Rob Janes Told A Room Full Of Ad Tech People That Programmatic Should Die. He Was Not Wrong.

Rob Janes is VP of Revenue at Ad Butler. He sells ad serving technology for a living. He also thinks the open auction was one of the worst things that ever happened to publishers, that Google had everyone locked in a dependency they could not escape, and that the entire programmatic ecosystem exists, at least in part, to make itself necessary.

He said most of this out loud. On a stage. In 2019. To a room full of people whose livelihoods depended on programmatic advertising.

But here is the thing about Rob Janes that makes this conversation different from every other "programmatic is broken" take you have heard at a conference or read in a trade publication. Before he ever touched an ad server, he was a paramedic in northern Canada for seven years. Ground ambulance. Emergency rooms. Mass casualty incidents at remote airfields. And a PTSD diagnosis that ended that career and quietly shaped everything that came after.

He sees this industry differently than most people in it. Not because he is smarter. But because he has a baseline for what actually matters that most of us never had to develop.

In this episode we get into the real state of programmatic in 2025, what the DOJ ruling against Google actually means and whether anything genuinely changes, the retail media explosion and why your dentist might have an ad network by 2028, what AdCP was supposed to be before Pre-Bid got involved, and why the Trade Desk might just be the next Google whether it wants to be or not.

And then we get into the paramedic years. Because that is where the real story is.

Thank you to our sponsors, Troutman Amin LLP and Incremental.com, who make this show possible every single week.

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

ADOTAT is hosted by Pesach Lattin and publishes weekly. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts so you never miss an episode.