Tyler Kelly on Surviving AdTech Chaos, Building Basis as the OS of Media

Marketing, Media & Adtech

What happens when you sit down with one of adtech’s longest-running insiders, who helped turn a four-person startup into a $2 billion global media infrastructure—and he actually tells the truth?

Welcome to this episode of The ADOTAT Show, where host Pesach Lattin talks with Tyler Kelly, President of Basis Technologies, about what it really takes to scale, lead, and stay sane in an industry obsessed with shiny objects and meaningless metrics.

Tyler’s been in the trenches since before most DSPs had names, let alone logos. He’s not just steering the ship—he helped build the shipyard. And in this brutally honest, refreshingly irreverent conversation, he breaks down everything from adtech burnout to the future of automation, why AI is mostly smoke and mirrors, and how Basis plans to become the global operating system for media.

In this episode, we cover:

💡 The Moonshot Vision:

Why Basis isn’t aiming to be “just another DSP”—but the foundation layer every marketer builds on. Search, social, CTV, linear, and beyond.

⚙️ Automation Without the Bull:

How Basis has quietly automated the ad tech grunt work for years, and why most so-called “AI solutions” are just ChatGPT in a trench coat.

📉 Why Click-Through Rates Deserve to Die:

Spoiler: they're useless, misleading, and possibly the biggest placebo in modern media metrics.

📦 The Myth of the All-Knowing Signal:

Tyler lays out why cross-device tracking is still mostly fiction, and why many marketers are building castles on quicksand.

🏢 How to Keep 1,000 Employees From Burning Out:

From small clients that drain your team to the structure that actually keeps people at Basis for 15+ years.

🏕️ Desert Island Scenarios, Fleece Vests, and Tribal Council Votes:

Yes, we also talk about which media roles get voted off first in the great agency survival game.

Plus, we ask the real question behind all the dashboards and dashboards-for-dashboards:

What are we even optimizing anymore—if half the signals are broken and the other half are lies?

🧠 Whether you're a media buyer tired of dancing around buzzwords, a strategist trying to sort substance from vaporware, or just wondering how anyone stays grounded in this industry—this episode has the sharp insights and sarcasm you didn’t know you needed.

🎯 Featured Guest:

Tyler Kelly, President, Basis Technologies

— adtech veteran, culture-builder, automation realist, and scrappy operator still thinking like employee #4.

🙌 Special thanks to our sponsors:

🛡️ Troutman Amin LLP – Legal firepower with an adtech IQ.

📊 Incremental.com – Turning retail media from guesswork to growth engine.

🔔 Like, comment, and subscribe for more brutally honest takes from inside the media machine. This is The ADOTAT Show—where the BS stays in the press release, and the signal finally cuts through the noise.

Stay Bold. Stay Curious. And Know More Than You Did Yesterday.

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