10 Communications Lessons from the Adtech God Pod
I went on the AdTech God Pod this week to discuss the state of modern media and what it means for adtech communications.
Here’s whatever wisdom we mustered broken down into 10 best practices.
1. Practice executive evangelism
Speak directly to your audience.
Leverage podcasts, newsletters, and social content. They’re the primary way ideas spread. If you’re relying entirely on press coverage, events, or intermediaries to tell your story, you’re ceding control of the message and timing.
Don’t rely on third-party gatekeepers to tell your story. The most important shift in modern communications is that you don’t need permission to build an audience anymore, so don’t ask for it.
2. Have one big idea
You need a single, clear narrative about what’s wrong with the status quo and how you’re changing it. Once you have that, repeat it over and over.
This is how you build associations and become the company for something. If you change your message every week, the market has nothing to hold on to.
Most companies get bored of their own message too easily. Give people something to remember, and keep reinforcing it until they do.
3. Teach your audience
The best content is educational.
Most companies default to talking about themselves (their product, roadmap, features, etc.). But buyers need help understanding how their world is changing and how you can help them navigate it.
If you’re a DSP, sell your product, but first help buyers understand their audience, measurement, and performance dynamics. In other words, help your audience understand how the world works and share what you’re learning.
When you consistently help people think more clearly about their job, you become a source of truth, and that’s what earns attention and trust.
4. Start with social
Social is the easiest way to start building your presence.
You don’t need to build an audience from scratch because the conversations you want to enter already exist. You can simply plug into them with your unique take.
Commenting is underrated. Find people who already have the audience you want, engage with their ideas, and contribute something that moves the conversation forward.
Simply participate and you’ll build visibility early.
5. Get personal
People like people.
You don’t need to turn your feed into a diary, but showing some personality goes a long way. Let some of your thinking, decisions, and experiences shine through your posts.
What shaped your perspective? What have you changed your mind about? What are you seeing that others might not be paying attention to? If the answers intersect with your business, even better.
When your content reflects how you actually think, it becomes more relatable and more memorable.
6. Use the four content buckets
If you don’t know what to post, it’s usually because you don’t have a framework.
Most effective social content falls into four buckets:
Thought leadership / industry commentary
Building in public (your entrepreneurial or management journey)
Case studies (proof that it works)
Data and trends
When you rotate through these, you create both variety and coherence. Instead of guessing what to post, you’re working within a system.
And over time, that system compounds into a body of work that reinforces your narrative from multiple angles.
7. Get everyone involved
Evangelism benefits the entire company.
The CEO is the chief evangelist, but it shouldn’t stop there. Your leadership team sees the market from one angle, while your operators are closer to the product and customer. At the same time, your sales team hears objections and feedback every day. Each team has their own stories and insights that all add valuable perspective.
When multiple voices across the company are reinforcing the same core narrative, it becomes much more durable. The more voices you have reinforcing the narrative, the stronger it becomes.
8. If you’re undifferentiated, communication matters more
This is especially true for service businesses and holdcos.
If your core offering looks similar to competitors, differentiation comes from being more present, thoughtful, and consistent in-market.
Jay Friedman, formerly of Goodway Group, and Lauren Wetzel of WPP are good examples of agency evangelists.
9. Use AI to scale execution
AI should make you faster, not replace you.
The thinking still has to come from you, but use AI to turn that thinking into content more efficiently.
Give it your take on a news story, let it draft a post, then edit it so it actually sounds like you.
The leverage comes from combining your ideas with AI’s speed.
10. Engage with the topics people care about
If you want attention, you have to engage with the conversations the industry is already having.
In adtech right now, that means:
CTV
AI
Performance
Commerce
You don’t need to cover all of them equally. But you probably need to engage with at least one or two if you want to be part of the broader discussion. If your content lives completely outside the conversations people are already having, it’s much harder for it to get pulled into them.
The throughline is simple: own a topic, show up consistently, and speak directly to your audience.
If you do that long enough, it starts to feel to the market like you’re everywhere. And in adtech, where buyers take months to make decisions, that presence makes all the difference.
