Did I learn anything this week?

Only that Meta’s legal team needs a calendar, Compliant wants you to eat your data vegetables, and WPP just got traded like a washed-up striker in the Premier League.

It’s been the kind of week where ad execs say “we’re excited about AI” right before laying off 4,000 people and pretending it’s a “strategic pivot.” Meanwhile, the ghost of FCB is wandering LinkedIn like a shell-shocked creative director clutching their final Clio.

So here we go. Buckle up.

Meta just got smacked by a judge for trying to force advertisers into arbitration—seven years after the lawsuit started. Apparently, they just now remembered their contract included an arbitration clause. That’s not strategy—that’s corporate amnesia.

The case accuses Facebook of selling imaginary audience reach so inflated it made U.S. state populations look low. Internal emails showed they knew. Advertisers spent millions. And only after fighting this in two courts, losing an appeal, and getting ghosted by SCOTUS, Meta suddenly says: “Wait! We’d like arbitration now!”

The judge called BS. And for once, a Big Tech company didn’t get to rewrite reality.

Compliant ran a study proving that quality media performs better than junk inventory. Shocked? Don’t be. They tested campaigns across top brands and found lower CPAs, better ROI, and fewer brain cells lost trying to justify those $0.17 CPMs.

But marketers keep hoarding low-quality impressions like doomsday preppers stockpiling canned beans. Why? Because measurement models still reward garbage supply, and procurement departments think “cheap” equals “efficient.”

Reckitt gets it. They’re building clean supply paths, exclusion lists, and frameworks tailored to, say, Durex vs. Enfamil (thank God). But for the rest of the industry? The addiction to scale over sanity lives on.

Remember when Outbrain bought Teads and said they’d create a “scaled, end-to-end platform”? Yeah, well—turns out, the only thing they scaled was confusion.

Now Teads is laying off staff, missing earnings, watching its stock nosedive over 90% YTD, and replacing execs like it’s musical chairs at Cannes. They say it’s macro headwinds. What they mean is: Amazon, Google, and Meta are eating our lunch—and we brought a Capri Sun.

Taboola, meanwhile, is out there winning Q3, partnering with Apple, and acting like it never even heard of a “native ad apocalypse.” They’re moving. Teads is spinning.

WPP, the former Goliath of global advertising, just got kicked out of the FTSE 100 after nearly 30 years. The reason? Oh, just a casual £21B loss in market cap since 2017.

They got replaced by British Land. Yes, literal land has more growth potential than WPP right now.

The industry shifted to AI, platforms, and performance. WPP clung to bloated holding company decks and “center of excellence” nonsense. Now they’re paying the price for innovation theater while Publicis and Omnicom eat their foie gras.

The $13B Omnicom-IPG merger wasn’t just a deal. It was a creative extinction event. They killed off century-old brands like DDB and FCB like they were expired coupons. Then they fired 4,000 people and called it “streamlining.”

In India—home to IPG’s most iconic agencies—the impact is personal and devastating. Lintas, Ulka, and Mudra helped build modern Indian advertising. Now? They’re being folded into TBWA or BBDO like discarded brand guidelines.

This isn’t “transformation.” It’s consolidation cosplay. When creativity becomes a line item, no name is safe.

The IAB Tech Lab’s new Deals API aims to fix the chaotic mess of programmatic deal-making. It adds clarity to who’s packaging what, who owns what, and where all that “premium” inventory is actually going. In theory? Great.

In practice? It’s like patching a leaking boat with a Google Doc.

SSPs and DSPs still play hot potato with accountability. Curated deals often deliver nothing. And let’s not forget: two-thirds of these so-called deals earn zero revenue. But sure, let’s solve it with a spec and some good vibes.

Arizona just sued Temu, the viral shopping app from China, accusing it of stealing user data, pushing counterfeit goods, and acting like a Trojan horse in your pocket. The AG says it infects devices, harvests data—including from minors—and uses malware cloaked in UX sparkle.

Temu denies it, of course. They say they’re just helping consumers “meet their needs affordably.” Like how a hacker helps you clean your inbox—by stealing it.

This isn’t just a privacy concern. It’s a new playbook for digital exploitation. And with Temu flooding ad inventory, it’s an ad-tech problem now, too.

Meta forgot their legal obligations. SSPs are ducking their supply sins. Teads misjudged the cost of combining mediocrity with ambition. WPP missed the memo on modernity. Omnicom traded legacy for efficiency. Temu said the quiet part out loud. And the IAB? They’re still building standards on a foundation of wishful thinking.

It’s not that adland is broken. It’s that everyone’s pretending the fire is a feature.

Every few months, as predictably as a DSP meltdown on the final day of the quarter, the ad industry stumbles into one of its ritualistic “moments of enlightenment.” It’s never new. It’s never meaningful. It’s just the same dusty insight hauled out of the basement, spritzed with a fragrance of KPIs and AI, and paraded around as if someone split the sea.

And this cycle’s revelation — delivered with all the ceremony of a scientific breakthrough — is that premium inventory performs better than the MFA-soaked, fraud-adjacent, attention-starved digital landfill buyers have been stuffing with budget for years.

Compliant publishes this “finding,” and the reaction across the industry is so hysterically earnest you’d think Moses himself marched down from Har Sinai holding two tablets: one reading “HIGH QUALITY,” the other “LOW CPA.” Suddenly executives are whispering with reverence about “lower CPAs,” “higher ROAS,” and “actual humans,” as though all of this wasn’t known, documented, screamed, memed, litigated, and quietly admitted in back channels for a decade.

And, right on cue, AdExchanger rushes to slap it on the homepage as BREAKING NEWS, like Woodward and Bernstein just uncovered a scandal instead of reporting that, surprise, garbage inventory performs like garbage. The headline may as well read: “WATER CONFIRMED TO BE WET — INDUSTRY SHOCKED.”

This entire beat could be automated with two macros and a shrug.

No renaissance of the obvious would be complete without a cameo from David Nyurenberg, who has apparently assigned himself the role of the ad industry’s late-stage historiographer. He emerges into the discourse like a man clutching the Dead Sea Scrolls, announcing — at midnight, no less — that “there is no quality open CTV.”

An incredible revelation. A marvel. Truly stunning. If only someone, anyone, had mentioned this before.

Except everyone has mentioned this before. Including him.

Nyurenberg delivers his sermon with such gravity you’d think he discovered a pulsar. Disney is soft on ads. Peacock is wobbling. Paramount is bleeding out. Buyers are nervous. CTV performance is plateauing. He says all this as though unveiling a dark secret kept from humanity, instead of reading directly from earnings reports that have been public for weeks.

It’s theater. Amateur theater.

The kind where the actors take themselves so seriously it becomes funny by accident.

Watching him declare there is “no quality in open CTV” is like watching an arsonist file a noise complaint about the fire trucks.

And yet the trade press treats his proclamation like prophecy — because this is the ecosystem’s favorite trick: have the people who helped create the mess explain the mess as if they were helpless witnesses.

Let’s not pretend this industry suffers from a lack of intelligence. It suffers from a lack of honesty.
Everyone already knows high-quality inventory works.
Everyone already knows low CPMs are a trap.
Everyone already knows MFA delivers scale without value.

Quality didn’t need rediscovering.
What needed rediscovering was a justification to pivot, a story to trot out at QBRs and earnings calls, a new framework to upsell, rebrand, and pitch as innovation.

Truth is free. Narrative is billable.
This industry always chooses billable.

Every buying system, every dashboard, every procurement model, every KPI comp structure is wired to reward the same three things: cheapness, volume, and plausible deniability.

That’s why junk inventory metastasizes. That’s why MFA farms print money. That’s why CTV became a maze of spoofing, reselling, dead channels, auto-play vomit streams, and “free ad-supported environments” built on the spiritual energy of a pawn shop.

When the waste becomes too embarrassing to ignore, the industry doesn’t fix it.
It publishes a study.
Then claims a renaissance.

These whitepapers are not truth-seeking documents. They are reputation laundromats, cleansing the very companies that profited from the chaos they now condemn.

Nobody wants to say:
“We chased cheap CPMs because our incentives told us to, and now we’re stuck with the trash heap we built.”

So instead we get:
“We are boldly investing in quality pathways based on new data that proves premium environments matter.”

It’s the same revelation every cycle, but each time it’s packaged like a courageous leap into the unknown.
It’s not courage.
It’s choreography.

They give media teams something to slide across the desk to procurement.
They give DSPs and SSPs a new justification for fee structures.
They give C-suites a narrative for earnings season.
They give vendors a chance to declare themselves arbiters of “good supply.”
They give the same old actors a chance to reintroduce themselves as born-again quality evangelists.

If the industry ever truly shifted to measuring business outcomes instead of dashboard theater, studies like this would be too boring to publish.
The fact that they return with clockwork frequency is the surest sign that the incentives remain broken.

His whole declaration that open CTV lacks quality is not wrong. It’s just about five years late, delivered in a tone of revelation instead of responsibility.
It’s Hamlet performed by someone who wrote half the murder plans. He’s part of the issue.

And this industry, bless it, treats the confession as bravery.

Quality never needed rediscovering — the industry needed an excuse.**

And now it has one.
Until the next cycle — when someone else will “discover” that garbage is garbage, AdExchanger will promote it, and the entire ecosystem will gasp again like goldfish seeing the castle ornament for the first time.

Behind the paywall is the part everyone actually cares about: the receipts, the whispered-over-latte power plays, the charts that make CMOs sweat, and the stuff PR teams wish you’d stop noticing. If the free feed is the trailer, ADOTAT+ is the director’s cut where the knives come out and the plot twists finally make sense.

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