The Complete Feed

Filmed live at Advertising Week New York, Rio Longacre and Brett House sit down with Matt Krepsik of MediaRadar and Vassilis Pakopoulos of MMA Global to unpack how AI is actually being used across marketing today. Drawing on new MediaRadar and MMA research, they separate hype from reality and explore where AI is driving real value—and where the industry still has work to do.

Eric Tilbury is an AdTech voice with an operator’s receipts. The Inuvo programmatic leader joins Brett and Rio to explain how DSP filtering shapes campaigns before bidding begins, why many ID-free tests never reach ID-free inventory, how to verify real CTV supply, and where iOS inventory may be mispriced. They also trace Eric’s journey from practitioner to industry teacher—and the 4:30 a.m. discipline behind it.

Publicis’s planned acquisition of LiveRamp has put neutral advertising infrastructure in play. ID5 co-founder and CEO Mathieu Roche returns after his Cannes conversation with Rio to map the real replacement job: onboarding, identity, clean rooms, activation, measurement, governance, and publisher distribution. Brett and Rio also examine ID5’s TrueData acquisition, its work with Optable and other pub-tech partners, and whether a coalition of specialists can replace an embedded

Kurt Donnell left M&A law for digital media and became the first CEO of Freestar, helping scale it into a global publisher monetization business. Now the open web faces a harder test: declining search traffic, AI answer engines, fragmented AdTech, and advertiser dollars moving to simpler closed platforms. Can radical transparency restore trust, what publishers should demand from AI companies, and whether Freestar’s new pubOS creates real leverage—or merely manages declines.

Bryan Leach left a Supreme Court clerkship and a successful legal career to build Ibotta from Denver. The company grew from a cash-back app into a promotions network reaching more than 200 million consumers—and completed Colorado’s largest technology IPO. Brett and Rio ask how Ibotta really makes money, whether redemptions prove incremental sales, what LiveLift and the Uber partnership change, and whether Colorado remains a place where ambitious founders can build at national

Alex Collmer built Vidmob on a provocative idea: advertising creative should be measurable without becoming mechanical. Now, as generative AI makes content nearly infinite, Vidmob is moving its creative intelligence into assistants, agents, APIs, and media workflows through Vidmob360. Brett and Rio ask what creative data can truly prove, whether optimization produces sameness, why Alex handed over the CEO role, and what humans must still control when machines begin making and

Jeffrey Cohen had a front-row seat as Amazon Ads became a global advertising giant. Now, as Chief Business Development Officer at Skai, he is working on the harder next chapter: making fragmented commerce media measurable, interoperable, and ready for AI agents. Brett and Rio ask what Amazon got right, why attributed sales are not the same as incremental sales, what Skai’s Celeste AI and agent-native platform can actually do, and who controls the budget when machines start ma

AI agents can access more data than ever—but who decides what they are allowed to do with it? Brett and Rio sit down with SafeGuard Privacy CEO Richy Glassberg to explore why privacy is becoming a permission layer for the AI era. They discuss consent, vendor diligence, machine-readable authority, and how auditable privacy infrastructure can help companies innovate responsibly while building customer trust.

Fern Potter left a senior ad-tech leadership role to co-found Intelligent Assistance around a bold premise: AI works best when it expands human judgment rather than pretending to replace it. She joins Signal & Noise to discuss why AI is not a strategy, how companies move from pilots to commercial impact, what programmatic advertising can teach us about unchecked automation, and why the future belongs to organizations that combine machine speed with human context, creativity,

Dollar General may be one of America’s most underestimated media businesses. Austin Leonard, VP & GM of DG Media Network, joins Signal & Noise to reveal how DG is turning 21,000+ stores, billions of transactions and rich first-party data into a powerful retail media platform—and using AI to transform targeting, measurement, in-store media and customer experiences.

Programmatic advertising automated the transaction. AI may automate the negotiation. In this episode of Signal & Noise, Brett House and Rio Longacre sit down with Andrew Mole, CEO and Co-Founder of PubX, for a provocative conversation about agentic trading, publisher monetization, and what happens when AI agents begin representing both sides of the advertising market.

What happens when being yourself becomes your biggest competitive advantage? In his first solo Signal & Noise episode, Krish Raja sits down with Justin Kramm, Founder & Creative Director of Shit Show Creative, for a conversation that blends humor with genuine insight. They explore authenticity, creativity, AI, LinkedIn, Cannes Lions, and why embracing your unique voice can open doors, build community, and create opportunities no polished corporate persona ever could.

Day 4 closes out Signal & Noise’s first Cannes Lions with conversations that capture where marketing is headed next. From AI agents and ad fraud to transparency, identity, enterprise transformation, and publisher innovation, Rio Longacre, Brett House, and Krish Raja speak with leaders from Dstillery, CHEQ, Stagwell Marketing Cloud, Chili Piper, Credera, and more to wrap up an unforgettable week at Cannes Lions 2026.

Day 3 at Cannes Lions 2026 brought some of the week's most insightful conversations from Hearst House. Signal & Noise sat down with leaders from Experian, Klarna, Zeta Global, Hearst, ID5, Real Chemistry, Omnicom Media Group Health, and MediaRadar to explore AI deployment, identity, healthcare innovation, measurement, and why trusted data and premium content are becoming more valuable as the industry moves from AI experimentation to real-world execution.

Signal & Noise is live from Cannes Lions 2026 with Rio Longacre, Krish Raja, and Brett House. Recorded at Hearst House, this special compilation features conversations with leaders across media, advertising, and marketing on the biggest trends shaping the industry—from agency transformation and premium TV to creativity, measurement, healthcare marketing, and the future of brand building.

For weeks, reports suggested Publicis was exploring a relationship with Hightouch following its acquisition of LiveRamp. In this special Signal & Noise Signal Break, Hightouch CEO Tejas Manohar publicly confirms those discussions for the first time. Brett House, Rio Longacre, and Tejas explore what it could mean for identity, composable CDPs, AI, activation, and the future of marketing infrastructure.

Publishers create the content, build the audiences, and bear the costs—yet often capture only a fraction of the value they generate. In this Signal & Noise exclusive, Rio Longacre and Brett House sit down with Keith Petri and Rich Hyden of Viant to explore the future of publisher monetization, identity, CTV, signal quality, and programmatic advertising. The conversation examines how publishers can strengthen their position in the digital advertising ecosystem and reclaim econ

What happens when an AdTech engineer decides software isn’t ambitious enough? In this episode of Signal & Noise, Brett House and Rio Longacre speak with Blake Scholl, Founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, about reviving supersonic flight, lessons from Amazon and Groupon, the future of AI, and why the biggest breakthroughs come from building hard things the world stopped believing in.

What happens when AI stops assisting consumers and starts acting on their behalf? In this episode of Signal & Noise, Rio Longacre and Brett House speak with industry analyst Karsten Weide about the future of AI-powered advertising, agentic commerce, and autonomous media buying. The conversation explores how OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Meta, and emerging AI platforms could fundamentally reshape the digital economy and the future of the open web.

The future of marketing isn't about managing more software—it's about connecting data, intelligence, and decision-making. Scott Brinker explains how AI is dissolving the boundaries between MarTech, AdTech, and enterprise operations, creating a new operating model built around context, automation, and orchestration.