The advertising industry has always loved one thing more than growth: pretending it understands what it’s measuring. For seventy years, we let one company count the eyeballs and called it currency. Then streaming detonated the living room. AI detonated targeting. Retail media blew a hole through the funnel. And suddenly the entire ecosystem is discovering that the emperor’s dashboard has no clothes. Nielsen isn’t dead. The challengers aren’t winning. CTV impressions are hitting turned-off TVs. Google is turning targeting into suggestions. Amazon is spending $200 billion like capital discipline is optional. And Netflix — once proudly anti-ad — is discovering that monetization is a skill, not a vibe.

These aren’t isolated headlines. They’re one big structural tell. Measurement is unstable. Currency is political. AI is eating control. Retail media is escaping the retailer. Everyone onstage is saying “transformation” while quietly renewing the same contracts they trashed last quarter. The trade press wants winners and losers. The real story is messier — and more interesting. Infrastructure is sticky. Trust is thin. Control is evaporating. The ground is shifting under adland’s feet, and the only people pretending otherwise are the ones selling the slide decks.

For decades, Nielsen was less a measurement company and more a regulatory body with a logo. One panel. One currency. Three networks and a prayer. Then streaming showed up with 400 devices, 1,600 FAST channels and an identity crisis. In 2021, the Media Rating Council yanked Nielsen’s accreditation and the trade press practically wrote the obituary in Canva. The challengers were coming. Multi-currency was inevitable. The king was dead. Long live chaos.

Except… Nielsen didn’t die. It rebuilt. Big Data + Panel got accredited. Sports leagues re-signed. Agencies renewed. The same execs who called it “unstable” and “unacceptable” quietly inked new contracts because infrastructure lock-in is stronger than outrage. Is the methodology perfect? No. Is anyone else ready to replace it at scale? Also no. Welcome to measurement in 2026: everyone’s mad, no one’s leaving.

VideoAmp told the world it had every publisher, every holding company, and destiny on speed dial. Then its own chairman admitted on stage they represent less than 1% of the $4 billion measurement TAM. That’s not disruption. That’s a rounding error with a press team. Cue executive exits, CEO musical chairs, and a lot of “strategic pivot” language that translates to: this is harder than we thought.

And yet. The company built a $150 million advanced currency business from zero in a few years. That’s real money. The problem? Traditional demo currency is still the bigger pie, and Nielsen still owns the bakery. VideoAmp may have “90% of the future,” but the future is currently a side dish. The question isn’t whether they built something. It’s whether they built it fast enough to outrun the debt.

On paper, iSpot looks busy. Integrations with The Trade Desk. A courtroom win against EDO. Research with GroupM. But scratch the surface and you find no MRC accreditation, Super Bowl numbers that don’t line up with Nielsen’s, and Glassdoor reviews that read like a hostage note. And then there are the layoffs. Nearly a quarter of the company cut in months. No splashy coverage. Just bodies disappearing quietly.

Here’s the strategic misstep: while VideoAmp made friends and played coalition politics, iSpot went to war. Agencies. Publishers. Competitors. Nielsen. That’s a bold move when you’re trying to become currency. Now they’re layering AI on top and calling it transformation. Maybe. Or maybe it’s what happens when growth-stage valuations meet the reality of trying to dethrone a 70-year incumbent.

The Kroger Company just handed its U.S. creative AOR business to McCann New York, politely ghosting DDB New York in the process. After a 2019 rebrand and a few years of holding the bag, DDB’s out. McCann’s in. Cue the “iconic brand” and “deep commitment to communities” boilerplate.

Let’s translate: grocery is a margin knife fight and retail media is eating everyone’s lunch. Kroger needs creative that works as hard as its data business. McCann gets a giant, complicated client with 2,700 stores and a thousand stakeholders. If this turns into another beige “fresh for everyone” campaign, nobody wins. If they actually weaponize Kroger’s commerce data, that’s interesting. Don’t bet on beige.

An Australian startup called Linkby just raised $15 million to fund what it calls “performance-based editorial.” Translation: sponsored content, but with a cost-per-click model and better analytics. The founder insists it’s more like PR because brands don’t control the angle. Sure. And advertorials are journalism with moisturizer.

The pitch is simple: publishers are broke, SEO is dying, AI search is siphoning traffic, and everyone wants engagement they can track to conversions. So Linkby pays for editorial, optimizes it, and promises measurable ROAS. It’s smart. It’s timely. It’s also proof that in 2026, the only way to sell “content” is to slap performance math on it and pray nobody asks where church ends and commerce begins.

Amazon posted monster numbers. Over $21 billion in quarterly ad revenue. Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football pulling 15 million viewers a game. AWS humming along with double-digit growth. And then Andy Jassy drops the $200 billion capex bomb for next year like it’s pocket change.

Investors flinched. Stock dipped. Because AI infrastructure is the new arms race and nobody knows who actually wins. Amazon is betting the farm on data centers, AI agents like Rufus, and a future where ads, commerce, and cloud are fused into one giant monetization engine. The question isn’t whether Amazon can spend. It’s whether Wall Street has the stomach to wait while it does.

Netflix built a $1.5 billion ad business and somehow still feels like it hates advertising. Fill rates hovering embarrassingly low. Pricing architecture that trains buyers to choose the cheaper programmatic door. An ad org reportedly allergic to dissent. That’s not a tech-stack issue. That’s a leadership and DNA issue.

Netflix was born anti-ad. Now it’s trying to be premium TV’s savior while acting like selling inventory is beneath it. Independent measurement? Reluctant. Self-serve? Slow. Culture shift? Heavy lift. If the most powerful streaming platform on earth can’t figure out how to monetize ads cleanly, that’s not a Netflix problem. That’s a CTV market reality check.

Google just redefined Lookalike segments in Demand Gen campaigns from strict audience caps to… suggestions. Those neat 2.5%, 5%, 10% similarity thresholds? Gone. Now they’re “signals.” Translation: the AI will decide who to target, and your slider is more of a mood than a rule.

Yes, you can opt out. With a form. That takes a week. Interface controls coming “later.” This is the slow erosion of advertiser control disguised as performance optimization. It may well improve CPA. It also makes targeting a black box with a dashboard. If you feel like your media plan is becoming a polite suggestion to an algorithm, that’s because it is.

After a messy split from UTA, Michael Kassan’s 3C Ventures has already blown past $50 million in revenue. Seven-figure transformation projects. Deal-making in adtech. A beachfront splash at Cannes with Questlove on deck. Subtlety was not invited.

Kassan’s play is simple: convene the powerful, fix their org charts, and broker the deals in between. He helped orchestrate holdco investments in Mediaocean, advised Fortune 500 CMOs, and positioned himself once again at the center of the industry’s power grid. In adland, relevance is currency. Kassan isn’t just spending it. He’s manufacturing it.

Michael Kassan doesn't sell strategy. He sells himself. And business has never been better.

Let me explain what 3C Ventures actually is, because the branding—"consulting, convening, co-investing"—is corporate poetry designed to obscure something simpler and more interesting: Kassan has built a $50-million-in-15-months business out of being the guy who knows everyone's secrets and everyone's phone number. That's the product. That's the whole product.

He's not a consultant. He's a therapist with a Rolodex. When Qualcomm was ready to blow up an agency relationship, he didn't hand them a deck with a quadrant chart. He told them to go into therapy with their agency, then designed the treatment plan himself. McKinsey would never. McKinsey also doesn't have his closing rate.

The real genius—and I use that word with some irritation—is that Kassan figured out the thing the ad industry doesn't like to admit: it runs on relationships, gossip, fear, and a small number of people who actually decide things. Everyone knows everyone. Everyone is afraid of everyone. And everyone needs someone to call when they're about to do something big, stupid, or both.

Kassan made himself that someone.

His superpower is "seeing around corners"—which sounds like hagiography until you realize why: he's sitting on top of more confidential conversations than a priest at a mob wedding. When you're simultaneously advising the CMO who's about to fire her agency, the agency CEO who suspects he's about to get fired, and the platform that wants to eat both their lunches, you don't need to predict the future. You just need to read your own text messages.

This is where the conflict-of-interest alarms should be ringing so loud they can hear them in Cannes. In late 2024, 3CV got WPP, Omnicom, and IPG—three holding companies that would happily watch each other drown—to take parallel equity stakes in Mediaocean. Three bitter competitors, same cap table, same architect. Kassan then took a board seat as vice chair. He didn't advise on the deal. He designed the geometry of it. That's not consulting. That's statecraft for people who buy media.

And then there's Cannes. Oh, Cannes. Kassan didn't invent the Lions. He just colonized them—turning the Riviera's annual awards show into what it always wanted to be: a very expensive place for very important people to agree to very large deals while pretending to care about creative work. Post-messy-divorce from UTA, he's done it again but bigger and pettier: a Michelin-starred dinner at the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc with Disney and iHeart, Questlove spinning the after-party, 240 dinner guests, 400 at the late-night. All while MediaLink was down the road wondering what happened.

Here's the uncomfortable question nobody in adland wants to answer: Is Kassan an access peddler operating in a fog of conflicts? Or is he the most honest person in the industry—the one who looked at a business built on relationships and said, fine, I'll just charge for the relationships directly?

The answer, maddeningly, is both. He optimizes for relevance over purity. He leans into the conflicts instead of pretending they don't exist, because being in the middle of everything keeps him impossible to ignore. Lawsuits, spending accusations, polarizing press—he treats all of it as the cost of staying at the center of the graph.

And the graph keeps paying. $50 million in 15 months. Seven-figure transformation contracts with Delta and JPMorgan Chase. A path to $100 million. All from a Century City office with fewer than 10 employees.

The product is the phone. The product has always been the phone. And right now, nobody else's is ringing louder.