How I Report: The Claim First, Then the Fact

The publisher of ADOTAT on the method behind every story: quote the claim, check it, name the company, give it a chance to reply, then publish what holds up.

By Pesach Lattin · November 4, 2026

I'm the publisher of ADOTAT, and people ask how we decide what a story is. The answer is boring on purpose. I take what a company says about itself, and then I check it. If the check holds, there is no story. If it doesn't, the headline writes itself. My background is on the record page. This is the method.

Start with the company's own words

I quote the claim first, exactly, from the company's own pitch, filing or FAQ. Not a paraphrase, not a rival's summary. LiveIntent tells Prebid its graph is "authenticated daily through active engagements with email newsletters." Samsung tells advertisers its ACR "captures every pixel being passed back through the glass." Thrad announced a $1 million Monetization Fund for AI chat apps.

Then I go looking for the fact. Sometimes it is in a peer-reviewed study: 85% of LiveIntent's persistent IDs were shared by the crawls of a self-declared bot that has never read a newsletter, per our LiveIntent story. Sometimes it is in the company's own paperwork: Vizio's last 10-K says contracts with Netflix and Disney+ restrict it from using viewing data from their content, per the ACR story. And sometimes the company does the work for me. Thrad's own FAQ asks whether the fund is a grant or an investment and answers "Neither." It is advertiser spend routed through Thrad's own DSP. That one is here.

The headline rule: claim, then the fact that breaks it

Every ADOTAT investigation headline has two halves. The first half is what the company says. The second half is what we found. You get the pitch and the check in one line, and you can decide for yourself which one to believe.

• Thrad Calls It a $1 Million Fund. Its Own FAQ Says It Isn't One.
• DSPs Tell Clients Fraud Runs 1 to 3 Percent. Anura's Scans Keep Finding Half.
• Stagwell Says Publishers Come First. Its Freestar Deal Now Feeds Principal Media.
• OpenAI and Meta Call It Enhancement. You're Liable for Ads You Never Read.

The rule keeps me honest too. If I can't write the second half from a document, a dataset or someone on the record, I don't have a story yet.

Name the companies

Ad tech loves the phrase "a major vendor." I don't. When a study found 17 of 18 major ID vendors gave identities to a bot on the IAB list since 2013, we named them, and we named the one that said no: Flashtalking, which answered "Bot" 440,504 times. When Stagwell bought Freestar, we named both ends of the auction it now sits on, in the Field Kit. Readers can't check a claim about a company they can't identify, and companies can't answer one either.

Right of reply, before we publish

Where practicable, the companies in a story get our questions before publication, and the story says what they did with them. Sometimes they answer fast: CIMM's Jon Watts answered three Unmeasured questions in twelve minutes, per the CIMM issue. Sometimes they don't. Stagwell and Freestar got ADOTAT's questions before publication and had not answered by Thursday morning. VideoAmp answered none of the 13 questions ADOTAT sent about its $6 billion figure, per the VideoAmp issue. Samsung, LG Ad Solutions, Vizio, Roku, Samba TV and TVision did not respond to written questions on ACR coverage.

The same rule applies to interview subjects. When Matt Egol said quantified emotion fits business outcomes at 80% against roughly 40% for NPS, the story said plainly that those figures come from unpublished client work and that ADOTAT has asked him to show the method. A good quote still gets the check.

The free part and the paid part

Every investigation has a free part, and the free part carries the claim and the fact that breaks it. You should not need a subscription to learn that a number doesn't hold up. The short versions live in the ADOTAT briefs and the Unmeasured issue summaries. The longer reporting goes to ADOTAT+ subscribers, who pay for it.

Reader-supported. No paid placement in editorial.

ADOTAT is reader-supported, and there is no paid placement in editorial. Ever. Nobody buys a headline, a mention or a softer second half. The rules are written down on How ADOTAT Works, so you can hold me to them.

That is the whole method. Quote the claim. Check the claim. Name the company. Ask them first. Print what you find. It is not complicated. It is just rarely done.