Ep 34. The Frankenstack Is Killing Your Marketing — and AI Native Is the Only Way Out, with Marco Matos, Adora

Salesforce just gave the "Force" suffix to another brand for the first time in its history — and the stock jumped 25%. ChatGPT ads are getting roasted on LinkedIn for underperforming. The Trade Desk launched Kokai Zuma, their most AI-forward interface yet. And Google quietly embedded its most powerful image generation model directly into Workspace. A busy couple of weeks. This week, Shiv sits down solo with Marco Matos — CEO and co-founder of Adora, and a 20-year veteran of building ad tech products inside the walled gardens — for a conversation that moves fast, disagrees productively, and lands on some of the sharpest takes of the season. Marco breaks down why the Salesforce/Anthropic partnership is less about Claude and more about a deliberate business model pivot — from seat-based pricing to token-based consumption — and why Benioff pulling that off at Salesforce's scale is one of the hardest things any tech CEO has done in years. He also makes the case that the "ChatGPT ads are underperforming" narrative is based on statistically meaningless data and a measurement infrastructure that doesn't exist yet — and that last-click attribution being anyone's source of truth in 2026 should be a fireable offense. They also get into why the agentic buying conversation is missing the point — the real unlock isn't using a platform's agentic workflow, it's having your own agent talk to theirs — why the ad tech industry keeps forgetting about creative while optimizing everything around it, and why every marketer building a Frankenstack of point solutions is setting themselves up to lose to whoever builds the end-to-end system first. 📣 A few announcements : U of Digital is partnering with the ANA to bring AI education to over 20,000 brands and 50,000 marketers. More details coming soon at uof.digital and on social. The AI Accelerator starts September 22nd — almost sold out. Get your ticket now! https://uof.digital/ai/accelerator/ And U of Digital will be at Ad Week — throwing a House Party with Unplugged Collective for marketers in media, ad tech, and MarTech on October 7th. Send a DM if you want an invite or register here: https://luma.com/thehouseparty-awny-2026 New episodes every two weeks. Get your AI Edge here.