Richard K. Howe is not your average adtech CEO. He’s not selling AI that guesses which shampoo you bought last week or stuffing identity graphs with browser crumbs and bad intentions. No—he’s building something far more dangerous to the status quo: AI that actually thinks.

In this episode of The ADOTAT Show, we sit down with the CEO of Inuvo, a structural engineer turned advertising insurgent, who’s throwing the entire surveillance-based ad model into the recycling bin (right next to your cookie policy pop-ups). Richard walks us through how his team built an AI platform that doesn’t care who you are—but why you do anything. It’s not about identity anymore. It’s about motivation. Psychology. Intent.

We unpack:

Why the “who” question that adtech has obsessed over for 30 years is officially useless

How Inuvo’s AI can sniff out a sleepless dog owner in Iceland… and sell them Bose Sleepbuds

Why retargeting is the AOL CD of marketing

How the open web has become a junkyard of skipped impressions—simply because they lack a cookie

And why most adtech vendors know they’re selling snake oil but keep doing it anyway

Richard also drops wisdom on mergers and acquisitions, why integration fails most of the time, how AI projects are like building bridges, and yes—his inability to remember garbage day. Spoiler: his biggest rival in life might be the trash bin.

Oh, and if you’re wondering how Karen Carpenter, Metallica, and short-nosed pugs all fit into the same episode… you’ll want to listen.

Big thanks to our sponsors:

💼 Troutman Amin LLP – The lawyers who actually understand this industry and aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty.

📊 Incremental.com – The measurement company that’s finally putting a stake in the heart of vanity metrics. If you're tired of dashboards that lie to you, they’re the ones who’ll show you what’s actually working.

This is adtech without the nonsense. Just sharp insights, broken myths, and a whole lot of pug snoring.

🧠 Watch now.

💣 Rethink everything.

🎧 And stay bold, stay curious, and know more than you did yesterday.

What happens when you combine military-grade leadership, agency scars, a refusal to hire “ninjas,” and an unwavering belief that trust matters more than targeting? You get Adam Potashnick, North American CEO of Brainlabs—and possibly the only person in advertising who can talk about team culture, AI, and client relationships without sounding like a TED Talk on autopilot.

In this episode of The ADOTAT Show, I sit down with Adam to unpack:

Why building the right team means skipping the “rockstars” and hiring the socially gifted humans who actually collaborate

How AI still isn’t smart enough to stop stalking you with weird banner ads

What real partnerships look like (hint: they survive the hard conversations)

And why celebrating the wins—big or small—isn’t just for Yankees fans

We also take a wild detour into personal branding, the myth of measurement, desert island survival squads, and the absolute lie that everything in ad tech is optimized and working perfectly (spoiler: it’s not).

🎯 This isn’t just another leadership interview—it’s a masterclass in not losing your soul while navigating Slack purgatory, client fire drills, and the endlessly shifting buzzword bingo of modern marketing.

🙏 Huge thanks to Troutman Amin LLP, our sponsor and legal sherpa through this industry’s absurdity—especially Eric J. Troutman, partner, who fights the good fight and still has time to watch this show (probably while reviewing 300-page contracts).

👇 Smash that play button. Then like, comment, subscribe, and go re-evaluate your hiring strategy.

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Welcome to another brutally honest episode of The ADOTAT Show, where we rip the vanity metrics out of your cold, dead dashboards and ask the uncomfortable question: does your marketing actually do anything?

This time, Rabbi Pesach Lattin sits down with Bradley Keefer, the CRO of Keen Decision Systems and the man currently babysitting over $7.5 billion in marketing budgets—all while casually setting fire to industry sacred cows like ROAS, brand love, and that PowerPoint deck your agency spent three weeks justifying.

In this episode, we talk about:

Why ROAS is the participation trophy of marketing

How most CMOs have the lifespan of a forgotten yogurt in the breakroom fridge

What “headless MarTech” actually means (and why your agency’s tech stack is probably a crime scene)

How AI agents are already making media plans better than your team—and don’t need sleep, snacks, or Slack

And the impending death of Frankenstein’d holding companies held together by duct tape, panic, and legacy contracts

Keefer doesn’t pull punches. He explains why Net Present Value (NPV) is the only metric CFOs trust, why AI forecasting will soon replace your “gut instincts,” and how indie agencies with five people and an API are beating global networks with 5,000. Also, someone says “six-fingered avatar” and we mean that literally.

🔥 Brought to you with support from our chaos-sponsoring heroes at Troutman Amin, and the attribution truth-tellers over at Incremental—who will tell you if your media spend is working, even if it hurts your feelings.

👇 Hit subscribe if you like brutal honesty, data-driven heresy, and guests who don’t sound like they were media-trained into a coma.

Stay bold. Stay curious. And know more than you did yesterday.

#AdTech #MarketingTruths #BradleyKeefer #KeenDS #CMODoomsday #ROASSucks #HeadlessMarTech #ADOTATShow #MediaPlanning #Incremental #TroutmanAmin #MarketingMetrics #AIinMarketing #pesachlattin

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