NB: Okay Fine. I Was Wrong About Marketure.

Turns out the room wasn’t half-empty — they got a bigger space at the venue. It looked sparse because it was bigger. My bad. Mea culpa. Moving on.

Now let me kill the narrative before it starts: I have no personal beef with Marketure or Ari beyond what I have with any player in this industry. I expose systems. It’s not good vs. evil, it’s journalism.

Do they like me? No idea. Don’t care. I’ve gotten the emails. I noted them and kept it moving.

Here’s what hasn’t changed: if you’re in adtech and you’re in NYC, go to Marketure Live. Still true. Always was.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The advertising industry is having a quiet existential crisis, and the symptoms are everywhere. OUTFRONT is spending $20 million on cloud tech just to modernize how billboards get sold, LADbible is laying people off after Facebook’s algorithm yanked away its traffic firehose, and meanwhile YouTube is casually making more ad revenue than Disney, NBC, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery combined. Throw in the industry’s latest obsession — AI infrastructure like Model Context Protocol — and a pattern emerges: everyone is scrambling to control the underlying systems before someone else does.

Because here’s the uncomfortable truth. In advertising, whoever owns the infrastructure eventually owns the money. Platforms control distribution. Protocols control data flow. Algorithms decide winners and losers overnight. If your business depends on someone else’s pipes — Facebook feeds, DSP integrations, AI connectors — you’re basically a tenant in their building, praying they don’t change the locks. The industry loves to talk about creativity and storytelling, but the real power move has always been much simpler: own the plumbing.

For decades, out-of-home advertising ran on the same technology stack as a 1998 travel agency: spreadsheets, PDFs and sales decks that required three meetings and a sacrificial goat to produce a media plan. Now OUTFRONT has decided to drag the industry into the cloud, dropping $20 million into OOH platform AdQuick and locking in exclusive access to its sales tech for three years. The pitch is simple: agencies submit a brief, and the system surfaces available inventory, pricing and proposals across OUTFRONT’s network.

The real story is less “revolutionary programmatic breakthrough” and more OOH finally catching up to the rest of digital media. Agencies already plan campaigns in cloud tools and programmatic platforms, so the billboard business eventually had to join the party. AdQuick gets validation and scale; OUTFRONT gets to tell investors it’s modernizing. Either way, the humble highway billboard is now part of the API economy. Somewhere Don Draper just spilled his whiskey.

LADbible built a social media empire on viral video aggregation, racking up billions of views across Facebook and TikTok by mastering the art of reposting internet chaos. But Meta quietly changed the rules, prioritizing original content over reshared clips. Now the publisher is laying off staff in Manchester after earlier cuts in London as engagement on Facebook collapses and the easy traffic pipeline dries up.

The numbers are brutal: Facebook engagement down nearly 90%, views down more than 80% year over year. That’s what happens when your distribution strategy is “pray the algorithm likes us today.” LADbible is now pivoting to original content, creator partnerships and YouTube growth — corporate shorthand for we should probably own our audience instead of renting it from Mark Zuckerberg.

Obsidianworks, the culture-focused agency co-founded by actor Michael B. Jordan and marketing exec Chad Easterling, is going fully independent after buying back the minority stake held by Endeavor’s agency 160over90 since 2021. The original deal plugged the young shop into Hollywood’s talent and brand ecosystem while giving Endeavor a seat at the cultural marketing table.

Now the founders want the keys back. And frankly, that makes sense. Cultural marketing aimed at Gen Z and multicultural audiences is one of the fastest-growing corners of the industry, and owning the equity matters when brands are desperate to look authentic. Independence means Jordan and Easterling control the strategy, the partnerships and — most importantly — the upside. Hollywood agencies rarely give up equity quietly, so this is a pretty loud statement.

Ad tech never met an acronym it didn’t want to put on a slide deck. The latest is Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard originally developed by Anthropic that lets AI models connect to external software and data systems in a consistent way. Think of it as the plumbing that lets an AI system pull reports, build audiences and trigger campaigns across multiple platforms without custom integrations for every step.

In other words, MCP is the universal adapter for AI workflows. And yes, that’s useful. But the real friction isn’t technical — it’s political. Ad tech profits from fragmentation, opaque reporting and vendors guarding their little data kingdoms. If AI agents actually start seeing the full picture across platforms, some of those margins start looking suspicious. The protocol may be simple. Getting the industry to cooperate is the real science fiction.

The Federal Trade Commission is once again considering rules that would make canceling subscriptions as easy as signing up for them. The agency reopened discussion around so-called negative option practices, where consumers are automatically charged month after month unless they jump through hoops to cancel.

Complaints about these tactics have exploded, climbing from about 33 per day in 2020 to more than 90 per day in 2025. The FTC tried to impose “click-to-cancel” rules in 2024, but a court tossed them out over procedural issues. Now regulators are back for another round — and somewhere a thousand subscription services are quietly reviewing their cancellation flows and wondering how many extra screens they can legally keep.

According to research firm MoffettNathanson, YouTube pulled in over $40 billion in ad revenue in 2025, beating the combined ad businesses of Disney, NBC, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery. That’s not a typo. A platform originally famous for cat videos now out-earns the traditional TV giants that spent a century building the entertainment industry.

The shift says everything about how media consumption has changed. YouTube dominates connected TVs, younger audiences love it, creators keep uploading and advertisers follow the attention. Meanwhile legacy studios are still arguing about streaming bundles and ad loads. The biggest television network in the world doesn’t own studios or broadcast towers. It owns an upload button.

The Manchester-based viral content machine is learning the oldest lesson in digital media the most expensive way possible.

Let me tell you a story you've definitely heard before, because the tech industry loves nothing more than repeating its worst mistakes at scale.

LADbible — the UK-based content factory that made a fortune convincing you that watching a raccoon open a jar was essential viewing — is laying off roughly a dozen people on its social video team in Manchester. This comes after it already trimmed its London social video team last fall. The casualties are mostly video editors, channel managers, and social editors: the people whose entire jobs were to shovel content into Facebook's maw and pray the algorithm gods smiled upon them.

They did not smile. They smited.

The numbers are not a vibe. They are a catastrophe dressed in business casual. Tubular Labs data shows LADbible's Facebook video engagement collapsed 89.8% from February 2025 to February 2026 — from 154.5 million interactions to a very humbling 15.8 million. Views dropped 84.8% year over year, from 7.22 billion to 1.1 billion. They actually uploaded more videos (well, 27.9% fewer, but still thousands upon thousands), meaning the bottom didn't fall out of their output. The bottom fell out of reality. The algorithm simply stopped caring.

Why? Because Meta, in its infinite and entirely self-interested wisdom, decided to start rewarding "original creators" and demoting pages that repost user-generated content without, in Meta's delicate phrasing, "meaningful transformation." LADbible's historic model — find viral clip, slap LADbible branding on it, watch engagement rain from the sky — suddenly became a violation of the new catechism of authenticity. The thing they were built on became the thing that got them penalized.

I am shocked. Shocked, I tell you. (I am not shocked.)

TikTok views are also down roughly 65% for them, because why not. The one ray of actual sunlight: YouTube monthly views are up 93%. Which tells you everything about the difference between renting an audience and building something that might outlast a policy memo from Menlo Park.

This is the "rented audience" problem, and it is as old as Facebook itself. At various points, LADbible was effectively a Facebook-native organism. Its entire metabolism was tuned to the platform's algorithm. This was brilliant — until it was suicidal. When more than half your attention and revenue runs through a single company's feed-ranking decisions, you haven't built a media company. You've built an elaborate bet on someone else's priorities staying aligned with yours. They won't. They never do.

To their credit, LADbible is trying to pivot — talking up direct branded video, sponsorships, and original formats, which grew 11% in the UK and 29% in the US. Original content now accounts for 54% of total revenue, up from 51%. CEO Solly Solomou has relocated to New York to chase direct commercial relationships. They're building actual IP on YouTube, where, again, they're growing. These are the right moves. They are also the moves everyone told them to make five years ago when Facebook was still sending rivers of traffic their way and making it very easy to ignore the advice.

The lesson here isn't complicated, and yet somehow the entire digital media industry has to relearn it every generation: the only durable hedge is owned audience. Email lists. Direct traffic. Formats that advertisers actually seek out rather than stumble upon. IP that lives somewhere you control. No single platform should be able to take out 80-90% of your engagement in twelve months just by updating a ranking system. And yet!

Every publisher with a P&L that's overly tied to algorithmic traffic is essentially writing an option that someone else controls. The premium looks great — right up until the counterparty decides to reprice risk overnight, with no warning, no severance, and a very cheerful blog post about supporting original creators.

LADbible isn't unique. They're just the current exhibit. Before them it was BuzzFeed, and Little Things, and Upworthy, and a dozen others who built cathedrals on rented land and then expressed surprise when the landlord renovated.

The raccoon was funny, though. I'll give them that.