Is Anything Real In Paid Advertising?

Hey. I'm Adam w Barney, and welcome to Is Anything Real in Paid Advertising. This show was born out of a mix of love, skepticism, and about a $100,000,000 in ad spend. Because here's the truth. I've worked inside global ad agencies.

I've run campaigns for Fortune one hundreds and scrappy startups. I've built landing pages, scaled budgets, hired the teams, but the irony, I've only clicked on a paid ad maybe five times in my life. So, yeah, there's something a little wild about spending that much money on platforms I barely use myself, And that's exactly why this podcast exists. We're in the middle of a strange evolution in marketing. AI is rewriting the playbook.

Budgets are tightening. Funnels are weirder. Creative is being spit out by robots, and half the dashboards we use, total hallucinations. This isn't just a podcast about what's working, it's about what doesn't. Where we've wasted money, where agencies get it wrong, and where the big promises fell flat on their pixelated faces.

But it's also about the people, the ones doing the weird work, the real tests, and the under the radar experiments. It's the voices that don't make the stage at the big events, but who are actually innovating in the background. Each week, I'll sit down with a guest for sharp, no BS ten to twenty minute chat. No fluff, no five minute bios, just a real dive into how they're thinking, testing, and scaling. We'll talk about performance, storytelling, growth pressure, and all the messy stuff under the hood of it.

And this is not a one way feed. I want this to be a conversation with you. If you're in the trenches, whether it's running an agency, building your brand, or scaling your voice, DM me, comment, share your take. I wanna hear the ones doing it in real time around the world. We're going to ask better questions.

We're going to challenge assumptions, and we're going to laugh at some of the stuff that definitely isn't real. So tune in. The guest episode drops soon. Let's get into it. Is anything real in paid advertising?

Probably not, but let's plug in and find out.