Andrea Tortella

CEO

Thrad

Andrea Tortella is co-founder and CEO of Thrad, the DSP and SSP for LLMs, which serves paid ads inside AI.

He previously worked on advertising at Perplexity, is a founding member of AgenticAdvertising.org, writes on zero-click advertising and the answer economy, and convened the inaugural Sponsored Intelligence Summit in London in 2026. He has spoken at Davos and at the United Nations many times.

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Session topic:

From Search to Ask: What Running Paid Ads in LLMs Has Taught Us so Far

Search is becoming ask. People put the question to an assistant in their own words, get one answer back, and decide inside that answer without clicking through to anyone's website. That breaks three assumptions the search industry has run on for twenty years: that targeting starts with a keyword, that measurement ends with a last-click conversion, and that the real estate you compete for is a page.

Thrad serves paid ads in LLMs for Fortune 500 and growth brands across a network of AI publishers. Andrea will walk through what changes under each of those three headings, with anonymised numbers from live campaigns and the assumptions carried over from search that cost the most before they were dropped.

Key Takeaways:

  • Targeting moves from keywords to expressed intent. What does the job of the keyword, the match type and the negative list when the query is a sentence, and which levers a buyer still sets.
  • Measurement moves from last click to assist. Three questions worth more than a conversion column: was your brand in the candidate set, did the user engage with the suggestion, did a downstream action follow. Plus how to build a fair read against existing activity.
  • Real estate moves from pages you own to surfaces you participate in. Which native formats earn attention, which retrofitted display thinking gets ignored, and what to demand from any vendor selling inventory here.