Podcast Summary: AdTechGod Pod Ep. 115

Al Kallel, Founder and CEO of Nativeads.AI, on the Future of Native Advertising in the AI Era

Date: January 6, 2026
Host: AdTechGod (ATG)
Guest: Al Kallel (AK)

Episode Overview

This episode features Al Kallel, a veteran product leader in digital advertising and current Founder/CEO of Nativeads.AI. The conversation dives deep into the shifting landscape of native advertising, the transformative role of AI, and how experiences and ad creative must evolve as user habits, platforms, and privacy expectations change. Al shares lessons learned from his years at major tech companies, the challenges of balancing consumer experience with monetization, and why fine-tuned, on-brand AI is the key to the next generation of native ads.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Al Kallel’s Background and Industry Evolution

• Product Leadership at Tech Giants:
  • Yahoo: Led first sponsored search for mobile in early 2000s – focused on consumer experiences “on the go.”
  • Nokia: Helped deliver location-aware monetization after NAVTEQ acquisition.
  • Microsoft/Skype: Led programmatic monetization across Skype’s platforms.
  • Amazon: Built Fire TV and Prime Video ad infrastructure.
• Major Shifts in Consumer Experience:
  • “Mobile was the big shift early... then social…last six, maybe ten years, a major shift to streaming services.” (AK, 04:37)
  • Balancing monetization with seamless user experiences is a constant tension in the industry.
  • The trade-off: Going native vs. standard formats – scale versus personalization.

2. What Makes a Successful Product & The Promise of AI

• Defining Product Success:
  • For Nativeads.AI, success means building ad experiences “that can scale and feel native,” providing brands control and scale via AI without sacrificing quality and relevance.
  • Predicts “a big departure in the next few years from destination URLs and destination apps to consumer experiences created through AI, whether it’s LLM or agentic experiences or AR.” (AK, 06:21)
• AI’s Impact:
  • The days of bolting ad experiences onto a UI as an afterthought are ending.
  • Future ad experiences must be contextually embedded, making them relevant within LLM conversations, CTV, AR, etc.

3. The Challenge of ‘AI Slop’ and Maintaining Brand Quality

• The Risk:
  • Explosion of low-quality, mass-generated content (“AI slop”) lowering the value of ad experiences.
• Nativeads.AI Approach:
  • Enforces “infrastructure on top of LLMs to close those gaps from data collaboration, data sharing…” (AK, 09:35)
  • Fine-tunes models with brand data to ensure ads carry the “brand soul,” not just generic output.
  • “Creative has to be reviewed by the brand. They have to be approved before they run in production. I don’t think we’re ready yet to let...AI just generate and serve on its own without some human in the loop.” (AK, 12:18)

4. Gaps in Native Ads Landscape and the AI Opportunity

• Where Others Fall Short:
  • Prior systems only personalized at basic levels (geo, demo), lacking true creative/contextual adaptation.
  • Scale is easy with AI, but effective personalization requires deep publisher–brand data partnerships.
  • RTB (real-time bidding) standards are “not sufficient.”
• Nativeads.AI’s Solution:
  • Secure, clean room environments for richer data sharing: “We’re exchanging this data for creating an advertising experience that’s...true personalization...better engagement…and better monetization.” (AK, 13:08)

5. Privacy, Signals, and the Demise of Cookies

• Problem:
  • Ad identifiers (like cookies) are being deprecated—slowly but surely—requiring new methods.
• Al’s Take:
  • “Working directly with publishers and brands, that’s your high fidelity, your high signals to deliver a true personalized advertising experience.” (AK, 15:14)
  • AI becomes even more crucial for contextually relevant, privacy-respectful ad delivery as cookie-based targeting dies out.

6. Looking to 2026–2027: What’s Next

• Most Excited About:
  • Agentic Experiences—consumers interacting with AI agents for content, shopping, and services.
  • 2026/2027 will be “a year of experimentation and growth”—real deployments, not just AI hype.
  • Better performance, more robust creative generation, and true personalization are on the horizon.
  • “The bottleneck of content generation can be solved with platforms like Nativeads.AI...” (AK, 16:28)

7. Agentic Commerce: How Far Will Bots Go?

• Host’s Concern:
  • Uncomfortable with bots (“agents”) shopping on his behalf, especially for personal/luxury goods.
• Al’s Nuanced Answer:
  • Agentic shopping is gaining traction for staples (milk, everyday essentials).
  • More complex, differentiated purchases (luxury, apparel) will be slower to automate.
  • “The shift is inevitable and it’s going to happen at different speeds.” (AK, 19:35)

Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On balancing monetization and user experience:

  “Figuring out that balance—how much you go native and lose scale versus how much you go standard and gain scale but lose flexibility—has been a constant tension.”
  (Al Kallel, 04:37)

• On the need for brand-specific AI training:

  “General purpose models...lack specificity, and brand is all about specificity. So, jumping too quick and not having real wide guide rails, you can end up with off-brand creative noise and not so great outcomes.”
  (Al Kallel, 09:35)

• On the limits of full AI automation for brand creative:

  “Creative has to be reviewed by the brand. They have to be approved before they run in production. I don’t think we’re ready yet to let...AI just generate and serve on its own without some human in the loop.”
  (Al Kallel, 12:18)

• On the future of agentic commerce:

  “Depending on the category...some categories are more at risk to shift to agentic, especially undifferentiated products...the shopping cycle [for luxury] requires more exploration. Agentic experience is more transactional.”
  (Al Kallel, 20:11)

Timestamps for Key Segments

• Al’s background and experience across Yahoo, Nokia, Skype, Amazon:
  02:32 – 04:02
• Mobile to streaming: major consumer shifts and product lessons:
  04:02 – 05:50
• The promise and peril of AI in native advertising:
  06:21 – 09:35
• AI slop, brand voice, and the necessity of creative quality control:
  09:35 – 12:18
• Where Nativeads.AI fits and how deep data collaboration is key:
  12:18 – 14:38
• Cookies, privacy, and the emergence of new identifiers:
  14:38 – 16:00
• Looking ahead: Agentic experiences and AI’s expanded advertising role:
  16:00 – 18:03
• Agentic commerce: what bots will (and won’t) buy for us:
  18:03 – 21:08

Tone and Language

The tone throughout is candid, forward-looking, and constructive, with both host and guest mixing technical insight and clear-eyed optimism about AI’s potential. Al Kallel remains practical about present challenges, particularly around creative quality, privacy, and data use, while expressing excitement about upcoming experimentation and evolution in adtech.

Conclusion

This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in how AI is transforming advertising, both technically and creatively. Al Kallel’s perspective combines decades of experience with a clear vision for the future—one where data-driven AI, creative control, and true personalization replace outdated, bolt-on ad experiences. As native advertising adapts to a cookieless, AI-native world, brands and publishers will need to collaborate closer than ever, ensuring technology serves both their goals and the experience of real people.