The AdTech Therapy™ Therapists
AdTech Therapy is built on the idea that sometimes, your woes need more than a strategist, stack vendor, or slide deck.
You need a practitioner. Someone who’s seen every kind of ad tech injury, knows how to spot the symptoms, and isn’t afraid to roll up their sleeves and give your prescription to you straight.
Every AdTech Therapy session is led by The AdTech Therapists Scott Messer and Jana Meron, experienced operators who combine hands-on expertise with an unflinching view of what’s working, what’s broken, and what needs to change.
Meet The AdTech Therapists
Scott is a seasoned sell-side operator who’s seen every kind of ad tech dysfunction, including legacy systems, outdated stacks, team paralysis, and chronic underperformance. That’s because he’s worked across nearly every layer of digital media, from ad ops and monetization to SEO, content strategy, and general management (including corporate strategy and M&A). If your stack’s showing symptoms, chances are he’s treated them before.
Scott started out in the creative worlds of writing and film, which seeded a lifelong passion for the publishers and people behind great storytelling. That creator-first mindset still shapes his work today—whether he’s rebuilding systems or clearing revenue blockers across publishing, retail media, or ad tech.
Long before the AI hype era, Scott was on the front lines of programmatic triage. Prior to launching AdTech Therapy Advisory, he served as SVP of Media at what began as Demand Media (later Leaf Group), leading monetization, SEO, content ops, and product across 40+ sites. He drove the shift from direct to programmatic, rebuilt ad stacks, and led major organizational overhauls, giving him rare insight into both the anatomy and psychology of digital media businesses.
For Scott, AdTech Therapy isn’t a convenient metaphor. He’s seen first-hand how teams normalize pain and build around dysfunction, which is why he sees education as central to the job: staying sharp by tracking real shifts, filtering out hype, and translating complexity into action—all so his clients don’t have to. With him, there’s no lip service or gimmicks, just diagnosis, prescription, and ad tech wellness.
Scott Messer
The AdTech Therapist & Co-Founder
Jana Meron
AdTech Therapist & Co-Founder
Jana is a revenue strategist, publisher advocate, and one of ad tech’s sharpest listeners. With a background spanning Google, Business Insider, and The Washington Post, she’s led some of the most respected programmatic and data strategies in the industry. Along the way, she’s earned a reputation as both a results-driven operator and a trusted partner to commercial and product leaders.
But titles and wins only tell part of Jana’s story. What sets her approach to AdTech Therapy apart is her belief in asking good questions instead of firing off quick answers. That’s why her sessions start with a conversation, not a stack audit: What feels off? Are there internal tensions? Why are you avoiding taking action? She’s learned that transformation is more than surface-level optimization. It comes from identifying patterns, fostering trust, and helping teams get comfortable being uncomfortable.
Jana has firsthand experience with the full spectrum of ad tech’s challenges, be it navigating privacy shifts, aligning brand safety strategies, scaling premium programmatic businesses, or turning data chaos into clarity. The results speak for themselves. Early on, she built Business Insider's programmatic business from the ground up, growing it into a major revenue engine during the company’s heyday. She later guided Insider Inc. through GDPR, signal loss, and the ever-expanding maze of monetization complexity. Then at The Washington Post, she oversaw the launch of Beacon Guard and modernized ad ops infrastructure, solidifying her ability to pair strategy with execution at the industry’s highest levels.
Now an independent consultant and head of Lioness Strategies, Jana sees her AdTech Therapy practice as a means of helping media and technology companies ask hard questions, find honest answers, and land on practical decisions that drive change that actually lasts. She’s not here to add more noise to your stack, but to clear the space necessary for teams to align and grow on their own terms.
It all started here in 2015. This is when Jana and Scott first met in person and found a shared passion for data, AdTech and making sh*t work the way it needs to.