Background & Education
Andrea studied Politics, Sociology and East European Studies at UCL's School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES). As an undergraduate he won the Laidlaw Undergraduate Research and Leadership Scholarship, researching the socioeconomic cost of homelessness to the public and private sectors.
Thrad grew out of that academic work — a dissertation asking what advertising inside AI models could look like, and whether it could pay for AI access for the billions of people who won't or can't pay a subscription. The question became the company.
Building Thrad
Andrea's argument is that advertising isn't an adversarial force — it's the mechanism that funded the open internet and sustains independent journalism, and it's the one best positioned to make AI accessible at scale. Thrad is the infrastructure he's building to make that happen inside LLMs, a case he laid out on The Agile Brand Podcast:
"Not that many companies can build the advertising infrastructure — the monetisation engine — which has been the business model of the internet. That prompted me to start Thrad: to build this infrastructure, to subsidise AI, to make it free, to make it cheaper, to make it accessible to everyone."
Andrea Tortella · The Agile Brand Podcast, Ep. #786 · Dec 2025
In early 2026, Thrad became one of the first companies running inside ChatGPT's sponsored suggestions programme, which OpenAI opened on invite-only terms — putting Thrad among the first movers inside the category it's trying to define.
Author — Mark Loves Marketing
Andrea also wrote Mark Loves Marketing: How to Share Big Ideas for Young Minds, a children's book introducing the principles of communication, creativity, and storytelling that sit underneath marketing — reflecting his view that the profession, done with integrity, deserves the industry's most creative and ethical people. He explained the thinking to ExchangeWire:
"I wrote this book because I want the next generation of marketers to walk into this profession knowing it matters. We need brilliant, ethical, creative people choosing marketing — not despite what it is, but because of what it can be."
Andrea F. Tortella · ExchangeWire · March 2026
Speaking & Public Presence
Andrea Tortella has become one of the more visible voices in AI advertising. In January 2024, while still a UCL student, he pitched Thrad live on CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos, on a programme that also featured former US Secretary of State John Kerry.
He's since been quoted in BCG's reporting on AI advertising monetisation, talked advertising in conversational AI on The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström, and sat down with VaynerMedia director Mehul Suri. Beet.TV, ExchangeWire, NDTV, WSJ, and ETN have all covered Thrad's growth — see the full list in the newsroom.
Philosophy
Andrea's view is that advertising's job is to inform, assist, and inspire — not to interrupt. He argues conversational AI is a rare chance to rebuild the relationship between advertising and the people it reaches: ads that add something to a conversation instead of competing with it for attention.
That's the filter behind who Thrad works with, how it builds its products, and how it talks about the category it's trying to define.