we-d-have-more-fun-karsten-weide.md
Podcast: [Marketing, Media & Adtech](https://stenobird.com/podcast/marketing-media-adtech-6725129)
Published: 2026-04-27T07:15:00+00:00
Episode link: https://adotat.captivate.fm
Audio file: https://episodes.captivate.fm/episode/3e69e676-0b5e-4f7a-a491-dd8cc81ff613.mp3
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Duration seconds: 2147

## Resource

Karsten Weide has spent 35 years inside the advertising machine. Journalist at Ziff Davis during the PC era. Built Yahoo Germany from an empty room with one phone on the floor. Sixteen years as a senior analyst at IDC modeling the digital advertising business. Now independent, and finally saying out loud what everyone in ad tech thinks but won't post on LinkedIn: the industry is lying, everybody knows it's lying, and if we all just stopped, we'd have more fun.In this episode of the ADOTAT Show, Pesach Lattin sits down with Karsten for one of the most honest conversations we've ever recorded about the state of advertising technology, AI in advertising, programmatic, brand safety, LLM content theft, and why the junior ad tech jobs are about to disappear.What we cover:Whether AI agents in advertising are the real deal or the next metaverse. Why media planners, coordinators, and junior ad ops roles are going away, not being "augmented." The PubMatic fully automated campaign and what it actually means. AI washing in ad tech press releases and why it's burying the real work. How LLM companies are destroying small publishers that can't afford to fight back. The New York Times vs. OpenAI, and why the mom-and-pop blogs are the ones getting eaten. The Google antitrust verdict and what it tells us about business ethics in tech. LinkedIn performance culture and conference enthusiasm theater. The Santa Cruz radio caller story that explains the entire value exchange in 90 seconds. The industry's greatest lies rated live: brand safety, programmatic efficiency, incremental lift, consumer-first positioning, and the universal vendor slogan that Karsten calls flat-out untrue. The one person in ad tech Karsten thinks is actually telling the truth. The empty-room origin story of Yahoo Euro…

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