Welcome to the carnival of late-stage capitalism, where advertising fraud, grocery-store lawsuits, pharma spin, political censorship, celebrity sodas, and Oasis reunion fees all fight for your attention—and your wallet.

So…. Aldi is rebranding knockoffs with the same confidence as a teenager faking a permission slip, and The Trade Desk just told SSPs to crawl into a corner and die quietly. Meanwhile, the FDA has decided drug ads need fewer sailboats and more cancer warnings, Jimmy Kimmel proved that affiliates can’t cancel a punchline, Ben Stiller is peddling vitamin soda, Roku wants to be the new Facebook on your living-room screen, and Ticketmaster is getting grilled for charging fans extra just to see the real price.

If this all feels connected, that’s because it is: the hidden tax of middlemen, regulators playing catch-up, and audiences realizing they’ve been conned. Whether it’s politics, pharma, or pre-roll, the game is the same—pay more, get less, and watch the gatekeepers scramble when the curtain gets yanked back.

After getting sued by Mondelez for allegedly copying snack packaging (think Aldi’s “Thin Wheat” doing its best Wheat Thins cosplay), Aldi pulled a branding judo move: it’s putting its name on everything. And not subtly. It’s either “Aldi” or “An Aldi Original”—like a Netflix special, but for cheese puffs. The company claims this rebrand has been “in development for years,” but that’s rich considering it just got caught with its hand in the Nabisco jar.

Let’s call this what it is: brand laundering under legal pressure. Aldi’s private label strategy has always thrived on mimicry—lookalike packaging, similar names, lower prices. But now, with more than 90% of their products being store-brand clones, the lawsuits are stacking up. Frito-Lay, Marks & Spencer, Thatchers Cider—you name it. This rebrand is their legal airbag. If they win, it’s savvy. If they lose, the courts could rip the guts out of a strategy that’s made Aldi the third-largest grocer in the U.S. by store count.

The Trade Desk just reclassified SSPs as “resellers,” and the message couldn’t be clearer: middlemen, your days are numbered. For years, SSPs coasted on being “agnostic”—neutral brokers who connected buyers and sellers. But “agnostic” became “apathetic,” and now they’re masters of nothing in a market that demands actual value.

The writing’s on the wall: if you’re an SSP still boasting “interoperability” and “open marketplace efficiency,” congratulations—you’re a pipe with a logo. If you want to survive, start innovating. Build premium inventory. Invent new formats. Get serious about pricing power. Because The Trade Desk isn’t waiting for you to grow a spine—they’re already rerouting the plumbing.

The FDA just nuked the pharmaceutical marketing playbook, sending over 100 cease-and-desist letters to drugmakers over misleading ads. They’re targeting everything from TikTok influencers with shaky claims to video spots that bury side effects under a feel-good beach montage. And this time, they’re bringing AI to the fight—flagging content that overhypes benefits or dances around the downsides.

This isn’t just regulatory theater. The FDA wants to close the “adequate provision” loophole, which has let pharma brands gloss over serious risks with a quick URL drop. The next phase? Rulemaking that’ll force every broadcast ad to highlight side effects front and center, like a trigger warning with a copay. It’s a bold swing—and a potential First Amendment battleground—but if it sticks, expect DTC ads to start looking less like Cialis-on-a-sailboat and more like a legal deposition.

Kimmel came back swinging—and scored 6.3 million viewers, tripling his average. This, despite Sinclair and Nexstar yanking him off 70 ABC stations, claiming he no longer reflects “diverse interests.” Translation: he made a Charlie Kirk joke. The blackout covered nearly a quarter of U.S. TV households, but the monologue still exploded on YouTube and social, with over 26 million total views.

Here’s the kicker: this wasn’t just a Kimmel win—it was a middle finger to gatekeepers who still think they can program morality into late night TV. The affiliates tried to muzzle a comic. The internet reminded them who really controls distribution now.

Ben Stiller just co-founded a soda brand. Yep, Stiller’s Soda is here, packing low sugar, 30 calories, and vitamins B12, C, and D into nostalgic flavors like Shirley Temple. The campaign is self-aware and weird in a good way, featuring Justin Theroux narrating in retro ad-voice absurdity. But the question remains: does anyone want celebrity soda in 2025?

The category’s crowded, the health claims are vague, and the launch is digital-only for now. But with Walmart.com on deck and a 2026 retail rollout, this could actually pop. Or it could be another celebrity vanity project clogging Amazon’s shelves. Either way, the ads are more fun than 90% of what Pepsi’s doing right now.

Roku’s making big moves with its self-service Roku Ads Manager, aiming to woo SMBs with Shopify integrations and shoppable overlays. This isn’t your grandma’s remnant inventory anymore. With platform revenue up 18% and 90 million logged-in households, Roku is betting that small businesses want what Facebook and Google used to promise: performance, precision, and premium placement—only this time, on the big screen.

But the pressure is on. Disney and Netflix are coming for the same CTV ad dollars, backed by content libraries that make Roku’s “The Roku Channel” look like a garage band. Still, if they can leverage their DSP integrations and keep advertisers coming back with results, Roku might actually hold the line. If not, they’re just another smart TV screen with delusions of platform power.

The UK’s competition watchdog opened an investigation into Ticketmaster’s sketchy handling of the Oasis tour pre-sale, and now Live Nation’s promising to “change how ticket prices are displayed.” Translation: they got caught tacking on fees like it’s 2005 eBay.

Fans scrambling for reunion tickets found themselves ambushed by surprise charges at checkout, sparking regulatory backlash. Ticketmaster’s fix? Letting you see the total price before clicking “Buy.” Revolutionary. If this is their idea of transparency, it’s no wonder fans treat every ticket purchase like a hostage negotiation.

Roku was the scrappy underdog that democratized streaming. For a while, it was the best thing that ever happened to the television industry—a USB stick that kicked cable’s ass. It gave us access, simplicity, and the power to ditch the bundle. The brand was lovable, underpriced, and functional. It worked. But here’s the thing: great ideas don’t always make great businesses forever.

Because Roku is now a device company in a world that doesn’t need devices. Every smart TV now comes with built-in OSes—Google TV, Fire TV, Samsung’s Tizen, LG’s webOS. Roku’s hardware, once essential, is now an optional nostalgia item. The company knows it. Wall Street knows it. Advertisers definitely know it.

Which is why Roku’s having a full-blown platform identity crisis, trying to pivot from “that streaming stick you bought in 2017” into something much more nebulous: a performance adtech platform, a data marketplace, and an attribution engine... all without owning the content, the screen, or even the inventory.

Let’s be real: Roku’s hardware business is a burning dumpster of negative margins. The company even admits it loses money on the devices themselves—because it always planned to make the real cash on the back end: ads, subscriptions, and data. That bet paid off—briefly.

Roku’s platform revenue now makes up about 90% of total revenue, and that’s not by accident. What used to be a hardware-first company is now a desperate adtech middleman. But here's the twist: Roku isn’t even primarily monetizing its own inventory anymore. It’s aggregating ad space from third-party apps, third-party devices, and third-party platforms. It’s become a smart-TV SSP in a Netflix-Disney-Amazon world, trying to stay relevant by building attribution dashboards and shoppable TV integrations.

The centerpiece of this pivot? Roku Ads Manager—a self-serve platform for SMBs, built to mimic the ease of Meta or Google Ads. You can launch a campaign in minutes, track conversions across screens, and even hook it up to Shopify. The pitch: performance marketing, but make it CTV. Sounds good, right? Until you realize Roku’s not actually controlling the stage anymore.

Here’s the harsh truth: Roku doesn’t own the living room anymore. It used to. But now, smart TV manufacturers have gone full-stack—building their own OSes, controlling the user experience, and cutting out the middleman. Even TVs running Roku OS aren’t really Roku’s anymore. They’re white-labeled partnerships where the hardware OEM decides how much power Roku actually has.

And while Roku still boasts 90 million logged-in households, the moat around that number is shrinking. The real screen war is about first-party data and ad ecosystem control. And that’s where Roku’s cracks start showing.

Netflix has its own ad tier and a monster content engine. Disney has Hulu, Disney+, and ESPN—and more ad inventory than any buyer can digest. Amazon owns Fire TV and the entire commerce loop. And they all have one thing Roku doesn’t: deep, exclusive content relationships and full-stack control.

Roku? It’s an aggregator wrapped in a UI skin, selling access to shows it didn’t make, on devices it doesn’t own, using infrastructure it rents from everyone else.

To stay relevant, Roku is pushing the “we’re the neutral platform” narrative. That neutrality used to be a strength—an agnostic layer over streaming chaos. But in today’s market, neutrality looks more like irrelevance with a measurement SDK.

They’ve leaned hard into performance metrics, attribution, and full-funnel sales talk. With shoppable overlays, retail partnerships (Walmart, Instacart), and integrations with Amazon DSP and The Trade Desk, Roku wants to be the bridge between TV and ecommerce. That’s the pitch.

But there’s a ceiling: you can’t out-monetize platforms that own the actual engagement. If people are spending time in Netflix or YouTube or Disney+, Roku isn’t the touchpoint—it’s just a jumping-off point. The ads may run through Roku’s pipes, but the brand experience belongs to someone else. And as advertisers consolidate spend into platforms with both content and commerce, Roku risks becoming the adtech equivalent of a toll booth on a bypassed road.

If Roku pulls this off, it becomes CTV’s Switzerland—the open, scalable, data-rich marketplace for performance advertisers and small brands looking for reach without walled gardens. There’s still demand for that—especially as marketers grow tired of black box metrics and algorithmic opacity.

But if they miss? They’ll become a white-label UI company with an SSP duct-taped to it, fighting for scraps from bigger players’ tables.

It’s a hard pivot. It’s smart. But it’s also desperate, and they know the window is closing fast. The next five years will decide if Roku becomes the Shopify of streaming—or just another piece of tech we used to love, before the giants swallowed it whole.

Because honesty — I do some serious deep dives with some of the toughest, baddest folks in the industry every single week. You think you know what’s going on? You don’t know what’s behind Door #2 until we kick it open.

If you’ve read how Publicis ate the whole restaurant or how Netflix turned nostalgia into an adtech money printer, you know the drill: no fluff, no PR spin, just the stuff the trades are too scared (or too cozy) to print.

Next up: WPP: The Giant That Keeps Tripping Over Its Own Feet. Yeah… you’ll want to see this one.

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