Episode Details

Thrad started as a university dissertation that asked a simple question: what if ChatGPT had ads? Today it calls itself the world’s first SSP for large language models, and CEO and co-founder Andrea Tortella is building the plumbing for paid ads inside AI conversations. He also put his own face in ChatGPT’s ad slot, and it beat the logos.

In this episode:

• Why 2025 was the year of GEO and AEO, and 2026 is the year paid ads entered LLMs
• AI walled gardens vs. the AI open web, and how ads can pay for the tokens
• Is Thrad to AI what AppNexus was to programmatic?
• The first mover disadvantage: why AI developers were scared to run ads, and what changed when OpenAI did
• Claude, the Super Bowl ad, and why Andrea thinks Anthropic’s no-ads promise is a math problem
• Trust from day one: separate, clearly labeled, additive ads
• Why contextual ads in AI can be more private than cookies ever were
• User journey compression: the whole funnel in one chat window
• Where the brightest graduates went, and why advertising needs them back
• Brian O’Kelley, a Thrad cap, and AdCP’s Sponsored Intelligence protocol
• Why “ads to agents” isn’t advertising
• A desert island with his wife, his co-founder, his parents and his best friend

Andrea Tortella is CEO and co-founder of Thrad. Find him on LinkedIn.

Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XA4w3Q4Lu4

The ADOTAT Show is the ad tech interview show for people who read the footnotes. New episodes Mondays. Subscribe to ADOTAT for the reporting behind the conversation: adotat.com

Presented by Troutman Amin LLP. In partnership with Incremental.