Ok, so I wasn't a fan of the other format of news, even though I've been doing it for a while. Decided to change it up—make it more interesting. Let’s really talk about what the hell is going on.

What do YouTube, Meta, TikTok, a flailing jeans brand, and TV measurement dinosaurs have in common? They’re all trying to fix what’s broken—while pretending everything’s totally fine. Let’s go.

YouTube loosened its profanity policy so creators can actually make money and sound like normal adults. Say “f-ck” early on? No problem. Just don’t say it every other sentence. The company’s monetization monk, Conor Kavanagh, says advertisers are cool with cursing now and can choose what level of potty-mouth they want to be associated with. It’s a small but meaningful shift—one driven entirely by creator backlash, not platform enlightenment. But still, if you're a gamer or a loud vlogger, congratulations: your opening “what the f-ck is up guys!” is finally monetizable.

Zuckerberg says AI will “empower humanity,” but what it’s really empowering is Instagram’s conversion rates. Meta’s Andromeda ad engine juiced performance by up to 5% and bumped average ad prices 9% in Q2. That’s not world peace—it’s optimized shampoo ads. AI is improving Meta’s ad load, targeting, and retrieval, and Zuck’s leaning into that like it’s a holy mission. Superintelligence? More like super CPMs.

TikTok's “Out of Phone” expansion is trying to plaster every inch of your IRL life with UGC and branded creator content. It’s not enough to get you on your couch—they want your attention while you're filling a water bottle or waiting for Redbox to spit out a Blu-ray. They’ve partnered with hydration stations, taxis, malls, and digital screens everywhere to serve you dance challenges and skin-care tips on loop. Dan Page, TikTok’s “New Screens” chief, says the goal is to be on all two billion screens outside your phone. This isn’t advertising. It’s visual colonization.

American Eagle ran a fun little ad with Sydney Sweeney making a “genes/jeans” joke. She says her body is shaped by her genes. Then: “My jeans are blue.” Boom—standard dad-joke wordplay. But somehow, some corners of the internet decided this was a coded eugenics message. Because blonde hair, blue eyes, and high school biology apparently = fascist propaganda now. The ad’s been pulled, and AE’s CMO probably has heartburn from explaining how a pun doesn’t mean the brand wants to bring back Aryan purity tests. American Eagle needed a hit after a $68 million loss. Instead, they got TikTok callouts and Nazi comparisons. Fun times.

Dotdash Meredith is now “People Inc.” because—let’s be honest—no one knew what a Dotdash was and no one cared about Meredith. CEO Neil Vogel is finally saying the quiet part out loud: most of their 40 publications aren’t going anywhere. Only 19 are getting the money, resources, and love. The rest? Digital hospice. People Magazine’s getting top billing, because it still performs across print, web, and social. Everything else that doesn’t have Kardashian juice or Alix Earle angles is quietly being starved. The new media motto: let the weak brands die faster.

Nielsen finally got MRC accreditation for its Big Data + Panel hybrid, but the applause didn’t last. By the time Cannes rolled around, ad buyers were roasting them over janky demographic data, weird spikes in under-18 viewers, and a black-box machine-learning tool called HDAM that’s about as trustworthy as a Tinder bio. Nielsen says it’s too late in the buying cycle to fix anything and won’t share HDAM evaluation data in NPOWER. Advertisers are fuming, but guess what? They all still re-upped their contracts. Nielsen is still the messy partner you keep dating because there’s no one better.

In a world where ad tech vendors love draining publishers dry, ArcSpan’s offering is a rare case of value-add. They’re helping publishers activate and monetize first-party data through a platform that’s simple, AI-powered, and actually built for RevOps teams. Real results too: 107% revenue lift and better click-through rates for some clients. With media collapsing around them, publishers need tools that don’t suck. ArcSpan is trying to deliver clarity, not just another layer of jargon and fees. Revolutionary concept.

Let’s be clear: accreditation is not absolution. But Nielsen’s PR machine would very much like you to believe otherwise.

Earlier this year, Nielsen paraded its Media Rating Council (MRC) reaccreditation like a badge of honor—proof that its Big Data + Panel hybrid was ready for prime time. The industry, desperate for a new baseline in an age where no one watches anything the same way twice, took a deep breath. Maybe, just maybe, this Frankenstein’s monster of traditional panel data and return-path information would actually deliver what it promised: precision, scale, and a path forward.

Spoiler: It didn’t.

Instead, what Nielsen delivered was a flaming plate of demographic absurdity, with ad buyers reporting mysterious surges in under-18 viewership on adult-skewing content and inexplicable dips in the coveted 25–54 range. It was like the data had been passed through a funhouse mirror—except no one was laughing.

Enter the villain of the month: HDAM, or as it's more widely known, the black box algorithm that no one understands and Nielsen refuses to explain. HDAM is supposed to smooth out inconsistencies in big data using machine learning. What it’s actually doing is delivering output so chaotic, buyers are considering interpretive dance to explain it to clients.

And then came the timing. Of course. Nielsen’s Big Data chaos didn’t show up in a sleepy off-cycle lull—it reared its ugly head right as Cannes Lions turned the media world into a sun-soaked networking circus and deals were being made in real time. Agencies flagged the glitches. Nielsen shrugged. “Too late to fix,” they said. That wasn’t a response—it was a white flag.

Let’s pause here and ask the question that everyone inside the industry already knows the answer to: Why the hell is anyone still using Nielsen?

Simple: because there’s no credible alternative. Sure, VideoAmp is trying. Comscore still wants to matter. But for now, Nielsen is the only “accredited” entity with enough institutional inertia to stay sticky, even when its product clearly isn’t.

Buyers know it’s broken. The VAB (Video Advertising Bureau) called it out publicly. There are two competing currencies—panel-only and Big Data hybrid—floating around, and both are trusted about as much as a crypto pitch from a guy named “Chad.” Agencies are forced to make seven-figure buys based on data that might as well be forged in Narnia. And yet… the checks still get signed.

Here’s the real kicker: Nielsen is sunsetting its legacy panel-only system by the end of 2025. That’s right—soon you won’t even have the broken-but-familiar version to fall back on. You’ll have HDAM, and whatever wild guesswork it spits out next quarter.

So what do we call a measurement monopoly that serves up unverifiable machine-generated audience metrics at the worst possible time… and still keeps every major buyer under contract?

Inertia. And a damn good sales team.

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

Let’s cut to it: if you read our breakdown of how Publicis is not only eating everyone’s lunch but also picking the restaurant, you already know we’re not here to coddle holding companies. While WPP’s busy swapping out CEOs and Omnicom’s playing acquisition roulette, Sadoun is quietly building a tech empire wrapped in a creative agency. We broke down how they swiped Coca-Cola, Mars, Spotify, and half the menu without even flexing. That piece? It's not something you’ll find in sanitized trades.

And if you really want to see where the money’s going, our deep dive into Netflix’s ad-fueled profit machine is the blueprint. We unraveled how they’re not just streaming your nostalgia—Happy Gilmore 2, anyone?—but transforming adtech with in-house AI, programmatic pipes, and the kind of targeting that makes even Meta nervous. Both stories go beyond headlines. They’re investigative, irreverent, and exactly what this industry needs more of.

By subscribing to ADOTAT+, you’re backing independent journalism that doesn’t flinch. The more of you that join us, the deeper we dig—and the more uncomfortable truths we’ll publish.

Stay bold. Stay curious. And know more than you did yesterday.