If you blinked, you probably missed five lawsuits, three executive orders, a Cannes ad campaign about skin cream, and someone from Reddit trying to make chaos look like strategy. Welcome to the media industry in 2025, where holding companies are merging like it’s speed dating, CTV giants are forming alliances that feel suspiciously like monopolies in drag, and gaming—yes, gaming—finally got promoted from side quest to media main event.

In the middle of all this? A real loss that reminded us not everything is cynical metrics and shareholder decks. Dennis Holt passed, and with him, a piece of the industry’s actual heart. The rest of the headlines? TikTok’s still in purgatory, Kassan’s predicting mergers like a caffeinated Oracle, RFK Jr. wants to blow up pharma ads, and Amazon and The Trade Desk are playing cold war with AI video. In short: the industry is moving fast, breaking things, and rewriting its own rulebook—again. Buckle up? No. Pay attention.

Dennis Holt wasn’t just a media legend — he was a mensch. He built USIM with vision, yes, but what people remember is how he built people. He made time, gave credit, and made this cutthroat industry feel human.

Over decades, Dennis redefined what it meant to lead in media. He didn’t just scale an independent agency — he cultivated trust, mentorship, and a culture where empathy wasn’t just tolerated, it was the expectation. His legacy lives in every executive he mentored and every campaign built on human connection.

In a business addicted to metrics, Dennis measured impact in people. He showed the industry that building with heart lasts longer than any trend cycle.

We didn’t just lose a founder. We lost one of the few who made advertising feel like home.

Using executive orders like a deck of Uno cards, Trump delayed TikTok’s forced selloff for the third time. ByteDance is silent, Congress is fuming, and app stores are caught in a very expensive waiting room.

The extension pushes TikTok’s selloff deadline to mid-September, despite lawmakers having introduced an actual bill months ago. Trump’s administration insists it’s about national security, but critics argue it’s about optics and control. ByteDance remains mute, while Apple, Oracle, and Google sit in legal limbo — hosting a politically radioactive app without a legal framework to back them.

Congress has already warned that further delays expose platforms to potential lawsuits and ruinous liability. And still, no one’s willing to stop the president’s executive workaround — which may not survive court scrutiny.

This isn’t policymaking. It’s political Jenga. And it’s wobbling hard.

Brands have flirted with in-game ads for years. Now, the market’s ready to commit. With console giants rolling out DSP support and AAA developers cracking open inventory, gaming is no longer the side quest — it’s the main campaign.

Major consoles like PlayStation and Xbox are adopting ad models straight out of the app store playbook, making it easier for brands to port over tried-and-true tactics. At the same time, companies like EA Sports are offering premium placements inside sports titles — think Madden and EA Sports FC — unlocking access to fandoms that are loyal, passionate, and hard to reach anywhere else. Add in advances in measurement, and advertisers now have the hygiene, scale, and data to finally go all in.

Gamers aren’t just engaged — they’re tribal. And if you’re a brand trying to reach the unreachables (cord-cutters, ad-blockers, Gen Z in headphones), this is the most immersive media channel left.

It took a while, but gaming just became the most immersive ad space on Earth. Ready, player brand.

Roku and Amazon announced a data-driven team-up that’ll connect 80 million authenticated TV households. That’s not scale — that’s saturation.

By combining Roku’s OS dominance with Amazon’s DSP infrastructure, advertisers gain unprecedented deterministic reach — all logged-in, all measurable. Early results show a 3X return on ad spend, a 42% increase in unique reach, and a 27% drop in ad frequency. It’s precision at mass scale, without relying on wobbly third-party targeting tricks.

This isn’t just about better ads — it’s about fixing CTV’s biggest headache: too much waste, not enough signal. Together, Roku and Amazon are giving advertisers what they’ve always wanted: scale and certainty.

It’s not a walled garden. It’s a walled supermall. And every brand just got a VIP badge.

Michael Kassan, never one to whisper predictions, is calling the next wave: another holding company mega-merger is coming, and probably sooner than most expect. If you thought the Omnicom-IPG deal was a one-off, think again.

Kassan’s take is blunt — holding companies are under pressure from every angle. Margins are thin, client demands are high, and internal consolidation isn’t enough. While WPP and IPG have tried to simplify with brand mashups like VML and IPG Health, it’s window dressing unless someone starts slashing back-end redundancies and stacking real scale. He believes consolidation now has industrial logic — not just strategic spin.

In a world of fee compression and AI-driven commoditization, the big players either get bigger or risk irrelevance. Kassan’s not forecasting drama — he’s describing math.

Agency logos are about to get swallowed whole. Call your branding agency now — or you might not need one later.

This year’s Cannes Grand Prix winners weren’t chasing clickbait or crypto. They were solving problems — from AI beauty filters to fare fraud to skin-care pseudoscience. Purpose wasn’t performative; it was the product.

Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign hacked Pinterest’s algorithm to favor authentic, unfiltered faces — pushing back against the rise of AI-enhanced perfection. Indian Railways went hyper-local with a campaign that turned train tickets into literal lottery entries, reversing $800 million in annual losses. And Vaseline? It went after TikTok’s skin hacks with science, not sass — making dermatology go viral the right way.

None of these campaigns needed AR filters or celebrity drops. They worked because they were rooted in behavior change and real-world stakes — not Cannes spectacle.

If your campaign isn’t fixing something, you’re not winning Lions. You’re just renting the yacht.

Reddit’s turning its chaos into capital. At Cannes, the platform introduced two new AI-powered ad tools that promise to help brands harness its infamous threads for structured, real-time marketing intelligence. Somehow, the front page of the internet is finally marketer-ready.

“Reddit Insights” acts like a cultural radar, scanning hot topics and user sentiment across communities. “Conversation Summary Add-ons” then pull positive, organic content from those threads and display it beneath ads — making every Reddit ad look like it’s already endorsed by the community. Together, they’re powered by Reddit Community Intelligence, a system trained on what Redditors actually say — not what marketers wish they said.

Reddit’s always been authentic, but also impossible to navigate. These tools offer just enough structure to make it scalable, without killing the chaos that gives it power.

Reddit finally gave brands a way to listen without lurking — and speak without stepping on a rake.

RFK Jr. is coming for pharma’s ad budget — not with a ban, but with regulation that could make TV campaigns more expensive, more complicated, and way less attractive.

Two policy ideas are getting attention. One would force advertisers to spell out every risk and side effect in consumer-facing spots — bloating airtime and compliance costs. The other? Blocking drugmakers from writing off their massive TV ad spend as a business expense, effectively nuking the incentive to advertise at all. Broadcasters are bracing for impact, and pharma’s already dialing their PACs.

Pharma is one of the last cash cows for linear TV — $5.1 billion in 2024 alone. If even one of these rules lands, it won’t just hurt Pfizer’s media mix. It could crater ad-supported prime time as we know it.

If Kennedy pulls the trigger, TV execs may need to replace “Ask your doctor” with “Call your accountant.”

Amazon and The Trade Desk keep claiming they’re not rivals — which is cute, considering they’re chasing the exact same playbook in AI-generated video. Welcome to the Cold War of CTV creative.

Amazon is trying to bootstrap video creation directly into its DSP to give Fire TV advertisers an on-ramp to dynamic creative — solving its long-standing problem of weak video libraries. The Trade Desk, meanwhile, is forming alliances with creative automation startups like Nova and Spaceback, letting their partners handle the heavy lifting. Both are gunning for the same thing: scalable, performance-friendly video that doesn’t require a $300K agency brief.

The next frontier in programmatic isn’t just targeting — it’s creative that moves. AI-generated video at scale gives whichever platform nails it first the power to control not just what gets served, but what gets remembered.

The creative wars have started. And while everyone’s watching CPMs, the real battle is who gets to make the ad in the first place.

When I saw the Roku–Amazon partnership announcement, I didn’t clutch my pearls. I reached for popcorn. Because this wasn’t just a headline—it was a tectonic throat punch. Eighty million authenticated households. A CTV footprint larger than most countries. And Amazon’s DSP as the only ticket inside? That’s not a partnership. That’s a velvet rope to the future of TV—and The Trade Desk is stuck in line, muttering about transparency while fumbling for its VIP pass.

Let’s break it down: Amazon and Roku have created what might be the most powerful adtech alliance since Google decided it wanted to own the internet. This isn’t theoretical reach. This is real, logged-in, device-connected, credit-card-attached people watching streaming TV while impulse buying socks and portable jacuzzis on the same platform.

It’s the stuff Jeff Green used to sketch on whiteboards back when the industry still believed open programmatic would save us from the duopoly. Spoiler alert: it didn’t. And this time, he’s not even in the room where it’s happening.

Here’s the brass tacks: the Roku-Amazon pact is exclusive. If you want to access their authenticated CTV audiences—which now include Prime Video, The Roku Channel, Tubi, Disney+, Paramount+, and probably your cousin’s streaming startup—you do it through Amazon DSP. Period. No workaround. No “open exchange.” No “identity bridge.” Just the Big A and their glimmering walled garden, complete with biometric gates and a checkout button.

The payoff? Unified, deduplicated targeting. Deterministic measurement. Frequency capping that doesn’t require a Ouija board. And real-world attribution that goes beyond “we think someone might’ve seen this.” We’re talking: Yes, Nancy from Denver watched the ad, and yes, she bought the damn air fryer.

Meanwhile, The Trade Desk is still pitching its UID2 solution like a magician waving a slightly burned playing card, hoping no one notices that everyone else is performing with fire-breathing dragons.

Let’s stop pretending this was subtle.

Amazon and Roku just built the streaming Death Star—and The Trade Desk is busy drawing floor plans for a modest space station that’s still under regulatory review.

Roku didn’t build a rival DSP. They didn’t need to. They handed the keys to Amazon and said, “Here, drive. You’ve already got the audience, the data, the distribution, and oh—also the store where people actually buy stuff.”

It’s not a strategic alliance. It’s a logistical coup.

Amazon, in its infinitely predatory wisdom, now owns both the screen and the cart. And that means every other DSP is now playing on borrowed time and borrowed identity graphs. They're selling reach with a side of uncertainty while Amazon offers conversions, receipts, and a thank-you email.

And The Trade Desk? It’s like watching a champion boxer shadowbox in a mirror, completely unaware the match has already moved to another ring.

Early testing shows that campaigns running through Amazon’s DSP on this joint platform delivered:

That’s not optimization. That’s annihilation.

This deal doesn’t just eliminate CTV’s fragmentation headache—it steamrolls it, wraps it in a Prime box, and delivers it straight to your QBR as a solved problem.

Roku’s stock jumped 10% after the news. The Trade Desk’s? Let’s just say if you listened closely, you could hear hedge fund analysts updating their slide decks while whispering, “Uh-oh.”

This isn’t just about reach. It’s about control. The Trade Desk built its empire by being the middleman to everyone. Now Amazon is saying, “Cool story, bro. We’ll just be the buyer, the seller, the data broker, the screen, the wallet, and the delivery truck.”

And Roku? They didn’t lose their independence. They licensed it out with terms so good you’d think Jeff Bezos personally gifted them a golden goose and said, “Go wild.”

The shift is existential.

The ad world always talks about “addressability” like it’s some holy grail. But what Amazon just did was plug the entire address book into their checkout system, and invite Roku to ride shotgun. That’s not a leapfrog. That’s a jetpack strapped to a rhino.

The new platform rolls out to all advertisers using Amazon DSP by Q4 2025. Expect every mid-tier DSP CMO to panic-sweat their way through QBRs, praying their brand clients don’t notice the elephant—and Fire TV—in the room.

Programmatic purists will cry foul. Agencies will start preparing “neutrality audits.” But buyers? Buyers follow performance. And right now, performance is wearing an Amazon badge and waving from a Roku remote.

The Trade Desk may still be invited to the Cannes parties. But don’t let the linen suits fool you—this was a boardroom knife fight, and they just lost a kidney.

They’re betting we’re not paying attention. We are.

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