The Digital Voice™
42 episodes listed below
Adtech shop talk with working-floor memory.
Legends of Adtech Podcast is an interview series about the people building, selling, fixing, and questioning digital advertising. Julia Linehan steers practical conversations on retail media, programmatic, AI, publishing, data, recruitment, and workplace wellbeing.
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Legends of Adtech Podcast is an interview-led show about the people inside digital advertising rather than a neat explainer of the category from the outside. It moves quickly. Julia Linehan sets up the industry context, gives the guest room to tell the story, then pulls the thread toward the practical lesson: what changed, what broke, what worked, and what the industry still gets wrong. The show is comfortable with adtech language, but it usually translates the acronym-heavy parts back into plain speech. That makes it useful for insiders and accessible to people near the industry. Recent episodes show its range. Camilla Ray talks retail media through the lens of customers, categories, brands, Sainsbury's, Argos, and Nectar360's planning work. Rob Webster connects early programmatic culture, candid commentary, and the current AI wave. Paul Hood brings publishing, transformation, AI education, and the human limits of automation into the frame. Leila Seith-Hassan's episode centers data, ethical AI, diversity in STEM, and the responsibility attached to measurement. Annabelle Dudman represents the operational side of adtech, where process, commercial excellence, and global teams matter as much as the pitch deck. James Macdonald's conversation focuses on partnership, programmatic platforms, and the gap Limelight Inc. saw in the market. Jon Walsh brings recruitment, community, LinkedIn Jobs frustrations, and AI screening into the discussion. A workplace-culture strand appears in Off Record, On Point, with Ferne McCann talking resilience, imposter syndrome, self-care, and wellbeing tech. The show works best when guests are direct. It has polish, but it leaves enough looseness for anecdotes, corrections, jokes, and strong opinions. For PlayNext, it sits in the zone between industry oral history and practical adtech shop talk.
Made for: Designed for adtech professionals, media sellers, agency teams, publishers, marketers, founders, recruiters, and workplace-culture observers who want practical industry context from operators. It also fits curious listeners trying to understand how retail media, AI, data, programmatic, and hiring actually work behind the labels.
What sets it apart: The show’s edge is its mix of insider fluency and conversational translation: guests can speak in industry shorthand, but the interview keeps pulling the point back to people, process, customers, and consequences. It feels closer to an experienced industry roundtable than a polished vendor briefing.
Adtech moves fast. Yesterday’s innovation is today’s warm-up act. Welcome to Legends of Adtech, created in conjunction with The Digital Voice™ and Adtech Juice: the podcast where we go beyond the buzzwords and straight to the people at the coalface of the adtech industry. Every two weeks, we sit down with the industry’s boldest thinkers, pioneers, and disruptors, to find out how they’re rewriting the game. This is their story. The Legends of Adtech podcast is where the industry's biggest voices spill their secrets. Each season, we're turning the spotlight on the biggest names, trailblazers and innovators...
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Career interviews turn ad tech's platforms, customer questions and hiring systems into practical accounts of how the industry operates.
Legends of Adtech Podcast follows industry careers until they turn into explanations of how digital advertising actually works. Julia Linehan leads one-on-one conversations that move from a guest's professional history to the commercial and technical problems they have tried to…
A retail-media brief has three bosses; Julia Linehan gives you reason to question 'customer first'.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Retail media is framed as a practical planning problem, with customer obsession kept at the center.
Retail media is presented as a working problem rather than a slogan. Julia Linehan frames the question around what customer first means in practice, then brings in Camilla Ray, Planning Director at Nectar360, whose 15 years in retail media and 22-person strategic planning team…
Rob Webster traces ad tech from early programmatic to AI.
Rob Webster anchors this Legends of Ad Tech conversation, with Julia Linehan steering him from the early programmatic era toward the industrys AI future.
A practical discussion of publishing, AI, and where automation still falls short.
Paul Hood's conversation sits squarely between publishing and ad tech, with a guest presented as an independent digital transformation consultant who has spent more than two decades driving innovation and revenue growth in UK publishing.
A grounded ad tech story about partnership, practical scale, and keeping the human layer in view.
James McDonald's conversation with Julia Linehan traces an ad tech career that moves from Fleet Street to early mobile work at Unanimous, then O2, Adphonic, and Limelight. The through line is partnership.
A clear look at adtech hiring and the tools that make it harder.
The discussion follows adtech hiring and connection work, tracing how jobsinadtech.com grew out of a gap in the market and why recruiters can be costly for both companies and candidates.
Workplace learning with the human layer left in.
Blunt comfort for messy relationships.
Chris Pettit, CEO and co-founder of Revving, tells host Julia Linahan that 'paid on paper' (invoices and IOs visible but unpaid for months) has worsened as adtech supply chains add layers and brands extend terms to 120 days or more.
Julia Linehan opens on retail media and the question of who really owns the customer.
Julia Linehan sits down with Rob Webster, founder and CEO at Tao Marketing Solutions, and the conversation moves from the early days of programmatic to the current AI conversation.
Julia Linehan sits down with Paul Hood for a conversation about publishing, digital change, and AI.
This episode features an interview with Leila Syth-Hassan, Chief Data Officer at Digitas UK, discussing her career journey, expertise in transforming data into impactful narratives, and advocacy for ethical AI and diversity in STEM within the adtech industry.
This episode features an interview with Annabelle Dudman, SVP of Commercial Excellence at Adform, discussing her career journey from finance to ad tech operations and how she transforms organizations through process and people.
Julia Linehan sits down with James McDonald for a brisk, inside-baseball conversation about ad tech, leadership, and why partnership still matters.
Julia Linehan opens with an introduction and pushes Jon Walsh to compress 24 years into a sharp career sketch.
This episode features an interview with Ferne McCann, co-founder of mental health tech startup Shoorah, discussing topics like burnout, resilience, imposter syndrome, and self-care in the context of workplace culture.
This episode features an interview with Katie Street, founder of Street Agency, discussing female empowerment, inclusion, and challenges women face in business ahead of International Women's Day 2024.
This episode explores the sustainability challenges in the digital industry, focusing on internet emissions, online advertising's environmental impact, and how companies can shift from viewing sustainability as cost mitigation to value creation.
This episode explores how toxic workplaces impact mental health and how mentoring programs can help heal and prevent toxicity in organizations.
This episode discusses workplace equality, diversity, and inclusion, examining both positive statistics and concerning issues like gender disparities and LGBTQ+ experiences.