On this episode of The ADOTAT Show, Pesach Lattin sits down with Shawn Jensen, Founder and CEO of Profila, the Swiss startup that's spent eight years building what they call zero-knowledge advertising, a privacy-first AdTech architecture where consumer data never leaves the device. Jensen doesn't pull punches. He calls CPM a vanity metric, says the $700 billion digital ad industry forgot to ask the customer what they want, and argues that the entire surveillance-based targeting model built since 2005 is a $50 billion-a-year fraud problem dressed up as innovation. We get into declared intent vs inferred intent, why GDPR and the EU AI Act are closing the walls on programmatic, and what Jensen thinks AdTech looks like in 2036 if he wins. This is the conversation the AdTech industry has been avoiding for a decade. Now it's on the record. 🎯 WHAT WE COVER: 00:00 Cold open: meet the Swiss founder who thinks AdTech is dumb 01:43 What is zero-knowledge advertising, explained for CMOs 03:18 Declared intent vs inferred intent: lead indicator vs lagging indicator 03:47 ACE: the Agentic Intent Classification Engine, explained 05:24 OpenRTB integration and why Profila isn't a rip-and-replace 06:16 The 100% engagement North Star vs the 0.1% industry average 07:34 Are consumers really capable of managing their own data? 09:00 Why we'll laugh at the social and search era in a decade 10:32 The EU's landmark RTB ruling and why it opens the door 11:57 The vanity metrics hit list: CPM, ROAS, and the eyeball economy 13:11 Eight years from concept: pre-revenue, near-death, and persistence 14:24 Meeting a Belgian privacy lawyer at CERN, the origin story 15:22 Why Profila took the academic research route instead of Sand Hill Road 16:48 The year Jensen sold his house, his pension, and his anniversary watch 18:00 Desert island: family, Bear Grylls, and Ricky Gervais 20:08 Wine, mortality, and how a winemaker reframed Jensen's career 22:16 The apartheid-to-AdTech through-line and why surveillance smells familiar 24:23 Skeuomorphism: the design principle behind Profila's transition strategy 27:09 Jensen's 2036 vision: Google as a quantum supercomputer, no longer in ads 28:35 The one sentence Jensen wants the audience to walk away with 📚 READ THE FULL THREE-PART WRITTEN SERIES ON ADOTAT: Part 1 (free): The Swiss Heretic Who Thinks Your $400 Billion Targeting Stack Is a Stupid Tax Part 2 (ADOTAT+): Shawn Jensen, Unfiltered: The Eight-Year Bet That Could Burn Down Programmatic Part 3 (free): Profila by the Numbers, the receipts, the verified data, the gaps 👉 Subscribe to ADOTAT+ for the full written series, transcripts, and the next interrogation: adotat.com 🔔 SUBSCRIBE TO THE ADOTAT SHOW for more interrogations of the AdTech, MarTech, and digital advertising industry. New episodes weekly with the founders, CMOs, and operators actually moving the industry, not just talking about it. 🎙️ ABOUT THE ADOTAT SHOW: Hosted by Pesach Lattin, the industry's most irreverent voice in advertising and AdTech. Twenty-five years of digital marketing experience. Zero tolerance for fluff. The show where executives get grilled, hype gets cut, and marketers are forced to rethink their playbook. 🌐 CONNECT WITH ADOTAT: Website: adotat.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/pesach-lattin Newsletter: 30,000+ agency, AdTech, and marketing executives read ADOTAT daily 🌐 CONNECT WITH SHAWN JENSEN & PROFILA: Profila: profila.com LinkedIn: Shawn Jensen, CEO at Profila 🔑 KEYWORDS / TOPICS: AdTech, advertising technology, programmatic advertising, zero-knowledge advertising, declared intent, inferred intent, privacy-first advertising, consent-first advertising, zero-party data, first-party data, GDPR, ePrivacy, EU AI Act, RTB, real-time bidding, OpenRTB, IAB Europe TCF, Belgian DPA, cookie deprecation, Privacy Sandbox, identity resolution, identity graph, ad fraud, WFA Compendium, Mikko Kotila, ANA PwC programmatic transparency, CPM, ROAS, LTV, lifetime value, surveillance advertising, behavioral targeting, contextual targeting, Profila, Shawn Jensen, Pesach Lattin, ADOTAT, ADOTAT Show, AdTech podcast, marketing podcast, CMO podcast, digital advertising future, AI in advertising, agentic AI, intent classification, Brave, Basic Attention Token, DuckDuckGo, clean rooms, multi-party computation, MPC, Switzerland startup, CERN, privacy tech, the death of cookies, the future of advertising #AdTech #Advertising #Programmatic #Privacy #ZeroKnowledge #GDPR #DigitalMarketing #MarketingPodcast #AdTechPodcast #ADOTAT #Profila #PesachLattin #ShawnJensen #DeclaredIntent #DataPrivacy #FutureOfAdvertising #AdFraud #CMO #MarTech #PrivacyFirst #ConsentFirst #SurveillanceCapitalism #CookieDeprecation #AIAct #EURegulation #RTB #OpenRTB #IdentityResolution #FirstPartyData #ZeroPartyData