WEEKLY REVIEW: Welcome to the Ad Tech Hunger Games: Everyone’s Automating, Lying, or Getting Sued

AppLovin’ or AppLurkin’? When Growth Hacking Becomes a Felony

Pesach Lattin (ADOTAT)
October 24, 2025

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Adtech’s Weekly Magic Trick: Selling Trust While Breaking It

The ad industry’s having one of those weeks where every headline sounds like a punchline. WPP’s handing out “AI for the rest of us,” Applovin’s allegedly sneaking apps onto phones like it’s 2012, and PubMatic’s pretending a lawsuit is just “headwinds.” Meanwhile, Google finally pulled the plug on Privacy Sandbox—its longest-running science fair project—and AWS decided it wasn’t making enough money from ad tech’s collective data addiction, so it built RTB Fabric, presumably to invoice everyone faster. It’s like the whole ecosystem got trapped in an escape room where every clue is labeled “powered by AI.”

If there’s a theme here, it’s that automation and accountability are in a knife fight, and automation’s winning on points. Agencies are collapsing under their own existential PowerPoints, The Trade Desk is arm-wrestling open-source ethics, and Google’s privacy crusade died the same way it lived—confusing everyone equally. WPP wants to democratize creation, but morale in the trenches says otherwise. Ad tech’s rich, powerful, and still trying to pretend it’s not terrified of regulators or relevance. So yes, innovation’s alive—but mostly because chaos keeps paying the bills.

WPP Launches ‘Open Pro’ — AI for the Rest of Us

Self-Serve, Scalable, and Finally Letting Small Brands Play Like the Big Guys

WPP has rolled out Open Pro, the self-serve version of its marketing operating system WPP Open, designed to give smaller brands the kind of creative and media muscle usually reserved for six-figure retainers. It’s a big swing toward democratizing marketing tech, letting teams plan, create, and publish campaigns without begging for agency time or budget.

CEO Cindy Rose called it a way to “put our AI advantage into the hands of more brands,” and—for once—it’s not just PR gloss. The platform pulls together WPP’s arsenal of tools into one place: AI-powered strategy modules, content generation at scale, and one-click publishing across major ad platforms.

CTO Stephan Pretorius describes it as “built to deliver outcomes, not just assets,” meaning the focus isn’t on pretty presentations but real campaign results. For smaller marketers, that’s no small thing—it levels the playing field in a world where speed and automation often decide who wins the brief.

Sure, WPP’s AI track record has been a mixed bag, but Open Pro looks like its most practical step yet—a clean, accessible suite for brands that want enterprise tools without enterprise bloat.

If you’ve ever wished for your own creative department in a box, this might just be it.

Applovin’ Busted Installing Apps Without Consent

Wall Street still cheers. Regulators now bring subpoenas.

Applovin (APP) has been caught secretly installing apps on users’ Android phones—without permission—through a shady product called Array. Researcher Ben Edelman says he found the source code that made it happen, plus 208 user complaints backing it up. That’s not a growth hack. That’s straight-up illegal.

Now, Applovin is under investigation by attorneys general in Delaware, Oregon, and Connecticut, with the SEC sniffing around too. It’s the company’s second major probe this year. Still, the stock is up nearly 300%, because apparently violating user trust is just another line item on a bullish earnings call.

How Ad Tech Actually Gets Funded

Friends, fools, and VCs with spreadsheets

Startups in ad tech usually don’t get loans—they get investors. That starts with friends, family, and angel investors willing to bet on a pitch deck and a dream. Once the startup starts breathing, VCs and private equity firms show up, waving term sheets and praying for a 10x exit. In the UK, schemes like SEIS and EIS give rich people tax breaks to throw money at high-risk companies—because what’s better than gambling when the government chips in?

For the startup-curious, Ashton says anyone can invest—even in tiny chunks—but don’t do it unless you’re cool losing every penny. And if you're thinking of joining one? Know how much cash they’ve got, how long it'll last, and whether your “equity” is just a consolation prize for low pay.

AWS Wants a Bigger Bite of Ad Tech with “RTB Fabric”

Because real-time bidding wasn’t expensive or complicated enough already

AWS just dropped RTB Fabric—a shiny new cloud service built specifically for the breakneck, bandwidth-guzzling world of programmatic ads. It promises single-digit millisecond latency, easier integrations, and an 80% discount on AWS’s usual ransom-level data transfer fees. Translation: ad tech companies can now burn cash slightly slower while feeding the Amazon mothership.

The pitch is all about streamlining RTB workflows and ditching the creaky on-prem infrastructure. TripleLift is already onboard, of course, using RTB Fabric to hook into Amazon DSP (shocker). AWS gets more ad dollars. Ad tech gets faster pipes. Everyone else gets targeted harder.

Google Kills Privacy Sandbox, Finally Puts It Out of Everyone’s Misery

Turns out “complex, unloved, and regulatory-bait” wasn’t a great product strategy

Google just axed its much-hyped Privacy Sandbox—its clunky, convoluted alternative to third-party cookies that no one really asked for and even fewer implemented. In a blog post dripping with spin, Google confirmed it’s retiring all 10 remaining APIs, including Attribution Reporting, Topics, and Protected Audience, for both Chrome and Android. So long to the slowest death march in ad tech history.

Privacy Sandbox was supposed to balance privacy with targeted advertising. Instead, it became a masterclass in overengineering, under-delivering, and dodging antitrust bullets. Google already bailed on cookie deprecation last year, so this move was just paperwork. Now the industry’s back to the same open secret it’s always relied on: track first, apologize later.

Trade Desk Flexes, Prebid Folds—Sort Of

After a TID-sized tantrum, the open-source “neutral” body blinks

The Trade Desk barked, and Prebid sort-of listened. After quietly nerfing the usefulness of Transaction IDs in version 10.9—crippling buyers’ ability to detect duplicate bids—Prebid faced backlash from DSPs who weren’t amused by the surprise update. TID was no longer global, but SSP-specific, killing transparency in the name of “publisher control.”

Now, after weeks of industry side-eyes and a not-so-coincidental launch of OpenAds, Prebid’s scrambling to reframe the whole thing as a “clarification,” not a rollback. Sure. And water isn’t wet. The new plan? Let publishers choose between global or SSP-specific TIDs. Because when governance fails, just hand out options like candy and call it innovation.

PubMatic’s DSP Breakup Gets Ugly—Now There’s a Lawsuit

“Significant headwinds” apparently means “we’re bleeding clients”

PubMatic just admitted it lost one of its top DSP partners—and the clients that came with them—and now they’re facing a class action lawsuit for allegedly misleading investors. CEO Rajeev Goel tried to spin it as a mere shift in “inventory evaluation,” but CFO Steven Pantelick dropped the real bomb: a major buyer bailed, and PubMatic’s revenue outlook tanked with it.

So now, investors who bought in during the happy-talk era are lawyering up. When your “better prioritization” strategy is code for “please stop leaving us,” things are not going great. Maybe next time, don’t bury the existential threat to your business in an earnings footnote.

Agency Morale Hits Rock Bottom, Starts Digging

Holding companies cut staff, worship AI, and wonder why everyone's miserable

Big ad agencies are bleeding morale like a leaky faucet—especially the ones shackled to holding companies like WPP, IPG, and Omnicom. According to an ADWEEK survey, most employees say the vibe is flat-out negative, and given the layoffs, consolidation, and rise of robot creatives, it’s not hard to see why.

Junior staff feel ignored, execs are sipping optimism Kool-Aid, and everyone else is quietly updating their résumés. One insider summed it up: leadership has no idea what the day-to-day actually looks like. But sure, let’s run another town hall about “culture.”

The Problem with Public Adtech: Selling a Story, Not a Produ

PubMatic’s Big Secret: When “Headwinds” Really Means “Losing Your Lifeline”

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: when an adtech company goes public, it stops being purely about building good tech. Suddenly, it’s about selling a narrative — one that keeps investors calm and analysts dazzled while reality quietly burns in the background.

PubMatic just proved that point in spectacular fashion.

In their Q2 2025 filings, buried under the usual glitter of “efficiency” and “AI-driven growth,” the company quietly disclosed that one of its largest DSP partners had bailed — and with it, a huge portion of PubMatic’s revenue. The words they used were almost poetic: “significant headwinds.” Translation: our biggest customer walked out, taking a few dozen media buyers with them.

The Spin

CEO Rajeev Goel called it a “shift in inventory evaluation.” Sure. And the Titanic “experienced an unplanned aquatic interface.”

The reality, confirmed by both publishers and internal earnings reviews, is that DV360 — Google’s ad buying platform — changed its bidding logic, torpedoing PubMatic’s CPMs overnight. One publisher who has since joined the class action lawsuit said CPMs on PubMatic dropped by as much as 30% in a single day.

They were told it was “temporary.” It wasn’t.

Within weeks, 30–40% of their media buys were gone, rerouted to competing SSPs that hadn’t yet been algorithmically ghosted.

The Fallout

PubMatic’s Q3 guidance nosedived to $61–$66 million, down 7–14% sequentially from Q2. The stock promptly plummeted 30% — the kind of cliff dive that usually ends with a CFO “spending more time with family.”

Investors didn’t just panic; they lawyered up. Multiple class action suits now allege that PubMatic failed to disclose material business risks between February and August 2025, violating securities laws. The filings accuse executives of making “materially false or misleading statements” while knowing their largest demand partner was evaporating.

When your “strong fundamentals” turn out to be a disappearing customer list, that’s not volatility — that’s negligence.

The Adtech Illusion

This is the adtech industry’s original sin: public companies have to pretend margin compression is innovation. They live quarter-to-quarter, juggling Wall Street expectations while their real customers — publishers and advertisers — are left guessing what’s actually going on under the hood.

PubMatic’s case isn’t just about bad luck. It’s about the impossible balancing act of being a public SSP in a market where every algorithm tweak from a major DSP can decimate your revenue overnight.

These companies can’t admit when CPMs are crashing because that spooks investors. They can’t tell publishers the truth because that spooks supply. So they default to the same euphemisms every time: “rebalancing,” “macro headwinds,” “inventory optimization.”

Which are all just polite ways of saying “we’re losing money and praying you don’t notice.”

The Industry Knows

Ask anyone on the sell side — DV360’s “inventory evaluation update” was the polite industry term for “Google just rewrote the rules.” Every SSP took a hit, but PubMatic’s exposure was extreme because of its heavy concentration of spend from a few top DSPs.

That’s the danger of depending too much on a single player: when the algorithm changes, your entire model implodes.

Meanwhile, publishers who depended on PubMatic for fill rates found themselves holding the bag — lower CPMs, fewer buyers, and zero explanation beyond vague reassurances.

The lawsuits will drag out for months. The trust issues will last years.

The Bigger Question

Why didn’t PubMatic come clean earlier? Because public adtech companies are storytelling machines with stock tickers attached. Their product isn’t just programmatic pipes — it’s belief.

They have to keep selling optimism, because that’s what investors buy. Honesty doesn’t move the share price. Hope does.

But here’s the problem: when your “better prioritization strategy” is really just code for “please stop leaving us,” you’re not running a business — you’re maintaining an illusion.

And eventually, the market stops buying it.

Why Subscribe to ADOTAT+?

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Inside ADOTAT+, we unpack the internal memos, subpoenas, and investor calls that AppLovin would rather you never read—and the whispered Slack threads about The Trade Desk’s “friendly” dominance over Prebid. It’s the unredacted version of the adtech world: who’s lying, who’s paying to look honest, and who’s quietly rewriting the rulebook.

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WEEKLY REVIEW: Welcome to the Ad Tech Hunger Games: Everyone’s Automating, Lying, or Getting Sued

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