Dave Madden is the rare executive who doesn’t just have stories. He has receipts. In this episode of The ADOTAT Show, we walk straight into the eye of modern gaming, advertising, cloud chaos, and one of the wildest brand partnerships ever attempted. It’s a full tour of an industry desperately trying to innovate while tripping over its own jargon.

Dave takes us all the way back to his WildTangent years, where rewarded ads were born long before today’s pitch decks pretended to invent them. He breaks down how he and Alex St. John reunited after decades apart, why a “barn full of PhDs” might actually be the future of cloud gaming, and how Playcast.io could rewrite discovery, access, and game economics in a way hyperscalers probably don’t want you thinking about.

We also get the uncensored version of the Titanfall-Mt. Dew-Doritos incident: a global promo with hundreds of millions of packages already printed, sitting on shelves, while the game itself flirted with a delay. Dave describes the moment he realized the entire operation could implode. And what he did next. Survival mode, not spin.

From there, we dive into Dave’s unfiltered assessment of adtech’s chronic delusion problem. He talks about “vaporware,” Cannes cosplay, and the industry’s obsession with pretending innovation is whatever shiny buzzword someone stapled to a slide last week. His quote about adtech being “an industry of lampreys sitting on the back of a whale” is the kind of line that should probably be printed on a plaque and sent to every CMO.

We talk brand soul, too. Dave walks us through the Lululemon campaign that almost got Duke Stump fired but ended up saving the brand. He breaks down why some brands should be excommunicated from the Church of Authenticity entirely, and why gamers don’t hate ads—they hate being treated like idiots. There’s a difference.

We wrap with the desert-island picks, the identity that actually matters when everything collapses, and the “achievement unlocked” Dave wants on the final screen of his life. Spoiler: it’s not about titles. It’s about people.

If you want the real story of where gaming and adtech are heading—not the sanitized conference version—this is the episode. Pour a drink, cancel your next meeting, and watch a master dismantle the mythology.

Stay Bold, Stay Curious, and Know More than You Did Yesterday.