The Complete Feed

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.

Advertising legend Rishad Tobaccowala joins Brett House and Rio Longacre for a wide-ranging conversation on AI, reinvention, agencies, and the future of work. Drawing on four decades at Publicis, Rishad explores why AI transformation is really organizational transformation, how careers are becoming more fluid, and what human skills will matter most in an age of abundant intelligence.

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

Everyone is talking about AI… but very few people have spent decades building AI systems that millions actually use. In this episode, Zohar Karu, Head of AI at Taelor and former Chief Data Officer at eBay, joins Signal & Noise to explore why AI transformation is really organizational transformation. We discuss personalization, enterprise adoption, trust, and why the companies that win with AI won’t necessarily have the best models—they’ll build the products and cultures peopl

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,

As AI becomes the primary gateway to discovering brands online, traditional SEO is giving way to a new discipline: AI Visibility. In this episode, Leah Nurik, CEO and Co-Founder of Brandi AI, joins Signal & Noise to explore Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), how AI decides which brands to recommend, and what the shift from search engines to answer engines means for marketers, publishers, and the future of digital marketing.