From a late-night phone call about a hacked ad account, to building a new category in adtech, co-Founder and CEO Max von Weber shares the story behind adnomaly – and explains why we should look beyond ad fraud to address another significant challenge: how to prevent misspent media budgets.
1. Tell us about the backstory to adnomaly
“It started with a phone call. A colleague at the paid social media agency where I worked rang me at ten o’clock one evening saying something was off with one of our client accounts.
“When we looked into it, we found eight campaigns sitting in there, each carrying a daily budget of €750,000. We certainly hadn’t created them, the page ID was unknown, and we never advertised in the US from that account.
“We got the campaigns shut down, but it still took about an hour to reach platform support.
“That was the moment I started asking why no system existed to flag something so obviously unusual. Within two weeks, I’d quit my job and adnomaly was born.
“We’ve essentially built a solution to my own daily fears as a campaign manager – wrong budget types, overspends, campaigns going live with the wrong geo-targeting. They were all still being handled with manual double-checks, buddy systems and signed-off PDFs.
“So, we’ve created a circuit breaker for media budgets. We integrate into all the major buying platforms – paid social, programmatic, paid search – and run a virtual agent inside the ad accounts, monitoring activity around the clock. When something looks unusual, we pause it, and alert the media buyer to ask: did you mean to do that?
“Unlike financial markets, which have automated safeguards that halt trading when something goes wrong, media buying has never had an equivalent. That’s the gap we fill.”
2. What’s the biggest misconception companies have about marketing performance data?
“That the money is always being spent exactly as planned. The reality is that even the most rigorous teams are operating in fast-moving, high-pressure environments across multiple platforms simultaneously, and the gap between what’s planned and what goes live is wider than most people appreciate.
“This isn’t about blame. Mistakes happen at pace, and the systems that exist to catch them haven’t kept up with the scale and complexity of modern media buying. The result is that waste accumulates quietly, often without anyone realising until it’s too late.
“That, to me, is the bigger misconception: that the industry has collectively underestimated how much preventable error exists, and how much better we could all do with the right tools in place.”
3. What were the biggest challenges scaling adnomaly from a startup to where it is today?
“Teams have been running buddy checks forever precisely because they know the problem is real, and they feel like they work “most of the time.”
“The actual challenge was changing a deeply ingrained habit, which tracks closely with pain: when a significant overspend has just happened, the urgency is there. But after a few quiet months, the likelihood of saying yes drops sharply, even though the underlying risk hasn’t changed.
“Breaking that pattern took proactive thinkers, people willing to say yes to something new and let us prove it could do better.
“The ones who did – such as Publicis and WPP Germany – achieved an ROI of up to 861% in a single year. Not because they had the biggest overspend, but because automating the checking process enabled their people to spend more time delivering work for their clients.
“The other challenge was technical. Being genuinely integrated into the APIs of all the major buying platforms so that we can actually pause line items in real time, not just send a report, required years of deep platform work. That’s a real differentiator.
“There are other tools out there focused on dashboards and reports, but being a campaign manager myself, I knew that adding another tool wasn’t going to solve these needs. We built a platform that actually takes work away instead of adding more.”
4. As a founder, how do you balance product innovation with commercial growth?
“You can’t chase the shiny thing if the foundations aren’t sound. There’s so much excitement in this industry right now about agentic workflows and AI-driven buying, but the operational mistakes people were making ten years ago are still happening today.
“If anything, automation makes them faster and harder to catch. A typo that used to be a human error is now a misfire between tens of different tools talking to each other to get a campaign live.
“So for us, product innovation means making the guardrails smarter – not abandoning them to follow the next trend.
“We automate QA so our clients actually have the time and headspace to chase the shiny things.”
5. If you could give one piece of advice to trading directors or agency ops directors trying to deliver operational excellence, what would it be?
“Stop relying on humans to fix a human problem. Manual processes have been the last line of defence in live media for twenty years and it still isn’t working. It’s 2026. QA should be automated – continuously, systematically, across every campaign and every platform.
“Not because humans aren’t capable, but because no human should be the safety net for an operation running at this scale and speed. Automation catches what tired eyes miss, and it does it every time, not just on the campaigns that happen to get a second look.
“Ultimately, this isn’t about removing people from the process, but about giving teams back the time they currently spend on campaign checks, and reallocating it to the work that actually drives client impact: strategy, optimisation, and performance.”
6. What’s the biggest mistake planners and buyers make when planning a campaign?
“Missing the small things that can have a massive impact on campaign spend. A colleague of mine once copied €50,000 from a German media plan into TikTok, but a formatting difference between European and English decimal conventions turned that figure into €5 million. It was a Friday afternoon, and by Monday, the platform had already spent €1 million.
“Everyone had done their checks. No one caught it.
“So from an organisation level, the biggest mistake is not having a safety net in place. Mistakes with media budgets are rarely cheap, and hoping or double checking everything works isn’t a strategy when you’re handling tens of millions of impressions a day.”
8. What industry issues keep you awake at night?
“Everyone’s racing towards (gen) AI and agentic everything, as if the unsolved problems of the past two decades have quietly resolved themselves.
“They haven’t, and that’s the gap that keeps me up at night – the way that people constantly chase a shiny future without focusing on getting the basics right that will enable them to achieve it.
“Because, while it’s fun to talk about a future full of possibility, we need to fix the current technology first. A shiny future doesn’t arrive on top of broken foundations.
“And this applies to all industries, not just adtech.”