Every December, the advertising industry tries to tidy itself up. It posts year-end reflections, shares lessons learned, and convinces itself that the chaos of the previous twelve months was somehow intentional. The tone is always earnest, a little smug, and deeply selective. We call it perspective. What it really is, most years, is laundering memory.

Last year didn’t cooperate.

On ADOTAT, the stories that broke through weren’t the ones designed to inspire optimism or reassure CMOs that everything is under control. They were the ones that exposed how brittle the industry’s narratives have become, how allergic it is to scrutiny, and how conditional its support for journalism really is once journalism stops being flattering.

These weren’t stories people casually skimmed. They were stories people read closely, forwarded quietly, argued about loudly, and then pretended not to remember in public.

And none of them did more damage to the illusion than the one everyone wishes hadn’t existed.

The most read article of the year. Also the one that revealed the most about who this industry really is.

The Cannes Report was, by every measurable standard, the biggest story ADOTAT published last year. It traveled faster, reached farther, and landed harder than anything else. It also generated the most anger, the most defensiveness, and the most behind-the-scenes scrambling.

What’s important is this: the outrage was never about accuracy.

No one seriously disputed what was described. The behavior wasn’t controversial. It was familiar. Executives leering. Hands lingering. Conversations derailed by comments that reduced women to props in someone else’s ego performance. Networking environments where women were forced to perform constant, exhausting risk calculations while pretending everything was normal.

None of this was new. What was new was that someone wrote it down plainly, without euphemism, and without the usual industry anesthesia.

I didn’t want to write that piece. That’s the part people who accused me of “wanting attention” missed entirely. I wanted to enjoy my coffee. I wanted to treat Cannes like everyone else treats Cannes: a blur of panels, rosé, and carefully curated photos that make it all look harmless. Instead, I spent days reading messages from women describing which parties they avoided, which executives were known problems, and which smiles meant danger.

The angriest responses didn’t come from people denying the behavior. They came from people furious that it was exposed. The real sin wasn’t misconduct. It was visibility.

At one point, a senior executive in the industry—someone who regularly speaks in public about media quality, ethics, and the need to support journalism—privately threatened legal action over the report.

Not over falsehoods. Over discomfort. The message was clear enough: journalism is admirable in theory, but unacceptable when it disrupts the social order that protects powerful people.

That moment mattered more than the threat itself. It clarified something essential. The industry doesn’t punish bad behavior. It punishes people who make bad behavior inconvenient.

ADOTAT+ exists precisely because of moments like this. The full Cannes reporting, context, and follow-ups live there not as provocation, but as insulation. Truth travels better when it isn’t alone.

A controlled demolition dressed up as operational maturity.

If Cannes exposed the industry’s moral evasions, GroupM exposed its structural ones.

The reorganization wasn’t dramatic. There was no collapse, no sudden reckoning. It arrived the way modern corporate change always arrives: in a memo that said almost nothing while quietly ending thousands of careers. “Single operating model.” “Integration.” “Roles impacted.” The language was smooth, professional, and deliberately bloodless.

What it translated to was simple. Agency brands would remain in name only. P&Ls would disappear. Autonomy would evaporate. Culture would be replaced by process.

This wasn’t mismanagement. It was adaptation. Brian Lesser did exactly what the market now demands from executives sitting atop legacy structures. Scale stopped being a competitive advantage. Complexity stopped being charming. Efficiency won.

But something else was lost in the process, and everyone knows it. Agency individuality, whatever remained of it, was quietly euthanized. The idea that media buying was an ecosystem of competing philosophies and human judgment gave way to something colder and flatter. Media Management and Delivery isn’t a vision. It’s a utility.

The most telling reaction wasn’t outrage. It was resignation. People understood immediately that this wasn’t the last round. It was just the first one that bothered to introduce itself.

Behind ADOTAT+, the analysis went further. Not because it was speculative, but because it was uncomfortable. The client implications, the talent drain, the long-term hollowing out of trust when relationships are replaced by dashboards—those aren’t things you put in a reorg FAQ.

An autopsy of an experiment that never belonged.

Microsoft’s ad tech ambitions didn’t fail because of incompetence or neglect. They failed because of mismatch.

Xandr, rebadged and reorganized into Microsoft Invest, was supposed to turn Microsoft into a credible alternative to the duopoly. The story was compelling on slides. First-party data. Cross-screen reach. Ethical positioning. Clean separation from surveillance-driven excess.

In practice, it always felt like a guest at a party it didn’t quite understand.

DSPs are punishing businesses. Margins are thin. Support is constant. Edge cases never end. Microsoft builds infrastructure designed for scale and stability. A DSP is neither. It requires obsession, tolerance for chaos, and a willingness to fight for incremental budget scraps.

By the time Microsoft formally pulled the plug, buyers had already disengaged emotionally. The product existed more as a pitch artifact than as a daily tool. This wasn’t a technological failure. It was a failure of fit, and the market sniffed it out early.

When everyone else reorganized, Publicis consolidated power.

While competitors obsessed over structure, Publicis bought something far more durable: control of identity infrastructure.

Absorbing Lotame into Epsilon wasn’t about incremental targeting improvements. It was about owning the substrate on which AI-driven marketing actually works. Four billion profiles isn’t an ad product. It’s leverage.

The contrast with the Omnicom-IPG merger was stark. One side consolidated humans and overhead. The other consolidated signals. Only one of those compounds over time.

At that moment, the industry crossed a quiet threshold. Identity stopped being a nice-to-have and became existential.

Two distractions pretending to be debates.

The fixation on take rates served the same purpose it always does: it gave the industry something easy to argue about while avoiding the real shift underneath. The value didn’t disappear. It migrated upward into places where complexity, not scale, creates leverage.

Meanwhile, the breathless declarations of an “Age of Outcomes” revealed advertising’s oldest habit: renaming gravity and calling it innovation. Every advertiser has always wanted results. Dressing that desire up as revelation doesn’t make it new. It just makes it billable.

And why ADOTAT+ does too.

Most industry publications survive by avoiding discomfort. They run press releases, sponsored studies, and conference coverage that never asks who paid for the microphone.

ADOTAT exists outside that economy. That choice costs access. It costs invitations. Occasionally, it costs friendships. What it buys is independence.

Last year wasn’t a year of progress. It was a year of exposure. And exposure, it turns out, is still the one thing this industry doesn’t know how to optimize for.

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Here’s the moment when the whole thing snapped into focus for me this year, and it wasn’t a panel, a white paper, or a conference keynote. It was a quiet, deeply unglamorous story that never made it onstage anywhere.

I learned about a PR firm in the adtech industry that was paying someone inside another PR firm to quietly route clients their way and help shift narratives to benefit them. Not pitch decks. Not positioning memos. Actual, behind-the-scenes influence trading. When it surfaced, the person on the receiving end of that arrangement was fired.

And before anyone reaches for the melodrama, let’s be clear about something important.

These people are not cartoon villains.
They are not twirling mustaches or plotting industry collapse. They are protecting their interests, which is, in fact, part of business. Not the noble part. Not the part anyone brags about on LinkedIn. But a very real part of how power behaves when it feels threatened.

What struck me wasn’t the existence of the behavior. It was how normalized it felt to the people explaining it. No one framed it as shocking. It was described the way people describe a loophole or a workaround. As if the real mistake wasn’t the behavior, but getting caught.

Then comes the part that stops being merely cynical and starts being instructive.

Imagine this, because it’s real.

In the adtech industry, there are companies that position themselves as neutral consultants, trusted voices who “advise the industry,” guide clients toward “best practices,” and publicly advocate for transparency, quality, and reform. At the same time, those same entities push clients toward their advertisers, shape narratives that benefit paying partners, and then—this is the part you couldn’t invent if you tried—recommend third-party vendors to fix the very problems their ecosystem helped create.

They create the smoke.
They sell the fire extinguisher.
They bill for the safety lecture afterward.

This isn’t corruption in the movie sense. It’s circular economics. A closed loop where confusion is not a bug but a feature, because confusion creates demand for guidance, tools, audits, consultants, platforms, and “solutions” layered on top of one another.

This is why so many people who talk loudly about reform never actually change the system. They are structurally embedded in it. They benefit from its complexity, its opacity, and its constant low-grade crisis. Real transparency wouldn’t just expose bad actors. It would expose business models that depend on clients not seeing the whole picture at once.

And this is the part that matters most for anyone serious about understanding the industry.

Most of the resistance to change doesn’t come from malice. It comes from self-preservation. From organizations protecting revenue streams, relevance, and positioning in an ecosystem where clarity would collapse margins and force uncomfortable conversations with clients, boards, and regulators.

That’s why conferences avoid log-level access.
That’s why “transparency” is framed as philosophy instead of contract language.
That’s why accountability is discussed in panels but never encoded in economics.

The system isn’t broken because no one knows better.
It’s broken because too many people are doing very well inside the breakage.

Once you see that, a lot of last year stops being confusing. It becomes legible