I thought this week was going to be one long yawn until Tony Katsur decided to set the table on fire.

Now we’ve got Google being accused of running a partisan dodgeball league inside Gmail, Dentsu pawning off its international empire like a Craigslist sofa, and Overwolf trying to slip Pepsi into your Fortnite kill shot.

Sprinkle in Prebid and the IAB hissing at each other over transaction IDs, and suddenly the industry looks less like a trade association and more like Real Housewives of Programmatic.

And just when you thought the chaos was enough, Meta’s chatbots got caught trying to sext minors and spout racist garbage—because nothing says “responsible AI” like a horny, bigoted algorithm moonlighting as your brand rep.

Meanwhile, The Trade Desk’s Kokai, their supposed AI wunderkind, is so “smart” it’s ghosting buyers and funneling spend into digital purgatory. Oh, and Pixalate reminded everyone that Google still owns the ad exchange universe, in case you had delusions otherwise.

So no, it’s not a boring week. It’s a week where every big player managed to show us their worst instincts—greed, denial, or just plain incompetence.

The inbox is rigged, the agencies are broke, the gamers are sold out, the chatbots are creeps, and the AI overlords are confused.

Or as I like to call it: FRIDAY.

The FTC just slid into Google’s DMs with a warning letter accusing Gmail of playing political dodgeball—yeeting Republican fundraising emails into the spam folder while letting Democrats coast into inboxes like it’s a campaign freebie. FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson cites reports of Gmail labeling GOP solicitations as “dangerous,” while Democratic ones supposedly get the email equivalent of a red carpet.

Google swears it's just the algorithm. But let’s be real: when your AI’s got a political bent and donors can't find the "Give Now" button, you’re not optimizing engagement—you’re rigging the email Hunger Games.

Dentsu’s trying to Marie Kondo its way out of a $5 billion mistake. The Japanese giant is exploring “strategic alternatives” (translation: “Can someone please buy this mess?”) for its international ops, which include the wheezing corpse of Aegis Group. Between $1.38 billion in impairment charges and 3,400 layoffs, it’s like watching a luxury cruise ship sink in slow motion.

Meanwhile, Dentsu Japan’s domestic biz is thriving. Which just proves: maybe don’t spend billions trying to impress Europe when you’re already the king at home.

Overwolf just poached an ad exec from Activision to scale its gamer ad empire across Europe. Their pitch? “We’re companions, not distractions.” Translation: we’ll gently slip Armani and Amazon ads into your Fortnite sesh like it’s a damn TED Talk.

With over 100 million monthly users, they’ve become the plug for brands desperate to be “in the game.” But let’s not kid ourselves—this is user experience as ad real estate, and at some point, even gamers will say, “Enough with the shampoo ads while I reload.”

The IAB Tech Lab just dragged Prebid like a bad roommate for bailing on OpenRTB standards. Prebid’s new implementation breaks transaction IDs, meaning DSPs can no longer deduplicate auctions—aka the one damn thing that prevented bidding on the same impression four times. Privacy concerns were the excuse, but this smells more like chaos wrapped in code.

The IAB is now calling for an industry summit. Let’s hope it’s less of a kumbaya circle and more of a tech intervention, because this move torched interoperability and left the buy side holding the bag. If you're a DSP, good luck optimizing with a blindfold.

Pixalate’s latest SSP rankings are out, and Google AdExchange is the Thanos of mobile app access—snapping up the top spot in every region, every store, every damn list. Magnite, PubMatic, and InMobi are hanging in there, but honestly, it’s like bringing a butter knife to a bazooka fight.

If this were a poker game, Google just bought the table, the chips, and your seat. The rest of the industry? Just hoping someone leaves the door cracked open.

The Trade Desk hyped Kokai as the AI revolution of programmatic. Instead, buyers are pissed, and SSPs are twitching. Apparently, the platform’s optimization is so “intelligent” that it’s now accidentally ghosting existing deals and rerouting spend into a black hole of AI logic.

Here’s the thing: if your algorithm is confusing your own clients, that’s not “smart,” that’s self-sabotage. Media buyers don’t want to date HAL 9000—they want deals that clear.

In a masterclass of "What the actual hell?", Meta’s leaked AI chatbot guidelines revealed bots on Facebook and Instagram were allowed to flirt with minors, spout racist garbage, and generate misinformation like it was some kind of digital tabloid.

After Reuters blew the lid off a 200-page internal doc, Meta scrambled to unplug the more scandalous behaviors. But too late—the bots were already horny, offensive, and confidently wrong. Brand trust? Torched. Child safety? Compromised. Ethics? Who?

Matthew Bertram called it a “brand trust crisis of the highest order,” and he’s right. When your chatbot starts channeling Andrew Tate and WebMD in the same conversation, you don’t have a PR problem—you have a leadership void.

Bertram nails it: “Responsible AI isn’t optional—it’s a business necessity.” You can’t bolt on ethics after launch like a software patch. Get it right from the start, or brace for the viral takedown.

Dentsu International is now on the auction block. After years of expensive acquisitions, questionable strategy, and leadership that confused “expansion” with “burn rate,” the company is looking for a way out. They call it “strategic alternatives.” Everyone else calls it what it is: a fire sale.

The numbers tell the story in sharp relief. Over $1.38 billion in impairment losses, another 3,400 jobs slashed, and international revenue so anemic you’d need a microscope to detect growth. All of this while Dentsu’s domestic business in Japan is thriving, posting its ninth consecutive quarter of record revenue and profit.

The split is glaring. At home, Dentsu operates like a perfectly tuned bullet train. Abroad, it’s more like a rusted-out bus with two flat tires.

Dentsu’s troubles abroad are not just bad luck or market headwinds. They’re the result of Japanese corporate conservatism colliding with the chaos of global advertising markets.

Rather than embracing agility, Dentsu’s overseas leadership leaned into the very worst instincts of legacy agencies: bloated back offices, overlapping IT systems, bureaucratic fiefdoms, and risk-averse decision-making dressed up as “discipline.”

The result? Rivals like Accenture and Publicis raced ahead with digital-first, AI-powered, consultancy-led offerings, while Dentsu International was busy writing memos about integrating acquisitions that never really fit together in the first place.

The Aegis deal remains the crown jewel of Dentsu’s mismanagement. They shelled out $5 billion based on revenue projections that belonged in a fantasy novel. Most of that goodwill is now gone, replaced with write-downs so large they read like a parody of corporate finance.

The ad industry has been screaming for years: data, technology, and agility are the only way forward. Dentsu instead clung to the idea that creativity alone could save them, as if clients weren’t already shifting billions into performance-driven platforms and measurement-focused partners.

Boards are supposed to ask hard questions. Dentsu’s didn’t. By the time anyone raised an eyebrow, the losses were baked in. What passed for strategy looked more like a “hope and pray” model.

The contrast could not be sharper. Japan is Dentsu’s fortress: 5.3% organic revenue growth, record profits, and rising margins. Internationally, however, the empire is crumbling: revenue decline, a $540 million quarterly loss, and thousands of layoffs.

It’s proof that while Dentsu knows how to dominate its home turf, it has never cracked the code abroad. The bullet train at home turns into a derailed freight train once it crosses the border.

Dentsu has hired Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley and Nomura to shop its international assets around. The options range from minority partnerships to full-blown divestiture. Translation: they don’t know what to do, but they know they can’t keep doing this.

The real lesson here isn’t just about Dentsu’s mismanagement. It’s about what happens when a company built on rigid hierarchies and legacy thinking tries to compete in a world moving at digital speed. The Japanese business thrives precisely because it plays to those strengths. The international division, saddled with bad acquisitions and glacial decision-making, was never built to survive in a market that rewards agility over tradition.

Because honesty — I do some serious deep dives with some of the toughest, baddest folks in the industry every single week. You think you know what’s going on? You don’t know what’s behind Door #2 until we kick it open.

If you’ve read how Publicis ate the whole restaurant or how Netflix turned nostalgia into an adtech money printer, you know the drill: no fluff, no PR spin, just the stuff the trades are too scared (or too cozy) to print.

Next up: WPP: The Giant That Keeps Tripping Over Its Own Feet. Yeah… you’ll want to see this one.

Stay bold. Stay curious. Know more than you did yesterday.