What does a modern chief marketing officer actually worry about? The IAB’s Center Seat series puts marketing chiefs through a fast, candid interview format, and this episode features Katie McAdams, CMO at Basis, the ad tech platform built around automating media operations. It is a useful counterweight to vendor keynotes: a practitioner responsible for marketing a product to marketers, talking about positioning in a crowded automation market, building a brand inside a performance-obsessed industry and deciding where her own team’s time and budget actually go. For agency and in-house leaders alike, the value is in the specifics — how a CMO at an ad tech company evaluates channels, creative and measurement for her own plan while her customers demand proof from her product. Watch it as a companion to this week’s measurement coverage: the person in the center seat lives with the same attribution blind spots as everyone else, and sells into them.
Video: IAB – Interactive Advertising Bureau (official YouTube channel)
The wider record helps explain why this conversation lands. Basis describes itself as a media automation platform spanning programmatic, publisher-direct, search and social, and McAdams has spent more than 20 years in digital marketing after starting in newspaper advertising. In her Cannes Lions comments this year she warned that AI’s appetite for data pulls teams toward short-term performance metrics, while brand building can take up to three years to show full effect. She also pointed to a second AI use — surfacing audience segments teams did not know existed — and argued that as creation gets cheaper, authenticity and quality matter more than volume. That balance is the thread to listen for in the Center Seat interview.
Related reading: Watch: Nielsen Recaps Cannes Lions 2026 · Watch: Think with Google Says the Marketing Funnel Is a Myth · Watch: Google Ads Explains Demand Gen Creative — Variety, Testing and Fatigue
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