Pesach Lattin

I've been elbow-deep in probabilistic marketing research, and I hit one of those thoughts so obvious I assumed everyone already knew it. Then Scott McKinley, the CEO of Truthset, sat me down and walked me through how this stuff actually works, hop by hop, and I stopped assuming anybody knew anything. We are not naming the bad guys today. Not because we're being polite, but because there are too many of them to name in one column, and picking one lets the other forty off the hook.

There's one ghost haunting every story in this issue, and it's not the one doing your dishes. AI has quietly become the general contractor of the entire ad business, whether the industry signed off on the renovation or not. TIME finally cleaned out its digital junk drawer because AI refused to eat garbage.

Free to read. Because the bad news should always be free. Here is the sentence nobody wants to say out loud at the next IAB happy hour, somewhere between the branded cocktail napkins and the panel titled "Trust and Transparency in the AI Era": The has slop won. Not "is winning." Not "poses an emerging challenge for supply-side stakeholders." Won. Past tense.