As 2025 gasps to a close, the ad industry is sprinting headlong into a future that looks less like Mad Men and more like Black Mirror meets QVC. CMOs are hunched over 2026 media plans. Holding companies are fusing like mutant amoebas. And everyone — everyone — is trying to figure out whether AI is a money printer or just another Cinnamon Challenge.

Here’s your holiday platter of chaos: anti-surveillance bills, AI-powered ad invasions, Bob Iger pretending not to destroy Hollywood, and Cindy Rose trying to duct-tape WPP back together with “client obsession” and Google cloud credits.

Pull up a seat. It’s a wild one.

It finally happened. The Senate realized that charging different people different prices based on their personal data might be a smidge unethical. The “One Fair Price Act” aims to outlaw the creepy black magic of surveillance pricing — where your weight, DNA, or ZIP code gets factored into how much you're gouged for a pizza.

Senator Gallego calls it exploitation. Big Tech calls it “revenue optimization.” And somewhere, a CMO is quietly sobbing into a Salesforce dashboard. The bill still lets loyalty programs slide, because America runs on punch cards and empty promises.

Of course, if this passes, expect a million new euphemisms for dynamic pricing that don’t sound like your FitBit just cost you twenty extra bucks at checkout.

While Congress was trying to protect us from being commodified, Disney was busy commodifying itself. In a $1B deal with OpenAI, Bob Iger greenlit fans to use Sora’s text-to-video tool to generate mini-movies featuring 200 Disney characters — including your Marvel faves and “Star Wars” royalty.

No voices, no names, just the visuals. Because this isn’t a threat to creators, says Iger — it’s an “opportunity.” Right. And AI didn’t write that earnings report either. Major talent agencies are already howling, and for good reason: Disney just gave the AI machine a loaded lightsaber.

Hollywood fought for protections. Disney negotiated a licensing deal. You tell me who’s playing 4D chess here.

Fresh off absorbing Interpublic Group, Omnicom is asking shareholders to approve a shiny new stock incentive plan — 27.4 million shares worth — so it can “attract and retain talent.” Translation: We merged, it’s a mess, and the C-suite wants a raise for sticking around.

The plan dilutes shares by over 11%, but don’t worry — FW Cook, the usual compensation whisperers, say it’s all good. ISS and Glass Lewis haven’t weighed in yet, but the writing’s on the slide deck: big mergers are expensive, and someone’s gotta get paid.

If you’re an employee, good luck seeing any of that. Unless you’re on the exec floor, in which case: congrats on the new yacht.

Jay Friedman has entered the chat with the most useful AI bullshit detector you’ll read this month. His take: most AI vendors today are closer to viral stunts than viable infrastructure. If your vendor can be replicated with Zapier and an intern, you’re not building a future — you’re building a fad.

The real ones? They’re integrated, product-led, boringly effective. They clean up your ops, not just your pitch decks. Friedman’s four-point checklist is required reading for any brand being love-bombed by ChatGPT clones claiming to “revolutionize ad personalization.”

If your “AI partner” can’t explain how their tool does hard invisible work behind the scenes, show them the door. And maybe the Cinnamon.

The forecasters have spoken, and TV is officially not king anymore. WPP predicts that by end of year, retail, finance, and travel will outspend all of TV combined. And it’s not just that linear is dying — it’s that shoppable everything is rising.

Samsung Ads is racing to build ad formats that make buying socks mid-Netflix feel natural. Spoiler: it’s not. But they’re trying. Meanwhile, programmatic is exploding in CTV, DOOH, and audio, even as the open web continues to get steamrolled by the TikMetaZon triopoly.

If your 2026 plan doesn’t include retail media, you’re not just behind — you’re doing it wrong.

Finally, some sanity: IAB Tech Lab dropped a formal CTV Ad Portfolio and updated programmatic guidance, with six standardized formats like Pause, Menu, and Squeezebacks (yes, that’s a thing). It’s the kind of nerdy-but-crucial infrastructure move that actually helps everyone scale.

The big players — NBCU, Disney, GumGum — are loving it, because now buyers know what the hell they’re buying, creatives don’t break, and salespeople can stop inventing formats on the fly.

It won’t solve every problem, but in a world where streaming eats TV and nobody knows what a Squeezeback actually is, this is real progress.

AI chatbots are the new frontier of attention, which means adtech is kicking in the door. PubMatic just partnered with Kontext to place programmatic text ads directly into chatbot conversations. The idea? When you ask your AI therapist how to fix your life, it might suggest a sponsored meditation app.

Creepy? Maybe. Effective? Kontext claims +70% ROAS and 50% better conversion than Meta. Right now, it’s limited to second-tier AI platforms, but it’s only a matter of time before ChatGPT, Gemini, and friends open the floodgates.

Marketers, get ready to brief your agencies on "empathetic interruptive copy." What a time to be alive.

Cindy Rose has been CEO of WPP for 100 days, and she’s already called the company's performance “unacceptable” on her first earnings call. Good start. She’s brought in new wins (Mastercard, Henkel), launched Open Pro (an AI-powered platform for smaller advertisers), and signed a $400M partnership with Google Cloud. But the stock’s still in the toilet.

Analysts give her a 7.8/10, which feels generous considering WPP’s still bleeding and was booted from the FTSE 100. She’s got optimism, a narrative, and a tech background — but this industry doesn’t reward vibe shifts. It rewards results.

Next year, she’s promising a full strategy reveal. It better be big. Because right now, Publicis is eating WPP’s foie gras, and the newly fused Omnicom-IPG Death Star is firing up the laser.

I believe in innovation. I also believe in pattern recognition, which puts me at a disadvantage in an industry that keeps rediscovering the same bad idea and acting surprised when it blows up.

The latest version is ads inside AI chat. Not next to the answer. Not clearly off to the side where a user can decide whether to engage. Inside the answer itself, delivered in the same calm, empathetic tone that convinced people these systems were there to help, not hustle.

PubMatic and Kontext are among the first to push this forward, positioning programmatic ads as “context-aware” and “native” to chatbot conversations. Helpful, they say. Relevant, they say. As if advertising’s biggest flaw has ever been a lack of emotional proximity.

This isn’t just another format. It’s a relationship change.

People don’t use chatbots the way they use search or scroll feeds. They don’t skim. They don’t bounce. They talk. They ask questions they wouldn’t type into a browser. They treat the interaction more like a conversation than a marketplace.

That’s why ads inside answers are different. The moment a user realizes that a suggestion might also be paid placement, trust doesn’t erode gradually. It snaps.

And trust is already fragile. Only about four in ten consumers say they trust AI-generated answers today. That number rises among heavy users, which actually makes the risk worse. The people most reliant on these systems are also the ones most likely to feel betrayed when they realize the guidance is being quietly monetized.

Users will forgive wrong answers. They won’t forgive being steered.

Of course the early numbers look great. Kontext is already touting outsized ROAS gains and conversion rates that outperform Meta. Narrow pilots. Friendly environments. No long-term data. This is the same math that once justified pop-ups, autoplay video, and every other format users eventually learned to hate.

The incentives make the direction obvious. Kontext takes a cut. AI platforms want to offset inference costs. SSPs want a new category of inventory. Nobody in this chain is paid to ask whether a moment is appropriate. Everyone is rewarded for pushing ads deeper into high-intent, high-emotion conversations.

That’s not a bug. That’s the business model working as designed.

Consumers already worry that AI-driven marketing misuses their data. Ads that appear to understand emotional state don’t feel clever. They feel invasive. The empathetic tone that made chatbots usable starts to feel suspect.

Is the system on your side,
or working for the bidder with the highest CPM?

Once that question enters the interaction, the interaction changes permanently.

In narrow, transactional contexts like shopping, travel, or customer service, well-labeled and clearly separated chat ads might limp along. People may even find them useful.

But the moment this format creeps into health, finance, or therapy-adjacent conversations, it becomes a legal and ethical minefield. States are already drafting laws around bot disclosure and commercial influence. Mental-health AI is under scrutiny for good reason. Mixing performance-optimized advertising into vulnerable moments isn’t bold.

It’s reckless.

The real danger isn’t that users find this creepy. The real danger is that it works just well enough to scale before anyone seriously audits its impact. That it becomes an opaque, high-intent decision layer optimized for ROAS rather than human welfare.

Think search ads, but with:

Once users realize ads are woven into the voice they trusted, they won’t just distrust the ads.

They’ll distrust the answers.

Adtech loves to kick down new doors. AI chat is the latest one. But some doors shouldn’t open without rules, and some relationships don’t survive being turned into yield.

If the industry doesn’t slow itself down, it won’t be users who write the rules. It will be lawmakers who learned how chatbots work five minutes before the vote.

And we know how that story usually ends.

Stay Bold, Stay Curious, and Know More than You Did Yesterday.

Behind the paywall is the part everyone actually cares about: the receipts, the whispered-over-latte power plays, the charts that make CMOs sweat, and the stuff PR teams wish you’d stop noticing. If the free feed is the trailer, ADOTAT+ is the director’s cut where the knives come out and the plot twists finally make sense.

Stay Bold, Stay Curious, and Know More than You Did Yesterday.