Let’s take a stroll through this week’s dystopia:

📉 Meta’s Monopoly? Still Active.
The FTC is finally done being gaslit. After years of letting Zuckerberg play Monopoly with real money and fake competition, they’re back — and this time, they brought a legal flamethrower. Instagram + WhatsApp = Buy-or-Bury scheme? FTC says yes. Meta says “But TikTok!” FTC says “Try again, Mark.”

🤖 AI Now Judges Your Brand.
Forget SEO. If LLMs don’t like your vibe, you might as well be invisible. Enter: Chorus — a tool built to sweet-talk the bots into giving your brand the digital thumbs up. Because apparently branding is now a dating game with robots.

🏆 Cannes Lions Turned Into a Crime Scene.
Case studies built on AI fakery. Campaigns that may or may not have existed. Juries duped harder than your grandma on Facebook. This year’s festival was less “Mad Men,” more “To Catch a Predator: Ad Edition.”

🛫 Retail Media Has Boarded the Flight.
United and JetBlue are turning your seat-back screen into an ad exchange. Congrats — you’re no longer a passenger. You’re an impression with legs.

🧱 And Google? Sued by a Fence Company.
Yes, you read that right. A fence company is suing Google over mystery clicks. You can’t make this up. (But Google can… allegedly.)

🧠 And AI Bots? Still Stealing Your Content.
Publishers thought robots.txt would save them. The bots laughed, scraped their headlines, and turned it into a product demo. You’re not losing traffic — you’re training your future replacement.

🧵 Six stories. One cold splash of truth.
Read them all, or risk being the only person in your next meeting who doesn’t know that Meta might be disassembled, AI thinks your brand sucks, and Cannes Lions is in PR rehab.

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

Meta didn’t just build a social empire — it allegedly built a kill switch for competition. According to the FTC, Zuck’s trillion-dollar toy box gave him the power to raise ad loads, rake in monopoly profits, and steamroll startups before they ever got to Series A.

The FTC says Instagram and WhatsApp weren’t just smart buys — they were part of a strategic playbook to kill threats. The agency now wants Meta to divest both. Meta, of course, says, “But TikTok?” FTC replies: “Not the same species.”

Meta reportedly tripled Facebook’s ad load between 2014 and now, and jacked up Instagram in 2015 and 2018. Why? Because even if you hated one platform, you’d still land in Zuck’s backyard. That’s the luxury of a walled garden — with no exits.

Will Meta be forced to spin off its greatest hits? We’ll see. But the FTC’s memo makes one thing clear: monopoly isn’t just about size — it’s about suffocating options.

Forget SEO. If AI models don’t “like” your brand, you’re invisible. That’s the new panic Natalie Silverstein and the gang at Collectively are trying to fix with Chorus, a new tool built with Jellyfish to whisper sweet nothings into the ears of LLMs.

Chorus maps how LLMs perceive your brand based on prompts and customer personas — then tells you how to fix it using creator campaigns. TL;DR: It’s therapy for brands with an identity crisis — run by machines.

Early adopter Haleon (Advil, TUMS, etc.) says it helps steer creator strategy. Why does it matter? Because 50% of Gen Z already trust LLMs to tell them what to buy. Brand equity now lives in tokenized latent space. Cool.

In 2025, LLMs are the middlemen of trust. Chorus is a way to influence the influencer behind the influencer. That’s either genius… or terrifying. Probably both.

Cannes was supposed to celebrate creative greatness. Instead, it’s dragging adland through the swamp of AI-manipulated case studies, unverifiable metrics, and greenwashed fantasies. Congrats?

Organizers are scrambling. AI disclosures, detection tools, jury reforms — all promised for 2026. But Cannes has a credibility problem now, not in 18 months.

When the biggest award show in advertising turns into a forensic audit, maybe it’s time we stop rewarding decks and start rewarding real results. Or at least real campaigns.

United’s Kinective Media has gone from in-flight ads to a full-blown retail media platform. And JetBlue just handed them the boarding pass to 40 million new leisure travelers.

Kinective sells “pause ads” on seat-back screens, Spotify content tie-ins, and will soon let you shop, stream, and maybe buy sneakers mid-turbulence. It’s commerce, meet cabin pressure.

This isn’t just loyalty data — it’s location, behavior, and mood. You’re tired, cranky, and buckled in. Perfect ad moment. And United is bundling that attention for brands.

JetBlue is just the start. If Kinective’s vision takes off, every mile you fly is a data point to monetize. Sit back, relax, and enjoy being segmented.

PVC Fence Wholesale says Google’s ad system is like buying a drink without knowing what’s in it — or if it’s even a drink. The lawsuit: Google stopped disclosing what queries led to clicks… then billed them anyway.

According to PVC, $18K of their $49K ad spend went to “mystery clicks.” No breakdown. No answers. And Google’s defense? Arbitration clause and “we’ve got your money, thanks.”

The suit shines a light on the larger problem: Google’s shift toward privacy has also meant fewer insights, less control, and no recourse unless you’re a lawyer with time and money.

If this gets class-action traction, Google may have to answer the question advertisers have been asking for years: what, exactly, are we paying for?

AI bots aren’t just reading your site. They’re living on it. A new TollBit report says Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) bots are scraping content 2.5x more than training bots — and most publishers can’t stop them.

Training bots are old school — they read once and bounce. RAG bots? They hover like your ex on Instagram. Continuous, stealthy, and often in violation of robots.txt. And they bring no traffic back.

OpenAI has a 179:1 scrape-to-visit ratio. Anthropic? A face-melting 8692:1. Publishers are serving up content on silver platters and getting breadcrumbs in return. This isn’t partnership — it’s looting with a smile.

RAG bots increasingly ignore robots.txt. Google doesn’t even use its “Google-Extended” bot for Gemini scraping. Which means if you block the AI bots, you risk getting delisted from regular search. Damned if you do…

TollBit offers tollgates. IAB Tech Lab’s building APIs. But unless publishers organize, they’ll keep getting scraped for free — while AI firms cash in on summaries that get the clicks they never will.

The FTC just served Zuck his antitrust mitzvah. And it comes with a side of breakup.

Let’s be honest: everyone knew Meta didn’t buy Instagram and WhatsApp to play nice. They bought them the same way a python hugs its dinner — slow, calculated, and with the intent to never hear from it again. And now, after more than a decade of finger-wagging and posturing, the FTC is finally showing up with something resembling legal brass knuckles.

In its most ambitious move since pretending it could regulate Facebook in 2011, the FTC is arguing that Meta’s “personal social networking” monopoly isn’t just bad for the vibes — it’s actively anti-competitive. They’re pointing to emails from Zuck that basically say, “We can’t beat them… let’s buy them,” and calling BS on the idea that TikTok and YouTube are real competition. According to the FTC, Facebook and Instagram connect your cousin Shira and her baby photos; TikTok connects you to 19-year-olds deep-throating pickles for clout. Not the same.

Meta’s lullaby remains familiar: “The apps are free! Look at the features! Where’s the harm?”
Never mind that ad loads on Facebook have tripled like your blood pressure during an election cycle. Or that escaping the Meta ecosystem requires either divine intervention or a flip phone. The FTC calls that monopoly maintenance. Meta calls it a seamless experience. Tomato, tomahto — except one comes with tracking pixels.

If the court sides with the government, Meta could be forced to spin off both Instagram and WhatsApp — and yes, that would be the biggest social media breakup since Taylor and Calvin Harris.
Imagine logging into three different ad portals, with three different targeting rules, and three different versions of “You agreed to our new privacy policy.” Delightful.

Ads get messier.
Right now, Meta’s ad machine is a Death Star: one login, massive reach, no escape. Break it up, and suddenly advertisers are juggling multiple interfaces, pricing models, and maybe even having to… think?

Privacy might improve — but don’t hold your breath.
Sure, no more cross-platform data-sharing orgies. But unless we pass actual privacy laws (don’t laugh), these newly independent platforms will find new ways to slurp your behavioral breadcrumbs. You’re still the product — they’ll just fight over who gets your address first.

This isn’t just about Meta.
If the FTC wins, it sets precedent. Amazon, Google, Apple? Suddenly those so-called ecosystems start to look less like walled gardens and more like monopoly cosplay with UX overlays.

Of course, this is far from over.
Judge James Boasberg gets to stew on this for a while. No matter how he rules, appeals will stretch this saga for years — which means Meta gets to keep inflating ad loads, pushing WhatsApp ads, and claiming all of it is “good for users.”

And while they’re at it, don’t be shocked if Threads gets a new update that connects to your doctor, your dog groomer, and your third-grade crush — all while pitching you vitamin D supplements you never asked for.

If Meta is broken up, your feed might get weirder, your ads more chaotic, and your privacy slightly less violated — for about five minutes. But maybe, just maybe, it’ll remind Silicon Valley that “move fast and break things” wasn’t meant to apply to democracy.

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

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