From Legos to Launch: Kevel's Commerce Media Playbook

From Legos to Launch: Kevel's Commerce Media Playbook

James Avery, founder and CEO of Kevel, joins Corey and Joe  to explore how commerce media has matured from a retailers-only conversation into a category that spans travel, fintech, and beyond. James breaks down Kevel's API-first infrastructure approach, the four Ps of building a world-class retail media network, and why offline attribution is quietly one of the biggest unlocks in the space. He also reflects on his experience testifying in the DOJ's antitrust case against Google — and why he found the whole thing fun.

MMM, Unplugged

Marketing measurement has long been treated as a planning exercise — but LiftLab's John Wallace is changing that. Corey and Joe sit down with the Founder & CEO to dig into why incrementality is the only measurement that matters, how the Skims TikTok experiment led to a 3x spend increase, and why most MMM outputs are blind to what's actually happening on your campaigns day to day. John also breaks down PlatformSense — LiftLab's new product that injects real-time platform signals into an incrementality foundation — and makes the case for why the best marketers treat BAU as the enemy.

Complexity Is the Point

What does it take to build a performance marketing platform for enterprise brands — and why would you choose that path when everyone else is running the other direction? Corey and Joe sit down with Marco Matos, Founder & CEO of Adora and winner of the Aperiam and Growth by Science sponsored Brand Challenge at POSSIBLE 2026, to find out. Marco shares how his time at Pinterest, Microsoft, Google, and Thunder shaped his conviction that large brands have the most low-hanging fruit — and why complexity is a feature, not a bug. The conversation covers full-funnel content scaling, the "Iron Man suit" philosophy for AI in marketing, creative-to-media execution in one platform, and where personalization is headed as the give-and-take between brands and consumers evolves.

The Financialization of Media

The media market is broken — and it's broken by design. In this episode, Corey and Joe sit down with Marc Guldimann, co-founder and CEO of Adelaide, to unpack why digital advertising operates like a classic "lemon market," where buyers can't assess quality so sellers have no incentive to provide it. Marc explains Adelaide's AU metric — a placement-level quality score built on attention research and outcome validation — and how it's beginning to function as a genuine market currency, moving from the buy side to the sell side much like credit ratings did in financial markets. The conversation goes deep on the financialization of media: forward contracts, securitization, and why a CMO who can't answer "what will it cost to reach my audience in six months?" is structurally disadvantaged compared to every other executive in the boardroom.

The Index Cloud with Andrew Casale

Andrew Casale, founder and CEO of Index Exchange, joins Corey and Joe to discuss the launch of Index Cloud — a new infrastructure paradigm that allows DSPs and ad tech companies to run bidders, custom algorithms, and data models directly on Index's edge infrastructure. Andrew explains how containerized bidding eliminates the massive cost of internet egress (up to 80% of a DSP's cloud bill), dramatically compresses latency, and opens up time for smarter, feature-rich AI models that could finally let the open internet compete with the walled garden giants. The conversation covers the implications for CTV and live sports advertising, the early partnership with Bedrock Platform and Chalice, the vision for GPU inference at the edge enabling real-time contextual creative, and why Andrew believes the open internet — if it can collaborate as one — is on the verge of a dramatic competitive rebound.