WILDLY INCONVENIENT: Brian O’Kelley on AI, Ad Tech, and Burning Brand Safety to the Ground

Marketing, Media & Adtech

🎙️ The ADOTAT Show – Hosted by Pesach Lattin

Welcome to the episode that brand safety tools wish never existed.

In this chaotic, hilarious, and dangerously insightful installment of The ADOTAT Show, host Pesach Lattin sits down with Brian O’Kelley — the legendary co-founder of AppNexus, the original architect of modern programmatic, and the only person alive who has both crashed CNN.com and reimagined how we think about suitability, AI, and the ad tech status quo.

Together, they unpack the uncomfortable truths of digital advertising, including:

🔥 Why traditional brand safety tools are medieval nonsense

🧠 How AI can actually understand context (and why that terrifies some vendors)

👀 What happens when bots unionize and demand PTO

📉 Why most point solutions in ad tech are either obsolete or about to be

🧩 How Brian’s building toward a world where every brand has its own AI agent

😱 And yes, the time he crashed a fifth of the internet from a basketball court

This is NOT a sanitized fireside chat. This is a full-blown tech therapy session meets startup roast meets future-of-advertising manifesto, where nothing is off limits and no acronym is safe.

💡 Sponsored By:

Troutman Amin – The legal team you call when you accidentally disrupt an entire industry. Smart, surgical, and ready to keep you compliant without killing your momentum.

Incremental – The measurement platform that tells the truth, not just what your media buyer wants to hear. Real lift, real outcomes, no smoke, no mirrors.

📌 Subscribe to stay ahead of the industry curve.

📢 Drop a comment if you’ve ever been flagged as unsafe by a keyword blocklist for saying “funeral.”

👁️‍🗨️ Stay bold. Stay curious. Know more than you did yesterday.

#ADOTATShow #BrianOKelley #AdTech #AI #ProgrammaticAdvertising #BrandSafety #Suitability #Incremental #TroutmanAmin #AdvertisingInnovation #Scope3 #PesachLattin