The man who invented programmatic says the industry that runs on it cannot think.

Randall Rothenberg ran the IAB for 13 years. He wrote the book on advertising. He described programmatic in a 2001 Ad Age column and got exactly zero responses. Now he says the technology side of this business has almost no creative thinkers in it, that performance marketing is the latest in a century-long parade of unfalsifiable nonsense, and that the AI machine about to reorganize your entire company got explained to him by a piece of guitar software.

He is not bitter. He is not retiring. He is building the next thing and telling you what it costs.

What's in this one:

Why he calls ad tech people "transactionists" and means it as a diagnosis

The CES line about AI turning us into a choir of identical consultants using the same prompts

CRAIFT vs CRAIP, and why the parentheses are unnecessary

The two Cannes festivals happening on the same beach, and which one you've been attending

Rosser Reeves, Ogilvy, Bernbach, Hopkins, Watson, Dichter, and why Rothenberg calls the intellectual history of advertising one bullshit theory after another

Where performance marketing sits in that lineage (spoiler: at the end of it)

MAMA, the white paper with John Frelinghuysen, and the guitar dongle that produced it

Why the Publicis, WPP Open and Horizon Blue announcements are lagging indicators, not news

AdCP vs ARTF, and his claim that the intelligence layer doesn't need standards at all because LLMs normalize data natively

Whether advising the agentic effort makes him a traitor to the IAB (his answer is not what you expect)

The 400 creatives in Brooklyn who blew up his own working hypothesis

His one sentence for every CEO who hasn't called him yet.

Thanks to Troutman Amin LLP for the sponsorship.