Thrad Sponsors ADSN: The Ad-Supported Network, Bringing Real-Time Ad Tech to Industry Conversations
by on 7th May 2026 in News
Thrad, the advertising infrastructure provider for the AI ecosystem, has announced its sponsorship of ADSN (The Ad-Supported Network), the weekly podcast and video network hosted by James Borow and Daniel Druger. The sponsorship backs one of the most credible independent voices covering the ad tech industry at a moment when the category is being redefined, where AI reshapes advertising, who sets the standards, and what responsible monetisation looks like inside conversational interfaces.
ADSN has built an audience of practitioners, agency leads, programmatic buyers, publishers, and operators who want sharper analysis than the trade press cycle typically provides. Borow and Druger bring decades of operating experience to the format, and their weekly cadence has turned ADSN into a running record of how the industry is actually thinking through the shift to AI-native media. In Thrad CEO Andrea Tortella's own words announcing the sponsorship on LinkedIn, "ADSN has become the primary venue for serious conversation about how advertising is evolving as AI reshapes the industry."
That audience is also Thrad's audience. The company currently serves millions of ads daily across a global network of AI publishers, delivering endemic, in-chat advertising for Fortune 500 brands including Betadine, Healf, TripAdvisor, Binance, Warner Music Group, and MongoDB. Reaching the professionals who evaluate, integrate, and spend on new inventory requires showing up where they already are. For a significant and growing portion of the industry, that means ADSN.
The timing reflects a broader inflection. On February 9, 2026, OpenAI launched ads inside ChatGPT on invite-only terms, with a minimum commitment of USD$200,000 (£149,500). Anthropic has taken the opposite position publicly. Google is moving toward monetisation in Gemini. The category is being defined now, in real time, and the conversations shaping it are happening on podcasts, Slack channels, and group chats long before they reach analyst reports. ADSN is one of the places where that conversation has settled.
"We built Thrad to power the next generation of AI advertising, so supporting a platform that's thoughtfully covering this space felt like the obvious move," said Andrea Tortella, CEO and co-founder of Thrad. "James and Daniel cover Martech, ad networks, infrastructure, regulation, everything that matters. The questions being asked about AI in advertising deserve serious answers, and they are among the few asking them every week."
ADSN's hosts reciprocated the endorsement. "Could not imagine a better sponsor for what we are doing at ADSN than Andrea Tortella and team. They are building something really special at Thrad," said James Borow, co-host of ADSN. Co-host Daniel Druger added that Tortella and co-founder Marco Visentin, "Are building something VERY special at Thrad," welcoming Thrad to the ADSN roster of sponsors.
Thrad's sponsorship supports ADSN's continued growth as an independent source for ad tech news, analysis, and debate. Both organisations intend to use the partnership to surface the operational realities of AI-native advertising, what it takes to serve ads responsibly inside LLM conversations, how publishers can monetise without compromising user trust, and where the open standards debate is actually heading.
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