Justin Pearse | Thirty Years Covering Ad Tech, Attention Metrics, The Open Web, And Why The Industry Never Actually Dies | ADOTAT Show Season 8

Justin Pearse, editor of New Digital Age and co-founder of BlueStrike Group, joins Pesach Lattin on the ADOTAT Show for a conversation spanning thirty years of digital advertising history, the rise and fall of attention metrics, the future of trade media, the BlueStrike model of owning both a PR agency and a trade publication simultaneously, and why the advertising industry has survived every near death experience thrown at it and will probably survive the next one too.

Justin started as a journalist covering the dot com boom, watched programmatic advertising get built from scratch, covered every major wave of digital media from search to social to CTV to retail media, and co-founded BlueStrike Group and New Digital Age to cover the industry differently than anyone had before. He brings a thirty year perspective that very few people in advertising actually have and even fewer are willing to share this honestly.

In this episode we cover:

1. Why the advertising industry keeps surviving everything that should kill it
2. The AI panic in advertising: why it already peaked and what that tells us about how the industry processes fear
3. The resilience paradox: is the industry genuinely resilient or just world class at kicking the can down the road
4. Attention metrics: why they emerged, why they are already going off the boil, and what is replacing them
5. Why outcomes measurement is the next frontier and why most of the industry is still grading its own homework
6. Retail media as the closest thing to honest attribution the industry has ever produced
7. The wave theory of innovation: why the best ideas fail not because they are wrong but because the timing is off
8. The BlueStrike model: owning a PR agency and a trade publication simultaneously and why radical transparency makes it work
9. Why people who have actually worked in the industry write better about it than journalists who have not
10. The decimation of trade press and the unexpected renaissance happening right now
11. Bruce Daisley, love your work, and what building teams around people actually looks like in practice
12. Why the dot com era was the greatest entrepreneurial moment in history and what it felt like to cover it from the press side
13. What thirty years of chronicling the industry actually teaches you about where it is going next
14. Why the average CMO in 2026 is fundamentally different from the average CMO ten years ago
15. The black box era of programmatic: why it ended not because the industry fixed it but because clients got educated enough to demand better
16. What younger Justin should have done earlier and what he would tell anyone starting out in the industry today
17. The legacy question: what does it mean to actually push an industry forward

Whether you work in programmatic advertising, digital media, ad tech, trade publishing, attention metrics, retail media, marketing technology, media buying, brand strategy, or content marketing, this conversation will give you a perspective on where the industry came from and where it is actually going that you will not find in a conference keynote or a vendor white paper.

CHAPTERS: 00:00 Introduction 02:00 Why the industry never actually dies 06:00 The AI panic and what it tells us 10:00 The resilience paradox: survivor or can kicker 15:00 Attention metrics: rise, peak, and what comes next 21:00 Outcomes measurement and grading your own homework 27:00 Retail media and honest attribution 32:00 The BlueStrike model explained 38:00 Owning a PR agency and a publication simultaneously 43:00 The trade press decimation and renaissance 48:00 Bruce Daisley and building teams around people 53:00 Thirty years of dot com to now 58:00 What younger Justin should have done earlier 62:00 The legacy question

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