If you thought August was going to be slow, think again.

Google’s back in court, Nielsen’s eating humble pie, and CMOs everywhere are pretending they’ve got AI under control while quietly panicking over GPT-generated ad creative that still kind of sucks. Meanwhile, Zillow’s trying to disinfect programmatic, Linda Yaccarino is hawking weight loss meds, and Elon Musk wants you to let Grok run your entire media plan. Welcome to another week in advertising, where everything’s on fire and half the people in charge brought marshmallows.

SSP files a lawsuit, blames Project Poirot, and probably wants its server back.

OpenX just filed its breakup letter—in the form of a lawsuit—accusing Google’s Project Poirot of quietly sabotaging its business while pretending everything was just fine in the auction lanes. According to the SSP, what appeared to be “optimization” was actually a stealth takedown, negatively impacting OpenX’s header bidding performance and ultimately leading to mass layoffs. The lawsuit resembles a remix of the DOJ’s antitrust case, only with fewer redactions and many more receipts. If OpenX is correct, Google wasn’t just favoritizing—it was dominating the competition.

Programmatic without the sewage? Zillow is trying.

Zillow wants its ads to stop appearing on content-mill hellscapes, and apparently, it’s willing to experiment to make that happen. Enter containerized RTB—a Frankenstein fusion of DSP smarts inside the SSP brain. Zillow’s using Chalice’s AI engine within Index Exchange to make sure they show up in places where they don’t look like a foreclosure ad. If this actually works, it could finally give programmatic a shot at shedding its rep as the Times Square of digital advertising: loud, sleazy, and full of con men.

WPP’s Q2 earnings sucked, but here’s a sizzle reel!

WPP had another rough quarter—down revenue, client churn, macro headwinds, blah blah blah. So what did they do? Put Brian Lesser on stage with a 90-second hype video and a whole lot of "platform" talk. Lesser talked up WPP Open, InfoSum, and a newly centralized vision for media, complete with AI buzzwords and strategic vagueness. The deck was shiny, but the numbers? Not so much. This wasn’t so much a turnaround plan as it was a TED Talk for nervous investors.

Free speech wins, but so do fake Joe Biden TikToks.

California’s grand plan to fight deepfakes in political ads just got vaporized in court. A federal judge tossed the law, citing the ever-useful Section 230. Platforms can’t be forced to police political bullshit, even if it’s AI-generated garbage that could sway elections. The law tried to make platforms block “materially deceptive” content, which sounds nice until you realize it’s basically impossible to define in code. In the end, this fight isn’t over—but don’t expect Big Tech to step in unless someone threatens their stock price.

Unilever's making 400 ads per product. Welcome to the machine.

At the MMA’s CMO summit, the AI Kool-Aid was flowing. CMOs aren’t just talking scale—they’re building it. The new playbook? Create fast, test constantly, and optimize like your bonus depends on it (because it does). Unilever’s now pumping out hundreds of assets per product thanks to Brandtech and LLM-fueled automation. China’s even crazier: Kimberly-Clark says it's making hundreds of AI-generated ads daily. The creative department is no longer the sacred temple of brand vision—it’s a factory floor run by algorithms with KPIs.

Upload your ad. Walk away. Let Grok guess what you meant.

Elon Musk is now the unofficial head of ad ops at X, and his plan is simple: replace everyone with Grok. Musk says his AI assistant will automate everything from brand safety to creative optimization—eventually making human strategists obsolete. For now, it’s mostly theory, powered by Musk’s signature cocktail of confidence and vector math gobbledygook. But don’t worry, there’s a full-screen immersive video viewer for you to play with while the machine learns to do your job.

Now even your idle screen has ad inventory.

Kargo and TiVo are teaming up to make sure your living room downtime is revenue-optimized. Their new ad formats—CTV Glass and CTV Video—turn content discovery and idle screens into immersive ad showcases. You didn’t ask for it, but now your smart TV home screen is a billboard with motion-activated storytelling. At least it’s “non-disruptive,” according to the PR team. Just don’t be surprised when your remote starts recommending a weight loss drug in between sitcoms.

GLP-1s for the masses, now with testimonials.

Currax Pharmaceuticals is going full DTC with its latest Contrave campaign, “Cravings Don’t Own Me.” Think GLP-1 vibes but with a discount and a human face. Real patients tell real stories about beating cravings and reclaiming their lives. It’s sincere, emotionally manipulative pharma storytelling at scale—and it’s blanketing 70% of the U.S. via CTV. If Ozempic’s price tag scares you, Contrave wants to be your scrappy alternative with better media buys and fewer celebrity endorsements.

From brand safety to Wegovy, Linda’s latest pivot is pure 2025 energy.

Linda Yaccarino is out at X and already back on the C-suite grind—this time as CEO of eMed, a telehealth startup hawking GLP-1s like they’re the next iPhone. Her pivot from social chaos to chronic care is... well, on brand. eMed wants to “digitally transform” weight loss, and who better to do that than a former ad exec who spent two years defending Musk’s circus? Call it redemption. Or call it what it is: the monetization of the Ozempic economy by any means necessary.

Let’s clear something up: the MMA used to mean Mobile Marketing Association.

These days…

It could just as easily stand for Mass Marketing Automatons, Midjourney Marketing Association, or my personal favorite, Marketing’s Mechanical Apostles.

Because whatever it once was, it’s now the unofficial temple of AI-powered creative worship—and the Kool-Aid’s not just flowing, it’s being poured from 12 optimized funnels and microtargeted to your marketing persona.

At their recent CMO Summit, the message was simple: faster, cheaper, more. Creativity is no longer sacred—it’s scalable. And if your bonus depends on proving ROI, you’ll take the automation over the artisans every single time.

Unilever took this to heart and set the whole process on fire—replacing the creative brainstorm with a production algorithm. Their Beauty AI Studio, built with Brandtech Group, is not so much a department as it is a content sweatshop with WiFi. Gone are the days of 10 polished concepts and endless mood boards. Now it’s 400 asset variations per product, delivered with the loving touch of a logistics spreadsheet. The system runs on 3D digital twins of products, brand compliance rules masquerading as AI DNA, and more language models than most startups can afford to mispronounce. The result? Assets produced 65% faster, 55% cheaper, and allegedly twice as “performant.” Whatever that means this week.

Not to be outdone, Brandtech’s Pencil platform is now the personal trainer for every CMO chasing ad volume gains. Pencil ingests LLMs, spits out ads at scale, and ties directly into Meta and TikTok for real-time optimization.

It’s basically a slot machine that prints ad variants and tells you which ones will perform best—before they even run. The creative process is no longer about vision—it’s about preemptive scoring and platform appeasement. If a tree falls in the forest, but the algorithm didn’t like the lighting, it doesn’t matter. The tree failed to optimize.

Meanwhile, across the Pacific, Kimberly-Clark is in full sprint. On a recent earnings call, their CEO casually revealed they’re now generating hundreds of AI-powered ads a day in China alone.

The phrasing was so casual it almost sounded like a shrug.

Hundreds. Per. Day.

The future of marketing isn’t arriving. It’s already flooding your feed and calling itself efficient.

Back at the MMA's Festival of Machine-Made Messaging, CMOs nodded solemnly as they recited the new gospel. The sacred creative department has been torn down and rebuilt as a clean, sterile room full of dashboards.

Create fast.

Test faster.

Optimize like you’re on deadline, because you are—and the deadline is called Q4 revenue targets. The high priestess of brand is now a performance marketer with a keyboard shortcut for “generate variation.”

Let’s be honest—this isn’t about replacing creatives. It’s about muting them.

Their instincts, their storytelling, their slow, thoughtful process—there’s no room for that in the new regime. The brief is gone. In its place is a prompt.

The mood board has been replaced with a heatmap.

The “big idea” is now just a placeholder for 800 smaller ones, tested to death before they even hit a real eyeball.

And this is now the religion.

The MMA, depending on your mood, could stand for Machine-Made Advertising, Money-Metrics Alliance, or Maximum Multiples Agency. All of them would fit. Because creativity isn’t being honored—it’s being manufactured.

And the factory never sleeps.

It all sounds efficient—until every ad starts to feel like background noise.

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.

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