WPP may no longer be a member of the FTSE100 after its market value dropped by 87% (£24bn in 2017 to just £3.1bn at the end of 2025), but there was a major silver lining for the company to promote a few weeks later.

Its advertiser clients were happier! WPP’s most recent Annual Report – published in February under newish CEO Cindy Rose – records a client satisfaction score of 8.2 out of 10; a record high. Clients, WPP reported, view the company positively for “building strong client relationships, fuelling growth and mitigating risk.”

At the same time, WPP chose to redefine its foundational purpose around the word ‘trust’.

The same Annual Report features the word 17 times. The Elevate28 strategic plan positions WPP as “the trusted growth partner for the world’s leading brands in the era of AI.” Rose lists “trusted data and technology solutions” as a structural competitive advantage. WPP says trust “is scarce and must be earned daily.”

And yet just three months before in December 2025 – the same month in which WPP’s shrunken market cap made it too small to remain in the UK’s top public companies – one of its biggest clients was far from cheery and certainly not in a trusting mood.

Sony was in Tokyo presenting WPP’s own lawyers with the findings of an unprecedented forensic investigation into how its media budget was being spent. According to an amended complaint filed in New York State Supreme Court last week, Sony alleges WPP retained 76% of rebate funds in China – $350m against $110m passed to clients – routing the money through 47 shell brokers.

So what happens when one of its largest clients decides to put ‘trust’ to the test, and doesn’t like what it finds?

The case against WPP

The complaint in New York was brought by Richard Foster, a former WPP executive who alleges he was fired in July 2025 after raising concerns about what he describes as an improper kickback operation run through WPP’s media investment arm. He is seeking $100m in damages. WPP calls the complaint “baseless and without merit.”

But last week’s amended filing introduced something WPP will find harder to dismiss: an independent investigation by one of its own clients reaching the same conclusions.

Sony’s probe was triggered by a criminal case. In 2023, Chinese authorities detained three GroupM China executives over an illegal kickback scheme valued at ¥1.2 bn (roughly $176m). The former chief investment officer, Di Fei, was sentenced to life in prison in March this year. Two colleagues received 14.5 years and four years respectively.

It’s worth pausing and reflecting just how serious this story is.

WPP’s top media buyer in China is serving a life sentence for bribery.

(Di Fei is appealing against the life sentence, with a decision expected later this year or in early 2027, according to Bloomberg.)

Sony watched that case, then looked at its own money. What it alleges it found was a system built on murkiness: WPP negotiated rebates directly with vendors, routed the funds through a network of brokers with no operations of their own, retained the majority, and used the hidden pool to fund discounts that looked good on a client’s spreadsheet. WPP’s representatives, when confronted with the findings in Tokyo, reportedly said they did not want to “know the answer.”

WPP has not addressed the specific allegations. And throughout all of this – the criminal convictions, the Sony investigation, the Foster complaint – WPP’s public story has never changed. In February 2026, Cindy Rose told investors the company was “firmly on track” with its transformation plan and “successfully transitioning from a complex holding company to a single, integrated company.” The word “trusted” appeared across every major investor document.

But the allegations describe a company that allegedly retained three quarters of a client’s rebate funds through shell companies. Are those the actions of a company that seeks to earn trust on a daily basis?

This shouldn’t just be about WPP

Over the years, whenever I’ve asked agency leaders about “principal media trading”, where an agency buys inventory at one price and sells it at a margin, they insist it’s a legitimate and common practice. All the major holdcos do this, in some form.

Done transparently, with disclosed margins, it can work for everyone. The media agency group is effectively doing what Tesco does: buys a load of milk from a supplier at one price and sells it to a customer at a higher price. Maybe if you buy more milk you’re entitled to a discount.

And, as the World Federation of Advertisers noted in Adweek’s coverage last week: there are valid reasons for using media brokers in China. The market operates through tripartite agreements, volume-based rebates, and confidential framework deals that have no real equivalent in Western markets. The infrastructure that rewards transparency in London or New York simply doesn’t exist in Shanghai.

If you’re WPP or any of its holdco rivals, you could reasonably argue you deserve (or even need!) a big, fat margin for navigating such complexity. And shareholders, who have already punished WPP with an 87% drop in market value, will not tolerate that margin shrinking.

That defence makes sense… until we remember the 76%.

If WPP were retaining 10-15% through principal trading in a genuinely opaque market, this would be a governance conversation about disclosure, not a fraud allegation. But the Sony investigation alleges $350m retained against $110 million passed to clients, routed through 47 entities with no operations of their own. There is a difference between the margin required to navigate market complexity and the margin that exploits it.

The question is: who gets to decide where that line falls: the agency, or the client?

The WPP case exposes something that should trouble any advertiser with a significant agency relationship, regardless of which holding company name is on the contract. It reveals that the mechanisms the industry relies on to verify trust do not work.

Because if there was something dodgy happening with Sony’s budget, why didn’t the auditors catch it? Media auditing, as typically scoped, examines pricing benchmarks and delivery metrics; not rebate flows through offshore broker networks. Sony didn’t find what it found through an audit; it found it through a forensic investigation triggered by criminal convictions.

How many advertisers have the resources and the conviction to do that?

What to ask

If you’re an advertiser spending significant budget through any major agency group, the WPP case doesn’t mean you should be on high alert that your agency is defrauding you. But it does mean the question “how would I know?” deserves a better answer than “we trust them.”

I’m not an auditor (nor would I want to be!), but I’d have thought these questions would be some starting points:

• Can your agency show you the full rebate chain, from vendor payment to final disposition of funds?

• What is the disclosed margin on any principal or proprietary trading conducted on your behalf?

• Does your contract grant you the right to commission an independent audit of rebate flows; not just pricing and delivery?

• Have your media funds passed through any intermediary entities not disclosed in your agreement? And when did you last ask?

• Does your agency distinguish between the margin it earns for navigating market complexity and the margin it retains from undisclosed rebate flows? Can it show you the difference?

Don’t trust the front door. Trust the plumbing

In my latest Media Leader column, I made the case that trust should carry a commercial premium. In a media industry which seems to have lost interest and/or competence in self-regulation – as more money and ads are shown on platforms which can’t or won’t root out fraud and slop – putting your ads in a trusted space should be more valuable than ever.

WPP knows this. That’s why the first thing the CEO did when publishing her first Annual Report was to put “trust” front and centre of its investor-facing material. Even if, as we know now, it was privately facing a major challenge to its integrity from a major client.

But trust, as WPP also says, “is scarce and must be earned daily.”

This is the gap that should unsettle anyone in the industry, not just WPP’s clients.

Every mechanism the industry relies on to verify that the word “trust” means something was measuring the front of the house. But no one was looking at the plumbing. It took a client attending a criminal trial and commissioning its own forensic investigation to find out what was underneath.

Sony asked. Most advertisers haven’t. Why not?

Share Ad-verse Reactions by Omar Oakes

About Ad-verse Reactions

A newsletter for senior advertising and media professionals who suspect the industry’s problems are more structural than anyone’s admitting. I use media, marketing, and advertising as a lens for bigger questions about how businesses, institutions, and professional identities actually work (and why they so often don’t…)

I’m Omar Oakes – analyst, commentator, and founding editor-in-chief of The Media Leader. I’ve spent over a decade in trade media. Now I write here.

I also run oomph. – a narrative consultancy for media and advertising leaders whose story hasn’t kept pace with their business.

📩 omaroakesmedia@gmail.com
🔗 linkedin.com/in/omaroakes
🔗 omaroakes.com

Just seven months ago, Netflix told the world it was buying one of the world’s biggest media companies, Warner Bros. Discovery, for $83bn.

Then, co-CEO Greg Peters justified the acquisition this way: “With our global reach and proven business model, we can introduce a broader audience to the worlds they create – giving our members more options, attracting more fans to our best-in-class streaming service, strengthening the entire entertainment industry and creating more value for shareholders.”

That deal was scuppered by Paramount bending over backwards to acquire WBD for itself. CEO David Ellison may have bent forwards, too, if this week’s lawsuit allegations around he and his father’s relationship with Donald Trump is to be believed…

And last night, after reporting its second-quarter earnings, Netflix seems to have fully opted for Plan B: not ‘become YouTube’, but certainly become more like a platform as increasing user growth and watch time without the treasure trove of content that acquiring WBD would have bestowed.

Which means Netflix is being pulled onto unfamiliar terrain: daytime viewing, mobile screens, creator relationships, and – however reluctantly – the idea of giving content away for free. Netflix competing on YouTube’s terms, on YouTube’s turf, using YouTube’s talent pool.

In short, become ‘YouTube-ish’.

The platform bet

For 19 years, Netflix’s entire identity rested on one idea: the commissioned, budgeted, compliance-cleared show, dropped all at once, built around a season and a schedule. That’s the model that made appointment viewing out of an on-demand service; a neat trick, and one worth remembering.

Because this quarter Netflix admitted it’s building something that doesn’t work like that at all.

It reported revenue of $12.56bn, up 13% year-on-year, just shy of analyst consensus. Operating margin held at 33.4%, ahead of the company's own forecast. Diluted earnings per share came in at $0.80, beating the $0.79 analysts had expected. Guidance for the third quarter points to a slowdown to 12% revenue growth, which Netflix attributes to prior-year comparisons rather than any change in the underlying business.

Co-CEO Ted Sarandos told analysts that Netflix’s video podcasts are “out-indexing on mobile,” a fairly bloodless way of saying something quite significant: this content is winning specifically in the hours and on the devices Netflix historically didn’t own. Most Netflix viewing happens in the evening, on a TV, as part of a household ritual. Going forward, podcasts featuring Jay Shetty, Martha Stewart, and a rotating cast of creators are filling the other half of the day: the commute, the desk, the phone propped against a coffee cup.

Netflix calls this incremental. That’s probably true. It’s also the audience YouTube has dominated for the better part of two decades.

But the streaming giant also tried to have its cake and eat it. Having very deliberately tried to leverage worldwide interest in the FIFA Men’s World Cup by bringing on board Goalhanger’s The Rest is Football (pictured, above), it blamed the same tournament for Q2 being a tough quarter. View hours grew 2% in the first half of 2026, roughly 97bn hours watched between January and June, an extra 1.5bn hours versus the same period last year. That's a slight acceleration on 2025's full-year growth rate of 1.5%

We’ve become so used to thinking of Netflix as TV (although not regulated by Ofcom as traditional broadcasters are). But, by failing to bulk up on all that WBD protein, it seems destined to scrap with other platforms for cheap, creator content to build incremental audiences.

This means greater competition against Amazon, which launched its own Creator Hub on Fire TV this summer, pulling in more than 120 creators at launch. Fire TV owners can watch new YouTube uploads from names like Dude Perfect the same day they go live. At Amazon’s May Upfront, the pitch to advertisers was blunt: video podcasts are, in the words of one Amazon ads executive, “the new home for talk formats” – pitched explicitly as competing for TV budgets, not sitting alongside them. Oprah signed a podcast deal with Amazon’s Wondery at the same event.

It also puts Netflix in uncomfortable competition with FAST networks. Peters was even asked directly by an analyst whether Netflix would build a FAST platform itself. He said Netflix would “continue to consider” which is a studied non-answer from a company that spent a decade insisting subscription was the whole model and used to flat-out deny it would feature advertising.

Ads: more pressure to YouTube-ification

But feature advertising it does, since 2022.

And this platformisation of Netflix is entirely predictable for any mature digital service which monetises through advertising. It's a step beyond the normal windowing strategy we see among broadcaster and native streamers e.g. Sony will license Spiderman movies to Netflix in the UK for a few months, then Amazon Prime Video, and now it's about to stream exclusively on iPlayer.

By featuring a growing list of podcasts and creator content, Netflix is building a Roku-like proposition, where publishers will have their own long-tail FAST channel. (It's arguably the path that YouTube could have taken - create a separate Netflix-style fit for TV sub-brand that would be premium and brand safe. But that's unlikely to happen as long as it's owned by YouTube, which is all about ever deepening information networks in order to improve its core proposition of search.)

Last night’s earnings call also revealed the same instinct on the advertising side. Netflix used this call to talk about opening up “programmatic access to Pause Ads and live inventory,” language aimed specifically at reducing the friction that has historically kept smaller advertisers out. That’s the same play as the creator strategy, run on the other side of the business: instead of widening the base of who makes content for Netflix, it widens the base of who pays for it.

Two fronts, one instinct: stop being a service only the biggest players (studios on one side, national advertisers on the other) can access, and start being a platform anyone can plug into.

No one at Netflix used the word “platform” on the call. They didn’t have to.

Peters made a version of this argument himself back in January, when he was defending the WBD deal against antitrust concerns. He told the Financial Times Netflix sits below 10% of TV hours "in every market that we serve," naming Amazon and Apple as the real competitive threat.

Netflix is one competitor among many on a much bigger battlefield than "streaming wars".

Why watch times and share price are at odds

Here’s where it gets complicated.

Back in January, I wrote about Netflix’s declining watch-time as the reason it needed Warner Bros. Discovery. Netflix’s own Q4 2025 shareholder letter admitted engagement had taken a hit in the back half of 2025 and attributed it, specifically, to a lower volume of content Netflix had licensed from other studios. That admission landed on the same day Netflix moved to an all-cash bid for Warner Bros.

The market reaction was brutal: Netflix shares fell more than 30% in the three months to that January report.

Around the same time, the Wall Street Journal reported data from market research firm Luminate which found Netflix’s share of US original content viewing time fell below 60% in 2025 – a new low.

My analysis of Netflix’s title-by-title viewing data across the last three years shows total hours climbing steadily and without interruption – from 93.46 billion hours in the first half of 2023 to 97.66 billion in the first half of this year. There is no dip in that line, anywhere. Watch time growth on Netflix is actually accelerating: 2% growth in the first half of 2026, against 1.5% for all of 2025.

So the actual picture seems to be: Netflix’s total viewing keeps climbing, but that share is shrinking relative to Amazon, Disney and YouTube.

Which would explain why Netflix’s stock has had one of the worst years of any major media company. It closed at $74.35 the day before this earnings call, near a 52-week low of $70.86, and down almost 20% for the year heading into the report, off a 52-week high of $127.75. Bernstein, the equity research house, cut its price target by 9% just over a week before the call.

And, after last night’s earnings call, Netflix shares fell by another 9% in after-hours trading.

What they won’t tell you

Buried well below the fold of most earnings-day coverage: Netflix said generative AI workflows have now touched roughly three hundred titles this year. A year ago, in July 2025, Netflix had confirmed GenAI use in exactly one production – the Argentine series El Eternauta. One title to roughly 300 in 12 months is the kind of number that should be leading business coverage of this call, not trailing it as a footnote to the margin conversation.

Which brings us to the line in this letter that deserves the most scrutiny and got the least of it.

Netflix’s own framework for judging its business now rests on three words: quality, variety, quantity. Asked directly to explain how “quality” is measured, co-CEO Greg Peters declined, on the record, to detail it; arguing the metric took years to build and represents a genuine competitive advantage.

Maybe that’s true. It’s also, conveniently, unfalsifiable: how are investors and journalists supposed to measure this mystical sense of quality?

Netflix also announced it is retiring its What We Watched engagement report from the earnings cadence altogether, moving it to a standalone annual release starting next year.

So, going forward, we’re getting less quantitative data from Netflix. That rather seems YouTube-ish, too!

Welcome to Ad-verse Reactions

I’m Omar Oakes: a journalist who has spent over a decade picking apart how media, marketing, and content actually work – not how they pretend to.

This Substack is where I share the same ideas, challenges, and provocations I bring to my clients.

I also run oomph. – a narrative consultancy for media and advertising leaders whose story hasn’t kept pace with their business. I help agencies, media owners, and senior marketers sharpen their positioning, craft industry-leading narratives, and turn complex issues into content that actually moves people.

📩 omaroakesmedia@gmail.com 🔗 linkedin.com/in/omaroakes

Having gone through the initial early-adopter phase of Facebook 20 years ago, as it transitioned from a student flirting network to the world’s chatroom, our imaginations were captured by proximity to influential figures (Twitter), an enormous video library (YouTube), and the curation of highly engaged communities (Reddit).

Not only did the internet seem a more interesting place by the end of the 2000s, it seemed that we were entering a new normal of publishing. Advertisers and media owners were competing for social media managers to create all this content and maybe even have a strategy around it. New kinds of agencies, branding themselves as “social media agencies” or “digital agencies”, became the hot young things attracting fresh investor money.

Having secured my first job as a reporter in 2009, the newsroom advice was simple: get an iPhone, sign up to Twitter, and Tweet Tweet Tweet! Don’t miss your opportunity to be part of this network which is only going to get bigger and more interesting over time!!

Well, it’s 17 years later and a good few years since I left X (Elon Musk’s atrocious name for Twitter). I can’t even remember when I left Facebook. I tried Instagram briefly and didn’t see the point. And LinkedIn, well, seems fundamentally broken given that I never seem to see posts from the people I regularly interact with, nor do my posts seem to get the same reach as they used to.

And what impact has breaking free from social had on my career? Almost certainly a net positive. For every random DM I would get from a potential hirer, or Radio Five Live producer asking me to appear on air, or nugget of insight from a clever Tweet, I have had, for several years now, the benefit of not playing the game.

It’s taken a while, but I’m convinced that the benefits far outweigh the lost opportunities. For starters, always-on social media activity is a massive drain of time and energy. Whatever the benefits are of having a fresh and lively online profile, they feel dwarfed by the obvious cost of being unpaid labour in this grand effort to make Silicon Valley tech bros even wealthier.

More importantly, I no longer have this sense of anxiety that I’m missing out on being part of this so-called online hive mind. Or that culture is rapidly passing me by because I’ve not got up-to-the-minute info about when Andy Burnham will become UK prime minister, or that people are going to forget I exist because I’m not ‘part of the conversation’.

At the risk of bragging to make to a serious point, I’ve never been happier or more productive. I spend hours thinking about what to write in the service of creating something deeply impactful and meaningful to my audience. Compare that to the vast majority of Twitterati, who spend literally hours on instantly-understood punchlines to gain likes. This isn’t conversation; it’s a never-ending armchair version of Have I Got News For You?, except with no moderator and thousands of comments straining to be heard.

Being happy and productive doesn’t just give me more pleasure as a thinker and a writer, it affirms my credibility as strategist and content creator for my clients. Because writing is thinking. So the longer we spend on writing, the better thinkers we will be. (And I promise not to reheat the ‘don’t use AI to write for you’ sermon, which you can find here….)

‘Such a waste of time’

I hope my interviewee Dominic O’Meara will forgive that indulgent preamble, especially because it suggests what follows will be a hit job, given that he has launched this new(ish) social media app called Supernova.

I promise, this is not a teardown. I wanted to interview Dominic because a) the app looks genuinely interesting, b) he has very strong views about the state of online media, c) I deliberately wanted to challenge my personal view that social media, broadly, has become a waste of time. Not to mention the myriad harms caused by social, which is set to be banned in the UK for under-16s.

Supernova presents itself as a new social network that is “designed differently from the ground up”. Sir John Hegarty, arguably UK advertising’s most famous living creative director, has invested in the startup and serves as its creative advisor. Other big-name industry backers include Anomaly founder Carl Johnson, 180 Amsterdam founder Guy Hayward, and ex-IPG Mediabrands UK CEO Richard Morris.

So imagine my surprise, when I opened our conversation by asking what motivated this venture, he began by looking at the early platforms in 2008 and 2009 and concluding: “it just looked like such a waste of time, such a lot of rubbish.”

But that was the era of peak social-media evangelism, wasn’t it? Fast forward to today, and his assessment isn’t much brighter: “The rest of it is unnecessary, overloaded, bewildering, often quite freaky, can be quite disturbing, like the endless barrage of stuff like you get on TikTok, which I think is brain death from the second you open it.”

Freaky? Disturbing? Brain death? So why in the world would you aim to compete in this sort of market?

Because, he insists, Supernova can offer a better alternative. As if the world needed to see social media at its worst before being ready to accept a version of its best.

O’Meara’s advertising career began in 1985, as one of 10 graduate trainees at Saatchi & Saatchi, and would become what advertising creatives call an account handler and director at agencies GGT, DMB&B, Doner, TBWA and Naked.

O'Meara built and ran his own agency, Community, in Amsterdam, before creating venture-backed social network Baagloo, initially for Community clients including Canon and Adidas. Baagloo reached 15 million monthly impressions and provided the user behavioural learning, precursor and some of the early backend technology for what became the prototype of Supernova, released in December 2021. O’Meara saw that what the world needed was “a social network focused on delivering positive outcomes for all, with that baked into the experience and design”. The early beta, evolved from this, is now in the app stores, and new version, based in turn on learning and extensive user research and feedback from this, is in development now.

“It's this new version and vision for the future that Hegarty, Johnson, Hayward, Morris and other big names are now getting behind and investing in,” O’Meara adds.

And yet it’s the Saatchi bosses he worked for four decades ago who would become his backers today: in October 2022, David Kershaw, Bill Muirhead and Jeremy Sinclair – the trio who ran the breakaway M&C Saatchi until a 2019 accounting scandal – invested in a £2m funding round into Supernova at a £10m valuation.

O’Meara has now landed on the conviction that social media per se is not the problem, but the way that Big Social have designed their apps is. Not a category error, but a lack of alternatives to doomscrolling and ragebaiting

Supernova mirrors a clean, image-and-video-led layout similar to Instagram, but it contains no algorithm built to keep people scrolling. It will be unaffected by the UK’s proposed social media ban for under-16s because it doesn’t let them there in the first place. And, to promote civility and altruism in online discourse, each like a user gives generates a cash charitable donation to causes chosen by the user.

O’Meara’s eyes light up during a demonstration, which shows a female user’s donation history to a children’s welfare charity. “When she looks in the mirror, she doesn’t see the self-satisfied, narcissistic glow of having got a few more likes. She sees somebody that’s altruistically given to the world and that makes her feel good.”

“We’re tapping into a behavioural science, a human nature, which is a positively known thing… it’s why [users] feel disinclined to be antagonistic on Supernova.”

This happens through “likes” being rethought of as democratic votes: users select their preferred cause areas (e.g. mental health or climate change) on their profiles. When a user ‘likes’ a post, that action acts as a vote directing a portion of the Action Fund toward their chosen cause. A “Supernova” (or a super-’like’) multiplies that voting power tenfold.

To combat the “scrolling through bile” effect, O’Meara employs strict hybrid moderation (AI combined with trained human moderators) to actively weed out hate speech, racism, and divisive, hyper-partisan political bickering.

Users must have followers in order to have their content seen on their feed. There is an ‘explore’ section, in the style of X, but that section specifically is curated by moderators, not an algorithm – this is the point he makes to distinguish it from Big Social: “If I go here onto the Explore tab, I see what our moderators have suggested I might want to look at. It’s not coming from an algorithm that’s just that’s human beings that have put this up.”

There are “12-15” of these human moderators, which he says, surprisingly is more than is enough at present: “We get barely any negative content, we get barely any rude or unpleasant stuff for antagonistic content that needs to be removed, but we do have moderators primed and able to remove it where it is necessary.”

It certainly feels like interesting timing for a contrarian design. And yet Ofcom’s most recent Adults Media Use and Attitudes report shows active participation in social media (posting, commenting, sharing) has dropped from 61% in 2024 to 49% in 2026. Suddenly my recent LinkedIn experience doesn’t feel like such an isolated case: less than half of people are doing anything on social other than scrolling, having a look, then going away. While Big Social (Meta and YouTube) have clearly modified their platforms to be more entertainment-led in response to the rapid success of TikTok in recent years, it does feel like social is becoming less social.

Meanwhile the same Ofcom report reveals people’s belief that being online does more good than harm has fallen from 72% to 59% over the same period. The share who think platforms are good for their mental health has dropped from 42% to 36%, with roughly a third of adults now saying they’ve deleted an app because of overuse or its effect on their mental health, up from about a quarter the year before.

By contrast, O’Meara reports that the contribution rate among Supernova users is “way, way higher than is typical for a social network”.

He explains: “Most social networks say about 2-3% of their users contribute, that is to say, they post or they put up content that others can enjoy. On ours, it’s between 12-15%.”

It’s a striking figure, until you look at what “high” contribution actually looked like the last time a platform was this young. In 2011, one of Twitter’s early investors, Fred Wilson, disclosed that of the platform’s 400 million monthly active users, 100 million logged in regularly and 60 million tweeted. That’s a contribution rate of 15%, at a comparable stage of growth to where Supernova sits now with its 25,000 users. Twitter’s own numbers, in other words, weren’t far off Supernova’s 12-15%.

No politics allowed

Positivity, it turns out, comes with a rulebook. Ask O’Meara what he won’t allow on Supernova and the answer arrives without hesitation: “We don’t allow any politics.”

Not moderated politics. Not politics-lite. None.

“There isn’t a single political party that’s worth arguing about, because they’re all crap, so we don’t want to help any of them,” he tells me; his reasoning being that no party deserves defending, so none gets a platform.

It’s a tidy solution to the ugliest problem in online moderation: remove the entire category that causes the fights, and you never have to adjudicate who’s right. News organisations are welcome on Supernova, he says, just not for anything political – which for most newsrooms is a bit like inviting a chef into your restaurant and telling them they can’t use salt.

His theory for why news skews negative in the first place is blunt: “we do tend to reward them for printing very negative stuff.” Human nature, not malice, in his telling. He’s not wrong about the mechanism. He’s just not proposing to fix it, only to exclude it.

Under-16s get the same treatment, and here O’Meara (pictured, above) sounds genuinely proud rather than defensive: “We policed ourselves, we introduced ‘no under 16s’ from day one…. We just decided we would do it from the moment we drew breath, because we just didn’t think anybody under 16 should be on social media.”

His reasoning stretches past app design into a broader theory of adolescence: “they shouldn’t be on screens at all. They should be doing something bleeding useful, not arguing with each other. Or, if they are going to argue, do it face to face!”

Indeed that argument has been building for some time and feels reminiscent of the 20th Century shift in attitudes towards smoking. In May, the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges told the UK government that most of what eventually brought tobacco under control – taxation, advertising limits, health warnings – barely exists yet for social media. Vivek Murthy, during his time as US Surgeon General under Joe Biden, spent his final months in the job pushing Congress toward warning labels on social platforms, the same treatment cigarette packets have carried for decades.

A few years ago that comparison would have sounded like a joke aimed at someone who’d never opened Instagram. Now it’s fast becoming conventional wisdom; giving a growing number of countries’ lawmakers a justification for ‘taking on’ platforms with bans and threats of bans.

Which raises the question I can’t shake: if the whole category is heading toward the tobacco treatment, does it much matter whether the product inside the packet is the “ethical” one? Nobody asks whether a cigarette was rolled with good intentions.

Don’t be such greedy bastards

So Supernova bans the arguments, excludes the under-16s, and runs without an algorithm. What’s actually holding the rest of the promise together?

I ask O’Meara directly whether the platform’s central pledge – that it won’t slide, the way Meta did, toward maximising engagement over wellbeing – is written into anything beyond his own conviction.

His answer: “Well, it’s certainly within our ethos, our manifesto, our credo to the world, you know.”

Not the articles of association. Not a binding structure. Ethos.

Charity, however, is a big part of the offer. Unlike traditional networks where ad revenue is fully captured by the company, Supernova channels a significant portion of advertising revenue into an “Action Fund” distributed to global charities.

But when pushed on the underlying problem with the industry he’s trying to fix, and he gets more colourful, and considerably more honest.

“Number one, we think: wouldn’t it be a great idea not to be such greedy bastards?” he asks, rhetorically.

Hard to argue with the diagnosis. It’s just that “don’t be greedy” is a personality trait, not a governance model – and personality traits don’t tend to survive contact with investors expecting the hundred-times return he’s already promised them.

He admits as much himself, almost in passing: “for now, it’s like it’s a very strong part of our ethos, it’s a very strong part of why I started this damn thing in the first place.”

For now, I retort. What’s to stop this earnest operation from becoming “enshittified” with worse user experience, weaker content moderation, and more ad inventory stuffed into it?

O’Meara insists that, by making a small dent into a massive market largely dominated by Meta Platforms, that will be enough to make Supernova a £1bn company by annual revenue.

“If you isolate the big advertisers [and] if we’re talking about Meta specifically, and you might as well, because they are sitting like 80% of social media, then you’re talking about 10% of their business coming from big advertisers, so 10% of Meta’s ad business is around £20bn. That, for a company startup like mine, is quite enough to keep our eye on.

“If we got to a 5% share of that 20 billion, would make us a 1 billion a year company. That’s not a bad place to get to.”

In the meantime, O’Meara is targeting a first milestone of 10 million daily active users. “That’s the first magic number we want to strike,” he says.

That would mean “we’ll be generating £300m annual for the company, and we’ll be giving £45m of that [to good causes] as our current numbers stand.

The ‘feel good’ pitch

That would make Supernova one of the UK media’s biggest sources of charitable donations – a quite ambitious achievement that would eclipse the likes of of Red Nose Day, UK charity Comic Relief’s flagship broadcast event backed by the BBC, which raised £34m last year.

Charitable giving, baked in the model, is part of the pitch that Supernova not just as a nicer app for Gen Z and Millennials, but is a brand-safe haven for advertisers who are deeply fatigued by having their corporate ads display next to toxic content on mainstream platforms.

Showing early industry validity, global sportswear brand Asics signed on as one of Supernova’s first official corporate sponsors, and UK mental health research charity MQ was its launch charity partner.

The “feel-good” pitch is highly appealing in theory, but getting users to actually migrate from apps where their existing friend groups, memories, and creators reside requires overcoming massive consumer inertia. Social networks are only valuable in the long-run because other people are on them.

In the short-run, at least, O’Meara cites Vero, another self-styled “optimised for connection, not addiction” social network, as an example of what’s possible.

“They did 3 million [user signups] in a week once... There’s next to no friction. This introduced image recognition, in which case everybody’s got it. So, it’s the same problem opportunity for everyone... The thing is to have really very good, fast, working tech.”

Which is an important observation, because a lack of “fast, working tech” was the very thing that killed VERO’s momentum. While it’s true VERO experienced explosive growth in 2018 (thanks to widespread frustration with Instagram and a ‘free for life’ promise to its first million users), its backend infrastructure collapsed under the weight of the traffic. Users faced server outages, couldn’t post pictures, and were hit with frequent glitches.

A fascinating litmus test

Here’s where I land, for now, on the question I asked myself at the start. O’Meara insists the appetite for something better than Big Social hasn’t gone anywhere: “There’s so many people that use this time, use social media, that number’s not going down, it’s going away from the existing ones.”

He’s betting that a silent majority of social media users want a digital environment that values community wellbeing over outrage-driven engagement clicks.

A minute later, almost despite himself, he says something closer to the truth: “people are falling out of love with social media, because it’s not really social… what is social about it?”

I think he’s half right. People aren’t leaving; Ofcom’s own numbers say as much, as total time online keeps climbing even as the will to participate in it collapses. But that’s precisely the problem for a platform built entirely on participation. Supernova doesn’t need people to keep scrolling. It needs them to post, comment, and actively hand out Supernovas – the exact behaviour that’s disappearing fastest, on every platform Ofcom measured, regardless of how good the cause behind the click.

I’m not the target audience for a platform like this. I write about how the sausage is made; it doesn’t mean I have to eat hot dogs every day. But Supernova is offering something distinct and with a clear vision that will surely appeal to many who haven’t lost that belief that digital media can create meaningful communities and inspire new forms of creative expression, without the minefield of addiction, abuse, and ‘brain death’.

Whether Supernova succeeds is not just a litmus test of whether social media can be more than doomscrolling and ragebait. It may be a final answer to a growing suspicions that the only true ethical alternative to social media was to simply not bother with it at all.

Welcome to Ad-verse Reactions

I’m Omar Oakes: a journalist who has spent over a decade picking apart how media, marketing, and content actually work – not how they pretend to.

This Substack is where I share the same ideas, challenges, and provocations I bring to my clients.

I also run oomph. – a narrative consultancy for media and advertising leaders whose story hasn’t kept pace with their business. I help agencies, media owners, and senior marketers sharpen their positioning, craft industry-leading narratives, and turn complex issues into content that actually moves people.

📩 omaroakesmedia@gmail.com 🔗 linkedin.com/in/omaroakes

Share Ad-verse Reactions by Omar Oakes

“They used to say you have to be consistent, you have to be simple. You can be consistently dull and simply shit, though.

“What I'm really poking at is there is such an opportunity to matter. How dare we waste that opportunity being invisible or being normal or being familiar?”

Nils Leonard, the co-founder and creative director of Uncommon Creative Studio, said that at Global’s Outdoor Upfronts on Tuesday. He was talking about poster ads, or billboards, but he just as easily could have been talking about written journalism.

That might seem strange: comparing a huge roadside poster with a wall of text. But bear with me.

As I wrote about earlier this week, the whole panoply of quality media content is under pressure from an ecosystem that has become too dependent on Big Tech platforms for reach.

That means that, to play the online content game, you have to deploy tricks to suit the algorithm, such as:

• ensuring headlines are hyper aggressive or annoyingly cryptic, depending on what type of clickbait works best

• being prolific with content volume, which usually means dipping into the well of ‘greatest hits’ rather than take a chance on coming up with something original or risky

• use engagement-hacking techniques, such as tacitly (or explicitly) agree to comment with another creator’s mundane posts so they will return the favour

The result? A wall of online content that is, as Leonard puts it, “consistently dull and simply shit”.

And now we have AI chatbots to help us create even more consistently dull and simple shit, at scale.

This scourge infiltrated B2B media long ago. Journalists who write about the creative industries – the ones who should be able to see this bullshit for what it is and raise the alarm – are, sadly, as complicit as anyone.

Myself included.

How much time have I wasted thinking up clever Tweets, or the ‘right way’ to respond to someone criticising my work on LinkedIn? There was a very short period, years ago, when I was active on Instagram, despite my distaste for the performative guff that shows up there. I tried to be all subversive by posting the most boring pictures I could surface from my boring life “here’s me at the office, making coffee”. Not only was it unpopular, it actually annoyed people, so much so that I shut it down within weeks.

I shudder to think how many books or investigative pieces I could have written in that time. Or, at least, could have tried to write and fail.

Permanence matters

Look, I appreciate the networking opportunities of social media and the ease of publishing of Substack (where, for all its faults, lets me have ownership of my audience in a way that social media never would).

But we’ve run the various experiments of digital publishing over the years to conclude, without doubt, that content for screens will never match the experience of reading on a physical, printed product.

There are various reasons.

One: apps and websites commodify content

We’ve moved from a world of media products to media parts, or from consuming meals to grazing on snacks.

Can you even name three journals, magazines, or news brands that you regularly read from cover to cover in online form? It’s extremely difficult because of the online content game: there’s always more content to push, more ad inventory to cram in, and more data to collect.

This is a disaster for written journalism. The stories we write are strengthened by being read within a product of multiple content pieces of varying shapes, intensities and emotions. Stick with it, and patterns begin to emerge. You feel what an editor feels through their decisions, whether it was the design, the order, or the length and variety of the articles.

In other words, the print product enables you to see between and across ‘content’, instead of seeing content through the same 4-inch or 10-inch screen every day.

Two: permanence raises the stakes

Let’s face it, I could edit this article at any point and you’re very unlikely to know.

I did this within a couple of hours of publishing this week’s earlier piece, because I had made a couple of bone-headed spelling mistakes. Embarrassing, but easily fixable.

Compare this to the hours of painstaking copy proofing that went on when I worked at Campaign (when it was still a monthly, let a lone a weekly, magazine), or during my local newspaper days. Everyone, not just the editor and subeditors, would carefully check for literal and factual errors, because we all wanted to avoid the dreaded phone call or email the next day that informed us of mess-up.

Because if you can’t even spell properly or know your basic facts, why should anyone trust you to handle sensitive topics or exclusive news properly?

I’ve never been brave enough to have a tattoo because what design could I possible commit to that I’d be prepared to have on my body for the rest of my life?

Compare that to the throwaway opinions and poorly written, poorly researched guff that adorns online publications with painful regularity?

How dare we, as journalists, waste our time and your time without striving to create content that matters so much that it would be etched in stone if it were feasible?

Why I’m supporting The Static

Very soon I’ll be supporting a new, print-only publication called The Static.

The Static is a colour tabloid for the advertising, design and media industries, launching on 11 September. It’s built by people who’ve spent their careers surrounded by exactly the kind of shit content I’ve just spent several paragraphs complaining about — and have decided to do something about it, instead of just writing newsletters about it, like me.

Claire Foss, a communications strategist and journalist who’s worked at or written for Haymarket, William Reed, the BBC and Channel 4, is founding and publishing it. Phoebe Willison, the designer behind The Skinny, is building its look.

The launch illustration is a play on VW’s “Lemon” ad, drawn by Thea Bryant, whose client list includes Adidas, Team GB and Amnesty International. That’s not a random flex; it’s the point. A magazine for people who make things beautifully for a living should look like it was made by people who make things beautifully.

I’ll be running the media and broadcast coverage. Tom Banks, formerly of Design Week and The Drum, is running design and advertising. Emily Gosling, who’s written for Creative Review, Design Week and It’s Nice That, is running the Life section — the human stuff behind the job titles.

Here’s the part that matters most: The Static is print-only.

No Instagram. No free version drip-fed onto a website or Substack to chase pageviews. Just an infrequent email to tell subscribers what’s coming, and a limited rack circulation that puts physical copies directly into creative industry offices and hubs from day one, with no algorithm standing between the work and the reader.

And it won’t run press releases. Press releases were never meant to be copied and pasted to the extent that they are now by online, high-volume content merchants. Press officers use to expect journalists to ring them after receiving press releases and ask questions and request interviews to get original quotes.

We just took it for granted that we’d want our work to be original, distinctive and built on human interaction. Are we really prepared to give up on that in the pursuit of just producing ‘more’?

How dare we waste the opportunity to matter by being invisible, normal, familiar.

A print publication you can hold, that costs money to produce, that can’t be quietly edited at midnight to fix a typo no one noticed… that’s about as far from invisible as content gets.

Yes, it’s a gamble. It’s a big bet that permanence still beats reach. I happen to think it’s the right one. And I suspect many of you who care about the creative industries think so, too.

Subscriptions and ad bookings are open now, ahead of the September launch issue. Find out more at thestatic.co.uk, or email claire@thestatic.co.uk.

If you’re interested in writing for The Static, or have ideas for features, opinion and analysis, email omar@thestatic.co.uk.

Welcome to Ad-verse Reactions

I’m Omar Oakes: a journalist who has spent over a decade picking apart how media, marketing, and content actually work – not how they pretend to.

This Substack is where I share the same ideas, challenges, and provocations I bring to my clients.

I also run oomph. – a narrative consultancy for media and advertising leaders whose story hasn’t kept pace with their business. I help agencies, media owners, and senior marketers sharpen their positioning, craft industry-leading narratives, and turn complex issues into content that actually moves people.

📩 omaroakesmedia@gmail.com 🔗 linkedin.com/in/omaroakes

Share Ad-verse Reactions by Omar Oakes

Recent articles…

I propose that, from now on, megacombo replaces the awful jargonistic term: sustainability.

Because sustainability is the worst kind of word: a boring, technical term for a beautiful idea. Megacombo will better represent this idea, that systems, such as life on planet earth, have a rich enough mix of diversity and layers of strength that it can sustain over a long, indefinite period. It is lasting and internally self-correcting when things get out of balance. The nature of life itself: a megacombo.

This is the idea that drives my fascination with media and advertising: the clear, alarming and urgent preoccuapation that whatever this industry is doing is unsustainable. Far from being a megacombo, it is becoming monolithic. The map has shrunk in terms of companies on the buy and sell side. Fewer companies, fewer leaders, fewer personalities, and fewer ideas.

Like any lasting ecosystem, a media and advertising market can only remain strong through diversity: a spectrum of differentiated buyers and sellers that morph into different shapes and sizes as culture and technology changes.

While nature has extremely strong tools for self-correcting imbalances, a human-made construct like a market needs human intervention to ensure things don’t go too awry. Or unsustainable. Or anti-megacombo.

This argument, as I put forward in a recent Media Leader column, is essentially my evolving view of this market and it’s what drives my journalism at the moment. The weakening of our megacombo is an unfolding catastrophe that threatens so much of the entertainment, journalism, publishing and public discourse that were taken for granted when I was a child in the late 20th Century. You don’t need to read Yuval Noah Harari’s Nexus (although you really should…) to see that the proliferation of online media has coincided with the rise in authoritarianism and a general flatlining in business productivity.

This shouldn't be a controversial view, but being anti-tech tends to run against a pro-business narrative because people constantly make this category error: they associate technological progress with economic progress. See here for my argument (or rather, Charlie Munger’s argument) for why tech can be good for consumers but is generally bad for businesses.

But the thing is, our industry is pretty poor at asking itself existential questions like this. Part of this is structural: creative industries are, for very good reasons, very sensitive about self-regulation. We all instinctively recoil at the idea of governments or other bureaucrats putting limits on free expression, not to mention free enterprise.

The other part reveals itself after many years of studying the people who work in this industry: we are an industry of nomads and travellers. Very few of us wanted to sell display ads or create slide decks about iROAS when we were children; this industry generally attracts bright and commercially savvy people who ‘just fall into’ media or marketing. This means few of us have strong preconceptions of what this industry should be or ought to be; we are geared to go with the flow, that uncertain momentum that carried us into this sector in the first place.

This complacency has made us vulnerable to the knotweed of Big Tech, which has been allowed to invade this industry at will without any real attempt to ask the simplest of questions: is any of this actually sustainable?

That’s the big question we must keep asking now. It’s one of the key questions the Advertising Who Cares initiative posed earlier this month at their Who Cares Wins? event in central London, hosted by Prospect magazine.

Content, that other stale, jargonistic term we use to describe the words, sounds and pictures that makes all of our commercial endeavours possible, is at the forefront of this shrinking of sustainability. You only need to visit Los Angeles to see how America’s engine of the entertainment industry has been hollowed out, or walk around London’s Soho, where you’d be lucky to spot anyone who works in advertising these days (they’ve all presumably migrated at home, spending most of the day perfecting LinkedIn posts that no one will see).

AWC, or even the sort of pieces I find myself writing these days, shouldn’t exist. But these conversations have become necessary because our industry lacks the infrastructure of self-correction that makes our industry sustainable. Or megacombo-able.

Let me explain how this impacts content, via six important findings from my excellent panel that day. My panelists were:

• Dominic Ponsford, editor-in-chief of Press Gazette

• Mel Leach, CEO of South Shore Productions

• Stephen Colegrave, co-founder of Byline Times,

• and Damian Collins, former MP, DCMS minister and DCMS select committee chair.

1. Scary numbers. So why aren’t we more scared?

Ponsford opened with figures the industry knows but rarely acknowledges with appropriate alarm: £31bn of £46bn in UK ad spend goes to the platforms. Compare that to every publisher combined: £1.5bn.

WARC’s figures tell a similar story: over the last two decades, total adspend on magazine and newsbrand media has fallen by a factor of 7.6x: from £9.2bn in 2005 to just £1.2bn at the end of 2025.

While many won’t shed a tear that the publications they don’t like have either been hollowed out or starved completely during this famine, Ponsford reminds us that advertising has, since the Industrial Revolution, subsidised the messy, incomplete, but essential public service that we call journalism.

“[Advertising] enabled democracy to happen; the fact that we had journalists who told people what went on, and it was subsidised."

But now, he added, we have just “10%” of people in the UK who pay for online news. What of the other 90%?

“Well, who knows? You've got the BBC, but if the BBC is the only show in town, we'll all love it a little bit less, I think.”

He went on: "You are getting an information-rich elite that people are willing to pay for information, but in terms of ‘mass media’… there are a lot of kind of polemicists and conspiracy theorists who do really, really well on YouTube."

The antithesis of quality media: unchecked content garbage published by platforms whose editorial decisions are automated instead of professionalised.

And it’s not because we’ve all just accepted that this is how content should be in the smartphone-internet age. That publishing on four-inch screens instead of print presses should mean publishers’ revenue is decimated and consumers get a much worse product. And the platforms who created these now media experiences should be so richly rewarded for what they’ve built for us.

Instead, according to Collins, we are all unsatisfied, and yet: “the industry won’t speak up about it, because it can’t afford to, because its coffers are being stuffed by these platforms all the time…. there’s a reluctance... to call out Google [and] Amazon, because they are the dominant commercial players in this industry.”

So not ignorance, but structural cowardice. Collins didn’t name names: was he talking about trade bodies? Agencies? Trade journalists? All of those who should stand up for quality content but are financially dependent on the platforms they’d need to challenge.

2. YouTube and the shadow system

Then Collins made what was arguably the session's most consequential observation.

YouTube is already the UK's biggest distributor of television content, yet broadcasters must surrender 45% of ad revenue to distribute on it, abide by Ofcom standards, and compete for prominence in an algorithm they don't control. This is important for two reasons:

Firstly, the premise is not true! YouTube is not the UK’s biggest distributor of TV content, no matter how you define “distributor of television”.

If you mean traditional scheduled broadcast content – dramas, documentaries, news, commissioned formats – the BBC iPlayer, ITVX, Channel 4, and Sky collectively distribute far more of that than YouTube does. If you mean “video content watched on a television set,” YouTube’s own data shows it is the most-watched streaming app on UK smart TVs by time spent, but that includes user-generated content, music videos, vlogs, and everything else that reasonable people wouldn’t call television.

It’s really important to make that clear because, given the way YouTube went round calling itself “the new TV” last year, this misunderstanding creates confusion about the scale of what’s going on in our industry.

But secondly, Collins was making real and important point. If YouTube is the largest single platform by volume of video consumption in the UK, we now have a shadow TV system in which the regulatory framework was written for a world that no longer exists.

That’s because, as Collins points out: “for the consumer at home, this is one box on the wall where everything is coming in... that has got a smaller audience than a YouTuber, is largely unregulated. I mean, from a consumer point of view, that is nonsense.”

“What does it mean to be a public broadcaster with a broadcasting license with various codes you have to abide by, if you’re reaching your customer through the same medium, where people don’t really have to do very many of these things at all?”

Collins’s big question, which is true for all platforms, is this: “if YouTube does become television, then do we have to regard it almost like a public utility and regulate it as such?”

3. Content: the ‘top of the content funnel’ is a public good

We’re very good at describing a marketing funnel in advertising: creative ideas sit at the top of the funnel to create long-term brand-building associations in consumers mins, while bottom-funnel activity converts to sale the people who are already interested in your product.

Leach applied this funnel thinking to content, which is a useful frame for why the content ecosystem is suffering even though, if you only look at headline statistics – £124bn, 2.4 million jobs – the creative sector appears to be in good health.

Her examples of recent UK hits – Mr Bates vs the Post Office, Dirty Business – are evidence of what the top of the funnel actually does: it creates the cultural texture against which advertising finds its meaning. Kevin Lygo, ITV’s director of television, told AWC’s annual conference in November that Mr Bates would not have been made if ITV were not an ad-funded broadcaster. While Mr Bates had an enormous national impact with its cutting dramatisation of the UK Post Office scandal, it would be very unlikely to attract a production green light from a Netflix or Warner Bros.

Global streamers don't make those shows. They want global content, supplemented with domestic content that they can reliably procure from domestic broadcasters.

Leach said: “If money continues to flow to digital and out of our terrestrial PSBs, then there is a danger that all of the content that reflects us back as a society will just simply be lost because the terrestrials are not going to be able to afford to fund it.

“Global streamers are called global streamers for a reason, they want global content. They're not massively interested in domestic conversations, and some of those programmes are really significant and important.”

You could argue that streamers currently have the best of both worlds: they can fight a global streaming arms race (i.e. produce and commission mostly American-made TV and film for global export), which ‘windowing’ domestic content via deals with the likes of ITV, which currently swaps some content with DisneyPlus on ITVX.

So you see how this is not ‘streamer bad, broadcaster good’. It’s about sustainability. Streamers need the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and the production companies they either own, operate or commission, to keep the content funnel filled with diverse content.

In the real world, most of us don’t want to watch Friends reruns and Marvel movies ad nauseam. We want stories that reflect our culture, which remains rooted in our nations and communities, which remain stubbornly analogue with their nuances, blurred edges and unpredictability.

Without media owners and production companies that are incentivised to tell national and regional stories, a huge part of what makes TV “quality” would be under threat.

4. Britain’s creative lead is a legacy position. But we’re spending it down.

But Leach’s most striking evidence was commercial rather than cultural.

“We probably need to look at the way that we incentivise domestic production in the UK. We're not the most competitive in the world anymore, and that is a problem. We don't have incentives for British broadcasters to buy original British IP.”

The UK is the world’s number-one format exporter, but the conditions that produced that position are being dismantled in real time.

This is partly because, in this global content race, some countries are adding grease to the track: Ireland, Leech said, has a tax credit threshold of £250k versus the UK’s £1m-per-hour drama requirement. The result: production is physically leaving the country. All of Fox’s [TV] entertainment is now made in Ireland specifically because of that tax break, she added.

What’s more, Leech’s own next global format won’t be made here: “we will actually not produce it in the UK, we will produce it in either Belgium or Amsterdam, because it’s much more affordable.”

5. Platform dependency is a trap. Even the escapees can’t fully escape.

Stephen Colegrave’s Byline Times story was the most vivid case study in the session. A freemium model built on social traffic, working well… until it wasn’t.

Byline Times is a reader and shareholder-funded print-first newspaper that aimed to break the dependence that publishers have always had on advertisers, in order to rebalance the editorial concerns from corporations to people. All editors (myself included when I was one), might crow about editorial ‘independence’ and the importance of ‘church and state’, but this is a tough balance to strike.

Meanwhile the legacy publishers have all, at some point in their journey of ‘digital transformation, been burnt by the platforms, whether it’s due to sudden algorithm or product changes, or a gradual metamorphosis from friend to frenemy to outright antagonist.

Byline, for its part, grew up on Twitter (now X). But then, Cosgrove recalled, traffic from X and Facebook dropped 90% almost overnight. They migrated to Apple News, BlueSky, Threads, and Substack, but only got back roughly half of that referral traffic.

Ponsford invoked Private Eye, a UK publishing institution, which still maintains a a 250,000 circulation and profit margin despite never having gone digital.

But the lesson isn’t “don’t go digital.” We’re never going back to a world of pulps and printing presses and pretend that iPads, Kindles and smartphones don’t exist.

Colegrave explained: “I think people don't realise the extent to which publishers and news organisations rely on social media to actually promote and give them traffic… that is a real issue that's going on now. There's no regulation about that.”

Byline’s commercial model – subscriptions (now 60,000), events, shareholder-readers – is genuinely compelling and worth holding up as a direction of travel. But the structural headwinds publishers face are intensifying, not easing. The path that Byline took in 2019 is much harder to walk in 2026.

So much so that Colegrave admitted that it would now be impossible to launch Byline Times today.

Once you’ve built on someone else’s land, you can’t choose when they evict you.

6. Self-regulation had a theory of the case. That theory is now broken.

Collins offered the sharpest historical framing of the session: Self-regulation worked in the 20th century because everyone at the table needed the market to be trusted. But now they don’t.

He said: “This industry is run really the way it was 100 years ago... Lord Beaverbrook would sit down for dinner with Lord Northcliffe, and they sorted it all out... because it was in everyone’s interests to have a trusted marketplace. Now we see the biggest section of that trusted marketplace dominated by companies that don’t abide by those rules, and no one can make them.”

That’s because Lords Beaverbrook and Northcliffe both had skin in the game. The platforms don’t. Or rather, their skin is large enough that they can absorb the jeopardy.

Tim Cowen, co-founder of Movement for an Open Web, went further with a chilling comment from the audience: “You can’t run a business in a digital economy without being found in Google. If you make a complaint about Google, you are likely as not going to be subject to retaliation in your business’s [search] history. That should be a cause for major political concern.”

In March, I documented the various ways in which self-regulation has become embarrassing in the UK. For those of us who still cling on to the belief that government should not be in the business of regulating free expression, it’s a troubling time because that free expression is being published on platforms where ad fraud, misinformation and AI slop don't just ‘surface’ but, increasingly predominate.

What was also true 100 years ago: media was a highly labour-intensive business and all of us employed in media had reputations to protect. Sure, the press barons could pretend to be gods and rise above the everyday critiques, but everyone knew that an editor and a publisher were to blame for a publication’s misdeeds. Today, the platforms go-to defence “we’re just a platform, not a publisher”, is especially pernicious because it dehumanises media, which in turn makes no one accountable.

And finally: stuffed coffers

There is, it turns out, no self-regulation because there is no self to self-regulate. As media has become capital-intensive, we are now faced with the uncomfortable 21st Century dilemma of becoming much tougher on regulating content as if we are issuing licences to practice medicine or law. But what other way is there, when the media is created by high-velocity content machines and not people?

Once again, this is an area where trade bodies are meant to protect industry from self-regulation by providing that forum for its members to find and correct problems without the government sticking its oar in.

But instead, there is no longer self-regulation because the ‘self’ is dominated by Big Tech, the very ones who have given these us these new regulation problems.

“The industry won’t speak up about [platform dominance] because it can’t afford to,” Collins said. “Its coffers are being stuffed by these platforms all the time.”

Which isn’t a new thing. This long-established ‘stuffing’ practice even has its own jargonistic term: industry capture.

PS

• I hosted one of two excellent panels at this AWC event. I referenced the latter session about online safety in my reaction piece to the UK social media ban for under-16s, but go here for a comprehensive summary by The Media Leader.

• I was unable to write last week because I was at Cannes Lions, but wrote columns for TML on what I wanted to see (the preview), versus what I saw (a review). Both are scandalously incomplete, but I’ve definitely no time to write a book write now (!)

• And some very exciting publishing news was reported last week which I’ll write about properly very soon!

Welcome to Ad-verse Reactions

I’m Omar Oakes: a journalist who has spent over a decade picking apart how media, marketing, and content actually work – not how they pretend to.

This Substack is where I share the same ideas, challenges, and provocations I bring to my clients.

I also run oomph. – a narrative consultancy for media and advertising leaders whose story hasn’t kept pace with their business. I help agencies, media owners, and senior marketers sharpen their positioning, craft industry-leading narratives, and turn complex issues into content that actually moves people.

📩 omaroakesmedia@gmail.com 🔗 linkedin.com/in/omaroakes

There is almost 100% certainty that he doesn’t care.

Why should he? Meta’s stock finished 5% up at the Nasdaq’s close last night, pushing its market cap past $1.5 trillion. Yesterday’s 5% move alone added roughly $75 billion to Meta’s value: about 50 times the maximum fine Ofcom could theoretically impose under the Online Safety Act. (Trillion, incidentally, is a word that used to be so rarely deployed that I never needed to shorten it, but we now we live in a world of actual trillionaires and trillion-dollar companies.)

Meta has become the rarest of corporate creatures: it trades as best of both worlds. The safety of a utility – like holding British Gas shares in the 1990s – combined with the growth profile of a startup. Its latest quarterly earnings showed year-on-year revenue growth of 33%. That is, to use a technical term, insane, for a company already that size to grow that quickly.

So Meta waves its hands, launches a new AI feature as it did yesterday, and completely overshadows any fleeting existential concerns you might have about a company now facing some kind of ban in multiple Western countries. The market isn’t worried. Neither is Zuckerberg.

And so yesterday’s social media ban is largely theatre.

The ban won’t work. And even if it did, the deeper problem can’t be fixed this way.

Why it won’t work

By chance (sort of) I attended a panel on this very subject last Thursday, hosted under the banner Who Cares About Safety?.

This was not gathering of ban-happy moral panickers. These were serious people making serious arguments: Jake Dubbins, co-founder of the Conscious Advertising Network; Lexie Kirkconnell-Kawana, CEO of Impress; Andy Burrows, CEO of the Molly Rose Foundation; and Cosima Wiltshire, a policy researcher and university student.

None of them are in favour of this ban. For lots of reasons, not least because the data we’ve already got about bans is not encouraging.

Australia introduced an under-16 social media ban in December 2025, and the UK version, dubbed “Australia plus”, promises to go further.

But, according to a survey of 1,050 children aged 12-15 conducted by YouthInsight for the Molly Rose Foundation in April 2026, 61% of children who held accounts on restricted platforms before the ban still had access afterwards. By platform: 53% of previous TikTok users, 53% of YouTube users, 52% of Instagram users. All still on, six months after a ban designed to remove them.

This isn’t a story about crafty teenagers getting round the ban with virtual private networks (VPNs). It’s simpler and more damning than that.

Between 60-64% of continuing users across TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat reported that the platform took no action to remove or deactivate their existing account. Australia’s eSafety Commission hasn’t issued a single fine for non-compliance.

Not one. As Kirkconnell-Kawana put it: “All the evidence coming out of Australia is that 60% of children are evading the ban, and of the 40% that are compliant, they are seeing no positive benefits.”

The platforms simply didn’t bother. And why would they? Social media companies face fines of up to A$49.5m (about £25m) for serious or repeated breaches. Yesterday’s 5% move in Meta’s share price added $75 billion to its market cap. A £25m fine isn’t a deterrent; it’s a rounding error.

The scale of what a ban is supposed to achieve makes this worse. Ofcom data published in May 2026 shows a 13-14 year old currently spends nearly 16 hours a week – over two hours a day – on just three platforms: YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok. For 15-year-olds the figure rises to over 22 hours a week. The Australian evidence suggests the ban releases almost none of those hours. The habits remain. The platforms remain. The harm remains.

Why it can’t work

The panel’s second argument cut deeper. A ban tells platforms who can use their services, but it says nothing about how those services are designed.

So a 16-year-old who graduates into legal use on their birthday encounters exactly the same infinite scroll, autoplay, algorithmic feeds and notification architecture that caused the problem in the first place. The teen is not protected; they’re just given a year’s reprieve before being let into what Dubbins called “the addiction economy” – a hosepipe of never-ending, algorithmically curated content bait designed to keep you on the platform all day and every day.

Andy Burrows put the design problem plainly: “The reality is that we’ve had over a decade of social media causing harm to children and young people as a result of commercial decisions and business models translating into design choices that have had safeguarding as a second-tier concern, if that.”

His charity, is named after 14-year-old Molly (Rose) Russell, who killed herself in 2017. In the six months leading up to her death, Molly was served more than 2,000 pieces of harmful content on Instagram: self-harm material, influencer content glamourising and normalising intense depression.

“Eight years later, if you go onto Instagram, if you go onto TikTok, that content is still there, and it is still there on steroids,” he said.

The Online Safety Act has been law for three years. But for Burrows, the Act was so watered down it “wasn’t fit for purpose” and “not commensurate to the size of some of the largest, most cash-rich companies in the world.”

He was blunt about what happened to Labour’s stated intentions in opposition: “We have seen two years of this government being captured by the tech bros.”

The reason, he suggested, is that Starmer’s growth agenda has convinced ministers that placing safeguarding obligations on these companies will cost the UK data centres up the M1.

Because Meta and Google are not just the companies behind Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. They are online media infrastructure on which businesses depend. They are frontier AI companies which are promising, whether you believe them or not, to deliver a step change in how humans and machines organise the world and, it is hoped, improve living standards.

None of which is good news for avoiding the next Molly Russell catastrophe.

Why the whole argument is on the platforms’ terms

Here is what nobody in that room said, and what yesterday’s announcement didn’t address.

Every proposed solution for ‘dealing with social’ media – the ban, the Online Safety Act, safety by design principles – is a request. Not a demand with real consequences, but a meek request to very large, very rich, and very legally resourced American companies.

“Oh please will you start behaving now?”

You can’t open a restaurant in this country without passing a health and safety inspection. You don’t get a fine afterwards if your kitchen turns out to be contaminated.

Or cars, which kill 3,200 people every day on average worldwide. No one talks about banning cars despite the many millions that have died or been injured on roads. Nor does anyone politely ask Ford if they would please put seatbelts in their cars or face a fine of up to 10% of their global turnover.

Of course, social media regulation has never worked like that. Platforms launch, cause harm, get asked to stop, litigate, lobby, wait it out.

Just imagine the consequences of the UK banning Meta entirely, or, to exhaust the restaurant analogy, force it to close and only reopen once it cleans up its act. Just for starters, such a move would likely trigger a trade dispute with the US, face judicial review under the Human Rights Act, and alienate the 35 million UK adults on Facebook. This isn’t China; becoming the kind of surveillance state that could actually enforce a blanket ban is not an option any government here (thankfully) will choose.

But there is one mechanism in yesterday’s announcement that is structurally different: the requirement that platforms use ID document scans or face-scanning technology to verify users’ ages. If implemented as a genuine prerequisite – you cannot operate in the UK market until Ofcom has approved your age assurance system – that could be a meaningful step forward for making a under-16s ban workable. For the first time, compliance would come before operation, not after harm.

Whether the government actually builds it that way is another matter entirely. Ofcom has been asked to conduct a “rapid study” of what effective age assurance even means. The details arrive next month, but I won’t be holding my breath.

But here’s what the announcement does reveal, whether Starmer intended it or not: it is an implicit acknowledgment that Meta cannot be controlled at the root. The ban is not regulation. It is a workaround; an attempt to protect a subset of users from a product that the government has quietly accepted it cannot meaningfully constrain.

Meta’s lawyers already know this. So does its share price.

Note: I moderated another panel at this Advertising Who Cares? event about the future of quality media content, which I’ll aim to cover on these pages soon. Thanks to for organising this event and please, if you care about the future of media and advertising, consider supporting this important initiative’s work.

PS: the high-quality media revolution

I’ve been extremely busy of late, so this is the first essay I’ve been able to write for several weeks. As well as a surge in my usual consulting and report-writing commitments, I made my SXSW presenting debut and am shortly due to an announce an exciting new journalism project that I’ll be supporting.

The pause did allow me to reset my expectations of what Ad-verse Reactions should offer going forward. While I’ve always tried to offer depth and perspective about the issues facing media and advertising, keeping to a weekly schedule does bring the pressure of having ‘a hot take’, which is exactly what I don’t want to produce here. There are enough of those and there’ll even more to come, thanks to AI chatbots and their amazing ability to polish verbal diarrhoea.

The uncomfortable truth about social media being seen as ‘essential’, as I argue today, is because it’s cultural. Many of us are conditioned to fill every waking hour with some form of swiping and scrolling on smartphones and, frankly, traditional media has also played its part in ‘attention hacking’ as publications and broadcasters moved online.

If we want humans to remain productive and happy in an age where so much can be done by computers, we all need to be more mindful about producing stuff that matters instead of producing stuff at speed. That is what hits Big Tech hardest: that demand from consumers and advertisers finally begins to dwindle as we realise we just don’t need this low-quality stuff in our lives anymore.

Welcome to Ad-verse Reactions

I’m Omar Oakes: a journalist who has spent over a decade picking apart how media, marketing, and content actually work – not how they pretend to.

This Substack is where I share the same ideas, challenges, and provocations I bring to my clients.

I also run oomph. – a narrative consultancy for media and advertising leaders whose story hasn’t kept pace with their business. I help agencies, media owners, and senior marketers sharpen their positioning, craft industry-leading narratives, and turn complex issues into content that actually moves people.

📩 omaroakesmedia@gmail.com 🔗 linkedin.com/in/omaroakes

Are you excited? Are you inspired? Desperate to know what will happen next?

No? Why not? This is really important! A $2.2bn acquisition? This could be the most significant structural move in the advertising industry this year.

What’s wrong? Do data-tech M&A stories leave you cold and numb?

Like, didn’t this used to be the fun industry? Ideas, humour, irreverence, glamour, pop, sport, didn’t ads used to be part of all the media fun?

It’s actually worse if you talk to people outside the industry in the pub. Mention advertising and you’re assailed with complaints that ads are getting more annoying, more creepy, more weird. “Ah, that’s where you’re wrong,” I smugly retort. Despite all the fashionable hand-wringing about “purpose” and “slop”, if you look at TV ads they’re actually pretty good nowadays. Don’t believe me? Go and find an ad break from 1997 on YouTube and watch the whole thing. For every Tango slap and R Whites lemonade man, there are ten howlers you’d cheerfully re-bury. Creativity hasn’t “declined”.

“Ah no, I don’t mean those,” they say. “I mean those annoying popups and those fake AI YouTube ads and how my Alexa won’t stop reminding me about dishwasher tablets” And. And. And.

And that’s why Publicis buying Liveramp, I suspect, feels instinctively like it shouldn’t matter if you work in this industry. Everything I’ll go on to say about why it really matters might seem rationally correct. It’s not too technical to understand.

No, this is about feelings, which should never be dismissed, even if they’re difficult to articulate. I suspect a story like this reminds you how uncomfortable you are that this industry is no longer fun at all. That’s it’s all just a robotic, calculated game of spying and buying.

It’s hardly your fault. It was our wider society that just tacitly accepted it was fine for companies to follow us everywhere — in life, online, in the palm of your hand — in order to leverage data about us for marketing purposes. With all that data to target and retarget everyone forever, who needs to bother with creativity?

Which is why, when I finally made myself read the coverage of the Publicis/LiveRamp deal, I was surprised to find it almost universally lauded as a strategic masterstroke. I’m not sure it’s wrong, exactly.

But I don’t think it’s the whole story either.

Sadoun’s 500 emails

On Sunday, Publicis Groupe announced it was acquiring LiveRamp for $2.2bn. LiveRamp is a data collaboration platform: the connective tissue that allows advertisers, publishers, data providers and platforms to match audiences across walled gardens without sharing raw personal data directly. It operates across 25,000 publisher domains and more than 500 technology and data partners in 14 markets. It is, in the language of the industry, “identity infrastructure”. You can also think of it as a switchboard for all that data to move between different systems.

Publicis CEO Arthur Sadoun’s stated rationale is that the deal accelerates Publicis’s push into what he calls “agentic business transformation” — the idea that clients need proprietary, co-created data to build AI agents that their competitors can’t replicate. Anyone can license an AI model, the argument goes. The edge is in the data underneath it. And LiveRamp provides the infrastructure to build that edge.

And the scale of it is worth sitting with: four billion consumer profiles, covering roughly 91% of adult internet users globally. That is serious scale a footprint that rivals the major technology platforms.

But the most revealing treatment comes courtesy of Digiday, whose opening paragraph expertly cuts to the chase of why this story matters.

Before the ink was dry on the LiveRamp deal [S]adoun had personally sent 500 emails. To clients, to partners and to rival holdcos — all carrying the same message. Nothing changes. LiveRamp stays neutral. Your data is safe. He had to send those messages.

That’s quite unusual for a CEO to have to do that when announcing an acquisition: reassure his competitors that the thing he’d just bought wouldn’t be used as the thing he’d just bought it for.

Because the key question is: how can Liveramp continue to act as a neutral part of the adtech plumbing when it’s owned by Publicis?

During an analysts call yesterday, there were four commitments that LiveRamp will continue to operate as an independent business with open access; no restrictions on services for any client; full interoperability maintained; client and partner data used only as explicitly agreed.

The press release puts it simply: “LiveRamp will continue to operate as a neutral, interoperable platform.”

Sadoun was slightly more careful on the call when he said: “LiveRamp will maintain the total neutrality that has defined its operation so far.”

So far. As if to imply: nothing lasts forever.

Sadoun has form here. When Publicis acquired Influential and Captivate in 2024, the market raised identical concerns. Today, roughly half the revenue from both platforms comes from non-Publicis clients. He’ll say: trust the track record.

But here’s why LiveRamp is different: Influential and Captivate are content platforms. Their neutrality doesn’t depend on competitor trust at the infrastructure level. LiveRamp’s does. RampID — the shared identity currency at the centre of the platform — works because everyone uses it. It works because no single player owned it.

Which brings us to the other unusual thing about this story. Not a single word from Omnicom, Dentsu or other agency holdcos on the record (as I write this the day after the deal was announced on 17 May).

The silence is the answer

The brands whose customer data flows through that switchboard — the advertisers who are, nominally, Publicis’s clients and LiveRamp’s clients simultaneously — have been conspicuously absent from this conversation too.

For what reason could the communications experts lose their voices over this?

One data leader at a rival holdco “jested” to AdExchanger (as you do) that the deal was a chance to escape what had become an expensive LiveRamp contract. Then added: their agency is currently in multiple pitches where performance is still measured by RampID.

So they’d be relieved to leave but are trapped by commercial gravity? That sounds familiar…

And it should, because that’s the entire situation in two sentences.

The silence from the rest of the market isn’t naivety. It’s the same instinct I described at the start of this piece — the instinct to go quiet, to conform, to accept strange as the new normal and crack on. The industry has spent years practising this move and it’s very good at it now.

There are two versions of what happens next. In the first, Publicis genuinely maintains neutrality — and paid $2.2bn for a service bureau with a competitive problem on both sides. In the second, so far is the operative phrase, and the transition is managed carefully enough that by the time anyone notices, the switching costs are too high to matter.

The industry’s silence is its answer to which version it thinks is coming.

Sadoun said so far. The industry heard forever. One of them is right. And nobody, it seems, particularly wants to find out which.

And why not? Maybe it’s that manufactured consent defence mechanism, throwing up a post-rationalisation that this is somehow just a logical endpoint of where advertising is in 2026.

The industry that traded creative logic for data logic now has its data infrastructure consolidated into a single entity.

Publicis didn’t invent this direction. It just got there first and bought the pipes.

Welcome to Ad-verse Reactions

I’m Omar Oakes: journalist, industry critic, and founding editor-in-chief of The Media Leader. I’ve spent over a decade picking apart how media, marketing, and content actually work — not how they pretend to.

This Substack is where I share the same ideas, challenges, and provocations I bring to my clients.

I also run oomph. — a narrative consultancy for media and advertising leaders whose story hasn’t kept pace with their business. I help agencies, media owners, and senior marketers sharpen their positioning, craft industry-leading narratives, and turn complex issues into content that actually moves people.

📩 omaroakesmedia@gmail.com 🔗 linkedin.com/in/omaroakes

What happened to the once mighty ad agencies of Madison Avenue and Soho, whose great creative and strategic minds used to make or break businesses?

Are agencies becoming increasingly minor characters because advertising is no longer a game of big ideas and spectacle, but a small, shabby game of following people around the internet with surveillance tactics and popups? Or do they deserve more blame for failing to make the case that the power of creativity has never been more necessary in a world of rising misinformation and automated mediocrity?

Whatever your view of agencies in 2026, there is likely a common reflex when reading stories from the past week about WPP and Publicis Groupe CEOs receiving substantial increases in their pay. My eyebrows twitched, but each to their own.

But in the case of WPP, not all shareholders did agree. In fact, one in four said no to WPP CEO Cindy Rose’s proposed pay increase, from a maximum package of £8.6m to £11.1m per year. Everything else sailed through the company’s AGM last Friday, including Rose herself being “re-elected” at 99.63%, which is a number that even Vladimir Putin might blanche at.

But seriously folks, this story matters a lot more than ‘rich company boss gets richer’. Let me explain.

WPP’s CEO pay: what’s really a fair comparison?

To understand why one in four matters, you need to know about the 80% rule. Under the UK Corporate Governance Code, if a pay resolution at a public company AGM fails to reach 80% approval, the board is legally required to engage with dissenting shareholders and report back within six months. Both WPP pay resolutions fell below that threshold (Resolution 3, the compensation committee report, at 75.84%; Resolution 4, the forward pay policy, at 74.92%).

So let’s see what WPP report back with in six months. But why go through this headache in the first place for company whose share price is so historically low that last year it fell out of the FTSE 100?

The first reason is peer comparison. In its latest annual report, WPP felt it necessary to publish the historic pay packagesof its rivals to show how frugal it had been. John Wren at Omnicom earned $21.7m (£15.9m) in 2024 and Sadoun was, even before his own pay rise was revealed last week, earning a “theoretical” maximum of £10m. You don’t close the gap, the thinking goes, by having a CEO who only makes a piffling £8.6m!

The second reason is even more awkward: WPP’s boss was apparently being paid so pitifully that she was outearned by about a third of WPP’s executive committee! The traditional pyramid of pay, where the CEO is top dog and tranches below get paid progressively less, had broken down.

The third reason is perhaps the most difficult to swallow: CEOs like Cindy Rose are not just paid for past performance, their pay is intended to send a signal and an incentive for future improved performance. The ‘shareholder big bet’ was shown in its most extreme form last year by Tesla, which gave Elon Musk a near-$1tn pay package. Musk’s pay was structured entirely around milestones not yet hit, designed to keep the most important person in the building focused and retained. Instead of, you know, the modern-day distractions of hate-tweeting all day, being high on ketamine, and taking food away from starving children in a famine.

The WPP board is making a smaller version of the same argument: Rose can earn £11.1m if she hits her targets, we believe she will, and here is the structure to make that happen.

You can’t imagine there being a similar rebellion over at Publicis Groupe, if it had the same shareholder voting rules. Chairman and CEO Arthur received a 20% salary increase, taking his potential package to €10.5m. But it’s a non-story because Publicis has posted 20 consecutive quarters of growth and, before Omnicom fattened itself by gobbling up IPG, had outmuscled WPP to become the world’s biggest advertising services group. In 2025, Publicis Media won more than $10bn in new business, according to Comvergence data, while WPP Media lost more than $2bn net. Yes, it has since won $1.9bn in Q1 of this year, but these are not comparable businesses at this moment in time.

In other words, Sadoun is being retained for performance already delivered, but Rose is being incentivised for performance not yet achieved.

Money is fiction. Value is reality

In recent years, Publicis built its data, technology and e-commerce capabilities over years of deliberate acquisition. Meanwhile, WPP, under Read, was painstakingly trying to simplify its hodgepodge of agencies, bespoke client teams, and integrated verticals, following years of aggressive acquisitions under Sir Martin Sorrell.

As for how WPP turns around under Rose now, last week’s profile interview by the excellent Suzanne Vranjica of the Wall Street Journal had some revealing lines. Such as:

“Rose said that once WPP returns to organic revenue growth, which she expects in 2027, it will allocate more funds to dealmaking and bolster such areas as commerce and social-influencer marketing.”

2027? Another seven months (at best!) feels like a long time to wait to start catching up. Especially since most new money in this industry is flowing directly to Meta, Google and Amazon via small and medium sized businesses who buy direct without agencies (including on verticals such as ecommerce and social media/influencer!)

As for internal “pay compression”, the timing of this argument isn’t great. WPP’s revenue fell 6.7% like-for-like in Q1. As Mark Ritson’s uncharacteristically dry, sober and unsweary Adweek article pointed out, WPP’s headline operating margin compressed 200 basis points in a single year, from 15% to 13%. And the company’s share price is down by about 30% since Rose took over in September.

While she received zero financial performance bonus (because she didn’t earn it), she did, however, receive her maximum bonus for non-financial metrics. The board gave her full marks for the softer stuff in a year the numbers went the wrong way. That is, as far as I can tell, the thing that 25% of shareholders were voting against.

The forward signal argument is the most interesting to unpick, because it isn’t wrong in principle. But a bet like this requires a credible forward path.

The risk of putting more ‘skin in the game’

If, as Rose hopes, WPP returns to organic growth next year, the market will be even more consolidated, more expensive to enter, and more densely populated by competitors who moved earlier. That makes it more likely that the board is pricing in a recovery that is, optimistically , a 2028 or 2029 story.

Will shareholders continue to have the same level of patience for that long?

There is one aspect to this supposed turnaround story that doesn’t give me confidence. For all the talk of transformation and innovation, this is still a business which, you know, needs to bring in more money than it spends. Business experts call this “profit”.

The danger is that WPP becomes so desperate to portray a winning turnaround story (to prop up the share price) that it continues to play the same, self-defeating game which has plagued all large agency groups for decades now: race-to-the bottom pricing.

Because WPP is winning accounts: the UK government media account, Reckitt, Estée Lauder, Jaguar… but if revenue keeps falling, it’s the signature of a company defending market share by cutting prices. Then every account that is won on those worse terms resets the floor for the next pitch.

This was bizarrely framed in the same WSJ interview: during a recent pitch for a healthcare company, Rose cut the agency’s fee, tying compensation to performance targets. Greg Paull of R3 (now part of MediaSense) was quoted describing this as WPP “putting skin in the game,” adding that this had not been a hallmark of the holding group. He meant it as a compliment.

Strange. Firstly, because fee-cutting to win business is not a new strategy at WPP, from everything that I’ve heard in over a decade of my covering this industry, no matter the CEO.

Secondly, the decline of fees relative to scope of work by big agencies has been a defining characteristic of this industry for decades. You can read Michael Farmer’s books and Substack to understand, with ample evidence and explanation, how the holding company model was always propped up by a cross-subsidy: undercharge on creative, recover the margin on media buying and production markup.

But now the same pressure is hitting media, as platforms commoditise buying and clients demand transparency on every pound spent. So the cross-subsidy is collapsing from both ends. Where left is there to claw the margin back from?

To quote Ritson: “The only question that matters is whether clients will pay more.”

That is the problem the WPP turnaround has to solve, and Rose’s brainchild scheme Elevate28, to make £676m in cost savings, is a margin defence operation that buys time. Meanwhile, ever weaker pricing erodes the top line.

Again, how much patience are these shareholders really expected to have?

See you in six months

If only politics were the same: a winning politician is forced to consult with the people who voted against them. Because they represent all the people, not just their supporters, right?

So it’s a very good thing that UK corporate law requires WPP to engage with dissenting shareholders when votes fall below 80% approval and report back in six months. Corporate behaviour might be even better if the actual workers were entitled to representation on boards, as they are in Germany, but that’s for a different column.

For now, this story matters because it really will signal whether there is much hope for the holding company model to survive. Is this a board that updates its view of WPP’s position in light of new meaningful evidence or another round of investor relations management that concludes with minor adjustments and a press release about constructive dialogue?

I suspect the data will answer that question before the board does.

Welcome to Ad-verse Reactions

I’m Omar Oakes: journalist, industry critic, and founding editor-in-chief of The Media Leader. I’ve spent over a decade picking apart how media, marketing, and content actually work — not how they pretend to.

This Substack is where I share the same ideas, challenges, and provocations I bring to my clients. Every Tuesday I publish a Stories That Matter edition dissecting the week’s big story, alongside deeper dives, things I’m reading, and more.

I also run oomph. — a narrative consultancy for media and advertising leaders whose story hasn’t kept pace with their business. I help agencies, media owners, and senior marketers sharpen their positioning, craft industry-leading narratives, and turn complex issues into content that actually moves people.

📩 omaroakesmedia@gmail.com 🔗 linkedin.com/in/omaroakes

Sooner or later, I say this after something I write is published. If only I had remembered that killer stat, chart, quote or insight, my piece would have been so much better.

It’s an occupational hazard of having deadlines, which is why deadlines are wonderful constraints. Rather than think of constraints as negative because of they disallow, it’s important to see them as the traffic lights that ensures some cars are allowed through safety, rather than have a free-for-all which leads to a huge crash. (More on the ‘Theory of Constaints’ here)

Sometimes, this catalogue of missed opportunities presents itself from readers.

Now, I don’t usually do this, but the response to last week’s ‘Stories That Matter’ piece — Advertising has reached peak self-delusion — produced some genuinely good challenges from people who know this industry well. Challenges that, had I had the wit to include them in the first place, would have made my argument so much better.

So here, briefly, is my attempt at a next-best thing: a Points of View-style Q&A. (You know that thing Anne Robinson used to do before telling game-show contestants how stupid they are:

Here goes…

“How does high-attention media build brands if nobody’s reading it?”

— Colin Lewis, former CMO and Marketing Week columnist

“Two points on this that I have to pick up on: 1. ‘High-attention media — the environments where advertising actually builds brands…’ How do they ‘build brands’ if they have diminishing audiences? Surely advertising in newspapers cannot ‘build brands’ if they have collapsing reach? 2. If marketers and advertisers are supposed to be ‘data-driven’, then they are acting rationally by not advertising on channels that do not deliver reach or are showing reduced reach year on year?”

Colin’s right about reach and I could have been clearer that I was talking about attention.

The point isn’t that declining media is ‘the answer’ — it’s that the industry has shifted billions toward environments where almost nobody is paying attention, and called it a smart trade. A smaller audience that actually reads something will outperform a mass audience that scrolls past it. That’s not nostalgia for print; it’s just what the effectiveness data says.

Here’s me talking about this with an effectiveness expert:

On his second point — are data-driven marketers simply behaving rationally? — I'd agree, up to a point. "Data-driven" is only rational if the measurement system you're using is actually helping. Which is why I cited the WARC data that 80% of campaigns achieve their reach targets, but only 25% deliver real effectiveness results. If your dashboard is telling you the campaign worked but most of the spend is not producing a measurable effect on the brand, that's only rational if you’re incentivised to look good at marketing rather than actually be good at marketing.

Which led me to ask: are marketers even optimising for brand growth? Or are they optimising for job security?

What else explains the rise of spend on ineffective media, other than it is the career-safe option to produce spreadsheets a CFO recognises. Explaining why you’ve been pouring money down the toilet for years is not a conversation most marketing departments are incentivised to have.

Colin subsequently confirmed as much, noting — with some hard-won candour — that as a former CMO, “behaving rationally is a good way to keep your CFO and CEO happy... keep food on the table.” He added that perhaps the finger should be pointed at mass reach channels rather than CMOs.

Whoever is ‘to blame’, this exchange hits on the key problem: the system punishes honesty and rewards the safe bet.

“It’s not just bad measurement. It’s the entire system of incentives.”

— Kathy Newberger, business development and ad strategy consultant

“Appreciated this part of the piece most: ‘I’ve argued before that measurement is never neutral; it reflects the interests of whoever holds it. The platforms built attribution models that credit themselves. The dashboards that govern performance budgets were designed by parties with skin in what those dashboards conclude.’ In my opinion it is that — combined with the very real human need to do more with less, faster, and to do what the people in charge of us expect and will reward, be they an agency leader or CFO or Wall Street or a CMO with little runway — mean that dashboard/keyboard media wins over time and non-platform media loses over time, no matter how much better it can be for brands.”

Kathy’s point is that even if you fixed the data, the incentive structure would produce the same outcome. But both things can be true at the same time… which makes the problem considerably harder than a measurement fix alone.

“You’re describing the advertising market. The advertising industry is something else entirely.”

— Nick Manning, founder of Manning Gottlieb Media and former Ebiquity CSO

“The ad industry is in crisis while the figures bandied about for growth relate to the advertising market, where a few big players get the big increases in revenue from many thousands of advertisers, big and small…. And the results are obvious to everyone, with poor ads bombarding the public, day in, day out. Meanwhile responsible media channels are starved of oxygen and the providers of scale audiences don’t get the money they deserve to make high quality content. And this is a vicious spiral as money pours into channels where it’s wasted on fake traffic and massive transaction costs.”

Nick’s distinction between the market and the industry is a really important reframe which I wish had been in my article.

The market — the aggregate money flowing through advertising — is growing.

The industry — the ecosystem of agencies, publishers, broadcasters, and independent operators — is in crisis.

These are not the same thing, and the headline number conflates them.

He goes further: some of the growth in performance advertising is itself a symptom of failure. When advertising doesn’t work, the response is to buy more of it i.e. targeting one person at a time, chasing responses, throwing money at a problem that more money won’t solve. The vicious spiral he describes — wasted spend, fake traffic, starved publishers, poor creative — is what growth looks like from inside a broken system.

Nick co-founded Advertising: Who Cares?, an organisation I support because it was created to have this conversation and come up with real solutions for a better ad industry. The fact that it remains a grassroots effort rather than a mainstream industry priority tells you most of what you need to know about how seriously the problem is being taken.

“The growth figure is picking up signals it was never designed to read.”

— Ged Carroll, strategy director and author of Strategic Outcomes

“Online advertising is growing because it’s not only pulling spend away from ‘traditional’ advertising. It’s competing for spend with shopper and channel marketing, commercial real estate particularly for retail (there is some great academic research out there quantifying the amount of value in the commercial property sector that has transferred from rent growth to online advertising), in the case of Chinese businesses operating beneath the de minimis price point — it’s spent in lieu of setting up local subsidiaries in their markets (like the UK) and ultimately domestic industrial jobs due these adverts being a lubricant for globalisation.”

Building on Nick’s reframing of ‘the market’, Ged added a layer I hadn’t fully considered: the adspend figures are being inflated by categories that were never traditionally counted as advertising at all.

Retail media, for one — trade marketing budgets migrating onto Amazon’s platforms and being reclassified as adspend. Not new money, but reclassified money.

And then there’s the ‘de minimis’ effect. Temu and Shein are among the biggest spenders on Meta and Google right now. That spend isn’t really advertising in any conventional sense — it’s a cross-border logistics subsidy enabled by an import duty loophole, with Meta’s targeting infrastructure as the engine. Each parcel ships directly from a Chinese warehouse, kept just under the £135 UK customs threshold, slipping through duty-free. The ads and the loophole depend on each other: without Meta and Google’s targeting, you can’t find enough individual buyers to make the model work. The US has moved to close that loophole. The UK, for reasons I don’t understand, hasn’t.

So not only do we have a a ruler that is measuring the wrong thing. It’s also picking up signals it was never designed to read.

Justin Lebbon — founder of the Future of TV Advertising global events series and a former colleague — added the question nobody else quite asked:

“okay, we’ve had nearly ten years of attention data so why are we doing the opposite of what the theory tells us!?”

I don’t have a tidy answer to that but I certainly have a few ideas… As they say: Watch this space.

I’m very grateful to anyone who comments publicly or emails/DMs privately. This industry matters but a) many, many people don’t agree or don’t understand this, b) the takeover of ‘technical stuff’ has cast a dark shadow over the economic and power moves that are as important today as they were in the analogue times.

As always — reply, push back, tell me I’m wrong. This is a safe space to be an unsafe space.

Welcome to Ad-verse Reactions

I’m Omar Oakes: journalist, industry critic, and founding editor-in-chief of The Media Leader. I’ve spent over a decade picking apart how media, marketing, and content actually work — not how they pretend to.

As well freelance journalism I run a specialist clinic, oomph., where I help agencies, media owners, and senior marketers sharpen their positioning, craft industry-leading narratives, and turn complex issues into content that actually moves people.

This Substack is where I share the same ideas, challenges, and provocations I bring to my clients. Every Tuesday I publish a Stories That Matter edition dissecting the week’s big story, as well deeper dives, things I’m reading, and more.

Alongside this, I’ve recently launched oomph. — a narrative consultancy for media and advertising leaders whose story hasn’t kept pace with their business. More at oomphoomph.com.

📩 omaroakesmedia@gmail.com 🔗 linkedin.com/in/omaroakes

That was the laudatory view of the UK’s trade association for ad agencies, the IPA, after the latest Advertising Association/WARC Expenditure Report revealed UK adspend had grown by 6.4% to £46.7bn last year.

It certainly seems “fantastic”, doesn’t it? Then, why, as I asked in my Media Leader column yesterday, are most people in advertising so gloomy these days? Wasn’t it only three months ago that we were being told there is a market “exodus”, with jobs being disappeared amid the AI automation revolution?

Or maybe this idea of adspend ‘growth’ is “fantastic” in the more literal sense. Namely: it’s becoming a polite fiction to mask what’s really happening.

Indeed the stories that matter in recent days come from the most obvious of sources: Big Tech companies’ latest earnings results.

Alphabet: 22% year-on-year revenue growth in Q1 to $109.9bn.

Meta: 33% year-on-year revenue growth to $56.3bn.

Amazon (advertising business): grew 24% year on year to $17.2bn.

I used to religiously cover these earnings nearly a decade ago as a tech editor for Campaign, and I still ask myself the same question today as I did then: “How can these already huge companies still grow so quickly?”

If you were paying attention, as Press Gazette was last week, you’ll know it’s because what used to be an “advertising industry” is now a sharing of the spoils between these three companies, which collectively pull in 2 of every 3 pounds spent on UK advertising services. That’s just £15bn for the rest.

The real numbers

This is not just a UK phenomenon.

In WARC’s Global Ad Trends Report: Media’s New Normal, which I co-authored last December, we featured a number of data points which lay bare how a headline adspend growth figure doesn’t begin to tell you what’s now happening in our industry.

In fast-growing ad categories — clothing, electronics, cross-border e-commerce — almost 80% of incremental spend now flows directly into retail media, paid search, and social platforms. The remaining 20% is shared across the entire rest of the media industry. Everything. TV, audio, publishers, out-of-home, the lot.

UK advertising spend on low-attention media has risen from 32% of total investment in 2015 to 70% in 2025. High-attention media — the environments where advertising actually builds brands — has gone from 68% to 30% in the same period.

So the industry is spending more money, in worse environments, for thinner results.

And 80% of campaigns achieve their reach potential. Only 25% achieve their effectiveness potential. The industry is measuring the thing that’s easy to prove, not the thing that matters. This is not a healthy market. It is a market that has learned to describe itself as healthy using metrics that can’t see what’s wrong with it.

The ruler problem

So how are we to look at these regular temperature readings of our industry?

A neutral measure of advertising’s commercial health or a ritual in institutional self-deception?

I don’t mean to imply some sort of conspiracy is afoot; it’s actually something more mundane and more corrosive. The consultation forum that shapes this report includes representatives from trade bodies with a vested interest in a growth narrative. The methodology just changed — a fact that sailed through without comment in trade-press coverage last week, because AA/WARC’s TV numbers did not, until fairly recently, properly account for streaming revenue.

That in itself is a story that matters. When the ruler changes shape, the first question should be: who benefits?

I’ve argued before that measurement is never neutral; it reflects the interests of whoever holds it. The platforms built attribution models that credit themselves. The dashboards that govern performance budgets were designed by parties with skin in what those dashboards conclude.

Of course we need reports like AA/WARC to give us some idea of where the money’s going. But the story that really matters is not the headline number that seems ‘fantastic’.

As we explained in Media’s New Normal, there is a new-wave of digital-native budgets in advertising that have little connection to household spending power. SMEs, trade-marketing funds, retail media networks, as well as certain tech and electronics verticals, are pouring billions into digital ecosystems that promise accountability and speed.

Importantly, they optimise for performance, not reach. Their budgets were born in search, social and retail media – and, so far, they’ve stayed there. They favour environments that can demonstrate immediate results, not channels that build long-term brand equity.

Focusing on a headline number, therefore, blinds us from the two-speed system that is only getting starker: legacy categories whose spend is broadly stable, and new categories whose explosive growth flows disproportionately to the major platforms.

When you control what gets counted, you control what gets funded.

The rational choice

The most important question isn’t why the industry produces flattering headlines. It’s why senior practitioners keep accepting them.

Most people reading this have sat in a room where someone presented a version of the 6.4% figure as evidence of a robust market, while privately knowing that their publisher client’s revenues are declining, that their independent agency is being squeezed, that the incremental budget they’re fighting for this quarter is going to Meta’s self-serve platform before it ever reaches them.

The knowledge is there, but so is the seductive power of the happy-clappy narrative. Questioning the frame means questioning the clients, the platforms, the trade bodies, and the data infrastructure that everyone has built their businesses around. It means telling a board that the market you claimed expertise in is consolidating in ways that structurally chip away your relevance. It means accepting that two decades of decisions — about programmatic adoption, platform dependency, measurement infrastructure — contributed to the number you’re now hoping nobody looks at too closely.

That’s an expensive conversation to start.

So the 6.4% gets cited at conferences. It goes in new business decks. It provides comfort to people who need comfort. And next year the number will be slightly different, the £31bn will be slightly larger, and the methodology may quietly change again.

The question isn’t whether you know what’s really happening. It’s what you’re planning to do about it.

Welcome to Ad-verse Reactions

I’m Omar Oakes: journalist, industry critic, and founding editor-in-chief of The Media Leader. I’ve spent over a decade picking apart how media, marketing, and content actually work — not how they pretend to.

As well freelance journalism I run a specialist clinic, oomph., where I help agencies, media owners, and senior marketers sharpen their positioning, craft industry-leading narratives, and turn complex issues into content that actually moves people.

This Substack is where I share the same ideas, challenges, and provocations I bring to my clients. Every Tuesday I publish a Stories That Matter edition dissecting the week’s big story, as well deeper dives, things I’m reading, and more.

Alongside this, I’ve recently launched oomph. — a narrative consultancy for media and advertising leaders whose story hasn’t kept pace with their business. More at oomphoomph.com.

📩 omaroakesmedia@gmail.com 🔗 linkedin.com/in/omaroakes

“The fact that millions of people share the same mental pathology does not make these people sane”. Erich Fromm; The Sane Society (1955)

There are so many reasons why you should read Fromm’s important psychological takedown of modern consumerism and how, as Marx expertly diagnosed through an economic historical lens, capitalism estranges individuals from their work and others. And so, people become ‘marketing characters’ who treat their own personalities as commodities to be ‘bought and sold’ for professional or social success.

Such mania must explain this relentless, wolfish, and overbearing attitude that AI will (or even must) be revolutionary. That must be why I persist with the crazy-making ordeal of sifting through all the trade media stories, and newsletters about advertising, despite this never-ending and unchallenged ‘AI is changing everything’ refrain.

From the last week, here are seven different stories, featuring seven different companies, containing seven different announcements.

OpenAI turns on CPC ads. (Digiday) StackAdapt leaks a ChatGPT pitch deck. (Adweek) Jellyfish wants you to use LLMs for media planning. (Adweek) Stagwell backs Trade Desk’s AI agents. (Campaign) Omnicom launches an agentic influencer tool. (Adweek) Hershey bets on AI agents for MMM. (Adweek) Goodway Group partners with Optable to feed cleaner data to AI agents. (Adweek).

And as for LinkedIn… if your feed is not currently being clogged up with incessant know-it-all AI chat, then please screenshot and send it to me so I can a) verify AI didn’t create it for you; b) have some faith restored.

Why am I so down on AI, you ask? Ah well, read my recent piece for The Media Leader. Actually, read this one too.

Now, let’s zoom out beyond the breathless headlines and ask what any good journalist should be doing as a matter of course.

What is actually going on here?

The honest answer is: a land grab. Every one of those seven announcements is a move in the same game — a scramble for position in the emerging AI advertising stack. But, as usual, very few out there are trying to join the dots.

So let me try.

What “commoditising” advertising actually means

Advertising has always had two valuable layers.

The thinking layer — strategy, planning, creative judgement, cultural insight — where the interesting work happens. Where someone looks at beer sales data among men in their forties on winter Saturdays and understands that what they’re really seeing isn’t thirst, it’s ritual.

Then there’s the execution layer — buying, trafficking, optimisation, reporting. This is where the margin has quietly lived; not because it was glamorous, but because it was complex enough to require specialists with expensive tools.

Let’s be clear: it is this second layer that AI is genuinely dismantling. Not the thinking, but the procedural scaffolding around the thinking. That’s certainly important, but it’s not revolutionary.

The media plan as a document, the channel allocations, the budget splits, the reach and frequency targets: yes, AI can accelerate all of that.

But here’s the thing I keep asking in response: so, bloody, what?

In all my time talking to agency planners and buyers, this part of advertising was never cited as ‘the hard part’.

The hard part was always the question underneath it: why this channel, this audience, this moment, at this weight, in a way this particular brand can credibly own?

How you answer that is generally called “craft”. Great media planning or media strategy is artisanal, much like consulting: it requires taste, judgment, experience, and — crucially — can not be optimised because it is, to a point, subjective. At some point you just have to accept, as a matter of faith, that your advertising was planned by someone who knew what they were doing and gave you a really great plan. You accept it’s simply not possible to mine the world’s data with the world’s best AI to come up with the greatest or the most optimal plan. Because life doesn’t actually work like that, even if the AI does what you think it can (not for this article, but buyer beware!)

So there’s an execution ‘problem’ here for the agencies whose advice big advertisers have relied on for decades. When execution becomes cheap and easy, it stops commanding a premium. The activity doesn’t disappear (if anything it will explode if the cost of trading lowers), but it stops being a source of advantage because anyone can do it.

The question is: who captures the value that’s left?

Three players are competing for the answer. They can’t all be right.

The platforms: because they’ve done this before…

Google, Meta, and their newest rival OpenAI are making the same bet: if you own the surface where advertising is executed, you capture the margin regardless of who does the planning.

But ‘own the inventory, own the targeting, own the measurement.’ is not a new bet. In fact, it’s the only bet these companies have ever made. And it has worked, repeatedly, in ways the industry keeps failing to learn from.

Search advertising. Google built the infrastructure, agencies built practices around managing it, and so brands paid for the clicks. Google captured the margin. Today, Google and Meta together account for roughly half of all global digital ad spend.

The agencies that “managed” search are now structurally dependent on the platforms they were supposed to be advising clients about. Is that why Meta and Google keep doing awful things and this industry keeps doing deals with them instead of treating them as the rogue actors they are? (Tune in next time on No Shit Sherlock…)

Programmatic display. Years ago as a tech editor, I remember constantly hearing about ad tech was supposed to democratise media buying. But instead it created a supply chain so complex — with bendy arrows bumping into the jargon language of DSPs, SSPs, DMPs, ad exchanges — where value concentrated at the nodes controlling data and inventory. Of course, Google owned most of these nodes. The independent ad tech layer got squeezed or acquired.

Social. Facebook built targeting infrastructure so sophisticated that brands couldn’t replicate it internally and agencies couldn’t meaningfully improve on it. The strategic layer became largely a matter of feeding the algorithm correctly. Meta captured the margin.

Three transitions. Same pattern. A new technology layer arrives, multiple parties compete to own the value, and the entity controlling distribution wins.

…but here’s where ChatGPT is different

But the platform advantage goes deeper than distribution. What the platforms actually captured, alongside the pipes, was measurement.

Advertisers spent years feeding their outcome data into Meta and Google, freely and at scale. The platforms used it to build what Sameer Modha, writing in The Media Leader last year, called Large Outcome Models: proprietary systems trained on data given to them by millions of advertisers (including their competitors!) Those models now tell advertisers what’s working. They’re also built to extract maximum spend, not to serve advertiser interests.

The advertiser trained the model. The model now works against them.

That’s not distribution control. That’s knowledge control. The platform doesn’t just own the pipe. It owns the definition of what counts as a good result.

OpenAI is now trying the same move, but faster and with a new flex: ChatGPT isn’t just an ad platform, it’s a demand-generation environment. The user arrives with intent already formed. If OpenAI can prove that ads served inside a chat interface drive outcomes, it doesn’t just take a cut of existing budgets — it claims to create a new budget category that didn’t exist before.

Meanwhile, Brian O’Kelly — the man credited with inventing programmatic — is building an operating system for AI agents that buy and sell media to each other with no humans in the loop. The roads are being paved; toll booths, and all.

Is OpenAI certain to win this? No. Any company led by Sam Altman, given everything we know about him, should be treated with extreme caution.

And anyway, Google’s moat was a decade of search intent data at a global scale. ChatGPT generates conversation data, which is valuable, but not the same thing.

So the attribution question remains unanswered: can OpenAI prove that an ad served mid-conversation drove a sale? CPMs have already fallen from $60 at launch to around $25 nine weeks in. If they can’t solve measurement, the premium inventory narrative collapses before it’s even started.

But the direction of travel — platform, owns stack, captures margin — is familiar enough to take seriously.

The agencies: the same trap, one level up

Agencies are falling over themselves to remind you, meanwhile, that they are not standing still.

Jellyfish (Brandtech Group) wants you to use LLMs for media planning. Stagwell is backing Trade Desk’s AI agents. Omnicom has launched an agentic influencer tool. The pitch is consistent across all of them: AI handles the execution, which frees us to focus on the strategic thinking machines can’t do.

It’s a reasonable pitch. But it has a big flaw.

I spoke recently on my podcast Believe It Or Not with co-host Hamish Nicklin — former CEO of Dentsu Media UK, now an AI consultant — about the extent to which AI will genuinely replace human judgment in media planning. His argument was more unsettling than the agency talking points suggest.

The planning knowledge base that agencies draw on is, he argued, already largely codified. We have 60 years of media effectiveness data, decades of IPA case studies, Binet and Field’s long/short framework, and MMM outputs across every major category — the patterns are well understood, well documented, and already partially embedded in agency planning tools. What a planner does — often instinctively — is operationalise those patterns.

Yes, sometimes brilliantly. But the patterns themselves are learnable. And if they’re learnable, they’re automatable.

The flaw in the agency AI pitch is this: if every agency is using broadly similar tools, trained on broadly similar data, optimising toward broadly similar signals, the planning layer homogenises too. You don’t get differentiated strategy from undifferentiated tools. You get a new kind of commodity, one level up the stack.

We have seen this before. When DSPs ‘democratised’ media buying, agencies initially sold access to them as a competitive advantage. Within three years, every agency had the same DSP access. The tool became table stakes.

I’ve seen some very clever people literally roll their eyes when, in conversation, I compare AI tools to email. Everyone has had email for decades now, where is the advantage?

Then the sanguine myth surfaces about “unlocking human potential” based on some cheery hypothetical which ignores our natural urge to be lazy (driven by a very important biological drive to conserve energy!)

The one genuine agency advantage that could survive this logic? Proprietary data at scale.

Decades of multi-client, multi-category campaign performance data that no individual brand can replicate. That’s a real moat. Hamish made this point explicitly — the agency can point its AI at thirty years of cross-industry data; the brand can only point it at its own history.

But the question hanging over that advantage is duration. How long will agencies have until AI tools become more accessible and data availability increases across the ecosystem?

The brands: efficiency is not advantage

Brands are being sold something rather different: efficiency.

“Lower CPMs!” shout the bazaar hawkers. “Faster creative iteration!” “Reduced headcount!” The Hershey story this week — AI agents fixing a $2 billion marketing blind spot — is a version of this frenzied pitch in press-release form.

Some of the efficiency gains must be real… but efficiency is not the same as competitive advantage. It’s a cost reduction, not a revenue driver. And if every brand captures the same efficiency gains from the same tools, no individual brand is better positioned relative to its competitors than before.

The deeper problem is measurement. Outside the walled gardens, the infrastructure required to prove what actually drives growth is too weak to do the job. Brand-level models — even sophisticated ones built on strong first-party data — are structurally insufficient. Modha’s framing in The Media Leader was pointed: isolating ROI one advertiser at a time is like shouting into a data storm. Too little signal, too much noise.

You need category-wide, cross-brand data to build models robust enough to withstand platform dashboards. Individual brands can’t build that alone. Only platforms, or serious industry collaboration, can.

Which means the brands chasing efficiency through AI tools are doing so largely blind to whether it’s working. Because the measurement infrastructure that would tell them is either controlled by the platforms or doesn’t yet exist outside the walled gardens.

So who wins?

The honest answer is: we don’t know yet.

But we do know that three times in the last 25 years, a technology transition in advertising has produced the same outcome.

Agencies and brands were told they’d capture the value, so they built practices, tools, and pitches around the promise. But the platforms captured the value; not just because they owned distribution, but because they owned measurement too. Measurement is always a huge story in media and advertising because it’s a battle over what literally ‘counts’ as winning.

There are genuine reasons to think this time might be different at the margins. Hamish made a point I haven’t been able to shake: the serendipity layer — the Channel 4 executive who mentions a series that hasn’t been announced yet, or the media partnership that emerges from a conversation that no dataset could have predicted — this remains stubbornly human. The insight that emerges not from pattern recognition but from genuine cultural judgment, the ability to make a brand punch above its weight in ways that no optimisation loop would generate, that still requires a human. Probably.

And so the uncomfortable question underneath all of this — the one I haven’t seen anyone in the trade press ask plainly this week — is not whether AI can replace human judgment in advertising. It’s whether the humans who do the thinking get paid for it, or whether the platforms that own the room take the money instead.

That question doesn’t have an answer yet. But the industry is currently behaving as though it does — and as though the answer is flattering to the people making the announcements.

It probably isn’t.

Welcome to Ad-verse Reactions

I’m Omar Oakes: journalist, industry critic, and founding editor-in-chief of The Media Leader.

I’ve spent a decade watching smart businesses in media and advertising say less than they mean. The thinking is there, but the language isn’t. I call that gap narrative debt — and this newsletter is where I pick it apart.

Every Tuesday: a Stories That Matter edition dissecting the week’s big story. Plus deeper dives, things I’m reading, and the occasional provocation.

Alongside this, I run oomph. — a narrative consultancy for media and advertising leaders whose story hasn’t kept pace with their business. More at oomphoomph.com.

📩 omaroakesmedia@gmail.com 🔗 linkedin.com/in/omaroakes

That sounds like it should be a major story. Not least because of the sheer scale of its implications.

And yet, nearly a week later, I haven’t been able to find a single statement on this by a major industry body, nor read an executive’s on-record response.

Everyone else had somewhere to be.

Even in a week where Publicis CEO Arthur Sadoun told Adweek he wasn’t here to squeeze people, squeeze shares, or please Wall Street — a line lapped up by all the trades. Hard not to laugh at a line like that when the world’s biggest media market has just squeezed you and your competitors for not throwing enough money at Breitbart and X.

What’s next? Pornhub and OnlyFans crying foul because advertisers are “colluding” to demonetise content featuring naked people?

This story matters because the industry just lost the right to pretend it has standards.

And no one is prepared to say a word about it.

What brand safety actually was (and wasn’t)

GARM — the Global Alliance for Responsible Media — was founded in 2019 under the World Federation of Advertisers, after advertisers were outraged to find their brands appearing next to footage of the Christchurch mosque massacre, livestreamed on Facebook and still watchable on YouTube several hours later. It brought together advertisers, agencies, and platforms around a shared framework: common definitions of harmful content, and a commitment not to fund them.

The obvious problem: GARM had no enforcement powers. A paper tiger with a bad name.

But GARM still matters because of what it represented: a shared floor. A thing everyone agreed, publicly, not to stand beneath. That’s not nothing. And yet the frameworks that came before and after — NewsGuard integrations, DoubleVerify, IAS (and, my personal favourite, the IAB Gold Standard) — were like a fresh coat of paint on a burning building.

GARM also matters because it was a central plank of the FTC’s case against the agency holdcos.

Under the Sherman Act — the same law used to break up cartels — it argued that the holdcos had acted as a single entity by coordinating their brand safety standards through GARM and the 4As’ Advertiser Protection Bureau. Competitors can’t agree to use identical standards any more than they can agree to charge identical prices. The consent decrees permanently ban any future coordination.

Each holdco must now develop its own standards independently — or not at all. What could go wrong?

A culture war against mainstream media

The antitrust framing is the tell; you can’t outlaw brand safety on free speech grounds. But you can outlaw competitors colluding on it. So that’s what they charged.

Don’t think so? Read the FTC complaint’s own language. The agencies “disfavoured political viewpoints” and were “discriminating against speech and ideas.” The named targets: NewsGuard, the Global Disinformation Index. The implicit beneficiaries: Breitbart, Newsmax, X.

X, of course, has never recovered from the advertiser exodus that followed Elon Musk’s $22bn acquisition of Twitter in 2022. Not content with turning X into a cesspit by binning content moderators and heavily slanting the algorithm towards favoured politicians, Musk saw fit to tell advertisers to “go fuck themselves” if they didn’t like his enterprising approach. The company is now less a social media company and more a tech bolt-on for Musk’s AI and aerospace interests, hence its inflated valuation since plummeting to just $9.4bn in September 2024.

That’s a mini case study in why X is not attractive to advertisers; it’s not ‘brand safe’ by design. Nor is any ‘platform’ in which unverified users can post whatever they like with editorial or legal hurdles to jump through.

And yet Ferguson said in the FTC’s own press release that the agencies’ ‘agreement’ had “distorted the marketplace of ideas by discriminating against speech and ideas that fell below the unlawfully agreed-upon floor.”

That’s not the language of antitrust enforcement. That’s the language of a culture war. A culture war against the very idea of mainstream media itself.

This is the same administration whose FCC conditioned its approval of the Paramount merger on a Trump-appointed ombudsman for CBS News and the cancellation of Stephen Colbert, and whose FTC has leaned on media owners to silence on-air talent for insufficient political deference.

The brand-safety case fits the same pattern: regulatory power deployed as political instrument.

In July 2024, I asked in The Media Leader what faith advertisers could have that X’s algorithm wouldn’t be bent toward the politician its owner had just donated hundreds of millions to support. The answer, it turns out, was: none — and when advertisers acted on that, the administration reached for the regulatory apparatus to make sure they kept spending there anyway.

The FTC consent decrees are regulatory capture with an antitrust filing stapled to them. Every holding company CEO knows this. NewsGuard’s own co-CEO said publicly that “Andrew Ferguson is simply responding to the lobbying of Newsmax.”

Every holding company CEO knows this too. Have they said anything in response?

No. I suppose they just had somewhere to be.

Why the silence is the story

But don’t confuse silence for cowardice. It’s more calculated than that, and more corrosive.

The holding companies are, simultaneously:

• dependent on Meta and Google for the bulk of their media buying

• pitching AI partnerships to the same US tech ecosystem whose political allies brought this case

• running global businesses that cannot afford to be seen taking sides in American culture-war politics

• and operating under an administration that has demonstrated it will use every lever — antitrust, federal contracting, approval processes — as a political instrument.

You know what that adds up to? An industry that has decided its commitment to unbiased advice is worth exactly as much as it costs to maintain.

When the cost goes up, the commitment goes down.

GARM collapsed for the same reason it was always going to collapse: voluntary consensus works until someone powerful objects. So there was no actual floor — there was just an agreement to pretend there was a floor.

The moment the pretence became costly, the floor disappeared.

The trade press, to its credit, filed the story. Adweek ran it. Campaign Asia ran it. eMarketer ran it. All in the same register: neutral; procedural; done. Like a planning application.

This isn’t a coincidence. The holding companies are trade media’s primary sources, their biggest advertisers, and the ones who fill the tables at their awards dinners. That’s not a conspiracy — it’s an incentive structure. The same incentive structure that bought the holdcos’ silence bought the trade press’s neutrality. Nobody needed to make a call. Everyone already knew the shape of the story they weren’t going to write.

Everyone, it seems, had somewhere else to be.

Welcome to Ad-verse Reactions

I’m Omar Oakes: a journalist and industry critic who’s spent the last decade picking apart how media, marketing, and content actually work — not how they pretend to.

I bring together an increasingly rare mix of network, voice, and track record: building publications, growing audiences, and challenging the stories this industry tells itself. I was global tech editor and media editor at Campaign magazine before becoming founding editor-in-chief of The Media Leader.

I have no plans to put this newsletter behind a paywall; I just love writing and sharing ideas.

As well freelance journalism I run a specialist clinic, oomph., where I help agencies, media owners, and senior marketers sharpen their positioning, craft industry-leading narratives, and turn complex issues into content that actually moves people. This Substack is where I share the same ideas, challenges, and provocations I bring to my clients.

• A weekly ‘Stories That Matter’ edition on Tuesdays in which I dissect the major story (or stories) of the week

• Other deep dives based on work I’m doing as a journalist and/or consultant.

• Stuff I’m reading.

Always happy to chat about ideas for this newish Substack and please say hello if you’re a fellow writer or someone who just wants to share notes about the world of media, advertising and marketing.

📩 Email me: omaroakesmedia@gmail.com

🔗 More about me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/omaroakes/

🖥️ More about oomph.: www.oomphoomph.com

Here’s the one that all publishers (including micro-publishers such as yours truly…) should be asking right now:

What is your content actually worth to an AI company — and what do you do about it?

Not “should we use AI in our newsroom?” Not “how do we optimise for AI search?” Those are operational questions, and they have answers. The harder question is the one underneath: if the AI companies hoovering up the internet’s output are building products worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and your journalism is part of what makes those products work — what share of that value is yours? And what does claiming it cost you?

This is the decision that is being made right now, deal by deal, policy by policy, prize announcement by prize announcement.

When you get wildly different conclusions from people with broadly similar problems, it usually means nobody’s done the hard thinking yet.

Three rights make a wrong

So the story that matters most in media and advertising this week features three publishers and three irreconcilable bets on how they will deal with ‘the AI question’.

First, Le Monde has struck licensing deals with OpenAI, Perplexity and Meta. CEO Louis Dreyfus is now reporting that stories surfaced on ChatGPT convert to paid subscriptions twenty times more often than the same stories on Facebook, and fifty times more than on Google Discover. Speaking to Press Gazette, he’s urging other publishers to follow. Larger operations like News Corp are well ahead of them with a “woo and sue” strategy: having done deals with OpenAI and Meta, they will aggressively come after other AI scrapers who don’t pony up.

Then, Wikipedia’s editors voted to ban large language models from generating or revising entries entirely. The reasoning: AI-generated text routinely violates Wikipedia’s core editorial standards — accuracy, verifiability, neutrality. Two narrow exceptions were retained: basic copyediting of your own writing, and machine translation. Everything else, out.

Business Insider, meanwhile, reportedly announced a $400 quarterly prize for the best staff use of AI — something which I had assumed, given the 1 April timing, was an April Fool’s joke by Semafor’s media editor Max Tani. Remember that Insider’s publisher Axel Springer is the same organisation whose CEO declared the company “going all-in on AI” while cutting 21% of its workforce.

In isolation, all three moves are understandable. But when you put them together, a big problem emerges.

Comparing apples and oranges? First decide: what is fruit?

If you’re advising a media business right now (or working inside one) the temptation is to look at these three and ask: which model do we follow? That’s the wrong question.

Instead, consider each of them had to think about before they could make any decision at all: what kind of asset do we actually have?

Le Monde‘s answer is that it has premium journalism with a known brand, and that AI companies need that brand to make their products credible. The licensing deal is a big bet: we have something you need, and here’s the price.

But this licensing bet only works if the brand remains credible enough that ChatGPT users want to click through. Which means the deal is only as good as the journalism underneath it. Are they investing in that, or assuming it?

Wikipedia’s answer is that it has something rarer than journalism: a collaboratively maintained, openly licensed record of human knowledge, built on editorial integrity as a founding principle. The moment you let a language model — which confabulates, bullshits, and optimises for plausibility over accuracy — anywhere near that record, you’ve contaminated the asset. Wiki’s bet is defensive: asset protection.

But doesn’t the ban only hold as long as the volunteer editor community does? It seems that the real threat to Wikipedia’s asset isn’t AI writing — it’s AI reading, which will eventually make Wikipedia’s role as the internet’s baseline reference layer redundant if the knowledge just gets absorbed. The ban might keeps the database clean, but it doesn’t keep it relevant.

Insider’s answer is, while a bit strange, also tells you something valuable. A prize for AI use inside an organisation that’s already hollowed out its editorial workforce isn’t a strategy. It’s the performance of a strategy, which is a different thing entirely, but clearly the thing which someone, somewhere inside publisher Axel Springer has decided works for them.

To be fair, that pressure to look like you have an AI strategy — before you’ve done the harder work of defining what you actually have — is everywhere right now.

Even Meta, which is supposed to be a high priest in the blessed order of AI overlords, is prone to this performative nonsense. Witness the launch, and swift demise, of an internal leaderboard called “Claudeonomics”, designed to rank employees by sheer volume of AI token consumption, as a case study in “tokenmaxxing” — the idea that volume of AI use is itself a proxy for productivity.

It’s also, obviously, completely insane. Volume is not insight and activity is not strategy. A leaderboard that ranks your employees by how much they’ve typed into a chatbox tells you nothing about whether the work is any good. It’s a Silicon Valley problem, but these days, when Big Tech sneezes, the whole media and advertising industry gets cholera.

Media companies can’t fall into the trap of doing the same thing with a different set of numbers: tracking AI adoption rates; counting tools deployed; or (bleurgh) running AI prize schemes. None of it answers the underlying question.

You can’t ignore this for much longer

Here’s the uncomfortable part, and the reason most publishers are still stalling.

The honest answer to “what is our content worth to an AI company?” is either embarrassingly low or uncomfortably high — and both answers demand decisions that nobody wants to make.

If your content is worth a lot, you’re probably already being undercut. The deals being struck quietly around you are setting a price floor that you’ll spend years trying to argue your way above. Saying nothing while you “watch the space” isn’t neutrality. It’s ceding ground.

If your content isn’t worth much — if it’s the kind of high-volume, commodity output that AI can replicate cheaply and accurately — then the licensing conversation is a distraction from a structural problem that AI didn’t create, but is making impossible to ignore.

Either way, you’re being asked to say something out loud that you’d rather keep vague. Which is why so many media strategies right now are elaborate exercises in not answering the question.

The three publishers in this story aren’t interesting because of what they decided. They’re interesting because each of them, at some point, had to stop hedging and say what they actually were.

If you’re working with a media client — or inside a media business — that is still in “watching brief” mode on AI, ask them this: can you say, in a single sentence, what your content is worth and to whom?

If the answer is a hedge, you have your answer. Not about AI. About whether the strategy you’re being sold is actually a strategy at all.

Welcome to Ad-verse Reactions

I’m Omar Oakes: a journalist and industry critic who’s spent the last decade picking apart how media, marketing, and content actually work — not how they pretend to.

I bring together an increasingly rare mix of network, voice, and track record: building publications, growing audiences, and challenging the stories this industry tells itself. I was global tech editor and media editor at Campaign magazine before becoming founding editor-in-chief of The Media Leader.

I have no plans to put this newsletter behind a paywall; I just love writing and sharing ideas.

As well freelance journalism I run a specialist clinic, oomph., where I help agencies, media owners, and senior marketers sharpen their positioning, craft industry-leading narratives, and turn complex issues into content that actually moves people. This Substack is where I share the same ideas, challenges, and provocations I bring to my clients.

• A weekly ‘Stories That Matter’ edition on Tuesdays in which I dissect the major story (or stories) of the week

• Other deep dives based on work I’m doing as a journalist and/or consultant.

• Stuff I’m reading.

Always happy to chat about ideas for this newish Substack and please say hello if you’re a fellow writer or someone who just wants to share notes about the world of media, advertising and marketing.

📩 Email me: omaroakesmedia@gmail.com

🔗 More about me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/omaroakes/

🖥️ More about oomph.: www.oomphoomph.com

There are those that tell you artificial intelligence is going to save the world: unlock human potential, cure diseases, fix the broken bits of capitalism.

While others will proclaim ultimate doom: AI will take your job, homogenise culture, hand more power to companies that already have far too much of it.

Of course the truth will lie somewhere between these extremes. As individuals, human beings are very good at getting a sense of the truth by figuring out the extremes of an argument and then, if they have the patience, to do the hard work of wading through the messy middle.

Unfortunately media — particularly algorithmically curated digital media — is optimised to grab and hold your attention instead of lead you closer to truth.

So I’m betting that whatever you think about AI right now is closer to one of these two extremes. Can’t we do better than this, particularly when we’re talking about technology that, rightly or wrongly, is shaping so much about what are we thinking and doing as advertising and media people?

I think we can. So I’ve started a podcast.

Believe it or Not is a show about AI in media and advertising — specifically about the big claims being made about it. Each episode takes one proposition and investigates it properly. We make the strongest version of the case, check it against what’s actually happening, and then give you an honest verdict. No prophecy. No panic. Just two people genuinely trying to figure it out.

As you’ll know from previous Ad-verse Reactions pieces about AI and the questionable claims and practices made by companies like Open AI and Meta, I’m very sceptical about how radically AI is going to change the world as these tech companies would like you to believe. That’s not to say it’s all a load of puff, but there is an overriding narrative about AI that needs correcting.

My co-host is Hamish Nicklin — 25 years in media, former CEO of Dentsu Media UK, chief revenue officer at The Guardian, and senior Google/YouTube sales boss. He now runs an AI consultancy called AgentFlow, so he’s in the trenches building with this technology and betting his business on it.

Basically: Believe it or Not is Hamish and I having an argument. We don’t agree on some fundamental points about AI, as you’ll hear.

I didn’t know Hamish that well before we came up with this idea. But when I wrote something sceptical about AI in a Media Leader column earlier this year, he pushed back — publicly, forcefully, and in good faith. More than that, he was willing to clarify and revise his own thinking out loud, which is no small thing when you’ve staked your professional reputation on a position. That kind of intellectual honesty is rare. It’s also exactly the energy this show needs.

The dynamic is straightforward. Hamish is the evangelist. I’m the sceptic.

I also want to be open about how I'm using AI as a journalist and consultant. Publishers owe readers transparency about how they're using these tools — and there are real risks in outsourcing your thinking to them, particularly when the limits of what's useful aren't always obvious. As I like to say about AI and writing: it's like hair dye. It can plausibly do a job for you, but most people can tell something is going on.

Early subscribers will know that one of the first things I published on Ad-verse Reactions was an explainer about how I used AI for writing. Things have changed a lot since then but I’m certainly not a convert. I’m still a work in progress, as I suspect most of you are, too.

I don’t know exactly where I’ll land on all of this. But I’d rather figure it out in public than pretend I already know.

Episode zero is out now on The Media Leader’s podcast feed. It’s a limited series and full episodes drop every Thursday.

Listen here →

As the series develops, I want to hear what you think — not just whether you agree, but where you think we’re getting it wrong. That’s the whole point. Reach me at omar@oomphoomph.com or find me on LinkedIn.

He then goes upstairs. He watches pretty much every award go to a social purpose campaign without a scintilla of irreverence amongst them. “I recall racing to the bar as the last gong was handed out,” writes Steve Harrison, who was there, “muttering ‘kill me now’.”

That scene is the best moment in Adland’s Progressive Gaze. It’s funny and sad in equal measure. The gap between “irreverence” and “kill me now” is, in miniature, the entire argument of the book. An industry that knows what it admires. An industry that rewards something else entirely. An industry that has, somewhere along the way, lost the nerve to be itself.

Harrison is right about all of that. The question is, what caused it?

The prosecution

Adland’s Progressive Gaze is a polemic — well-written, frequently sharp, and consciously provocative — from a veteran copywriter who has had quite enough, thank you very much, and has decided to say so at length. If you’ve read the masterful Howard Gossage biography Changing the World Is the Only Fit Work for a Grown Man, you’ll know Harrison diligently researches his targets and, as you’d expect for one of advertising’s most decorated copywriters, is skilled at balancing precision with playfulness in his writing.

His charge sheet, summarised: purpose advertising has colonised the awards circuit; DEI language has imposed groupthink on agencies that exist to produce uncomfortable ideas; and a once-irreverent industry has made itself safe, corporate, and boring — then dressed the ennui up in the browbeating language of social justice.

Harrison’s specific targets are instructive. He dedicates the opening eight pages of the book to Jaguar’s late-2024 “Copy Nothing” campaign — a radical departure from the brand’s heritage that he dismisses as “a vehicle for the creative team’s progressive point of view.” Not only is that Jaguar ad emblematic of peak woke, he argues, but also a watershed: proof that “the brew had gone flat” and that “the marketing and advertising industry — and society in general — had had quite enough of the uninhibited progressive proselytising it had unleashed on the world.”

He takes aim at Bud Light for hiring a trans comedian in its advertising. He invokes Unilever — whose CEO Alan Jope and chief marketer Aline Santos argued that their brands should “stand for something more important than making your hair shiny, your skin soft, your clothes whiter or your food tastier” — and delivers what he clearly considers the definitive rebuttal: “The fact that consumers bought Unilever’s products precisely because they made their hair shiny and their skin soft, seemed to escape Jope and Co.”

I had to reread that sentence. Is that true? More on that later.

Harrison is right to call out the industry’s drift into self-congratulatory purpose-washing. The Hegarty scene captures it perfectly: an industry that mouths the language of creativity while rewarding something that looks nothing like it.

But the most striking data point in the book is buried in its final chapter. The advertising industry’s Employee Net Promoter Score — the standard measure of whether people would recommend their workplace to others — was just 6%. Harrison calls it a “shocking result” that should have set the agenda. He’s right.

I’ll admit that figure passed me by. It shouldn’t have: a 6% eNPS is not just a ‘morale’ issue — it’s an emergency warning.

Harrison is also right to be scathing about the IPA, ISBA, and the Advertising Association’s response. Their probing into the causes of this figure goes no deeper, he writes, than linking morale to “is advertising trusted” and whether it has a “positive impact on society.” They asked a communications question about a working conditions problem. It is a damning observation, and nobody in those organisations should be comfortable reading it.

Harrison’s diagnosis for why the jobs became so miserable: the progressive agenda — making people feel guilty, surveilled, unable to just get on with the work.

But in identifying a real disease, Harrison blames the wrong pathogen. The industry didn’t lose its nerve because progressives took over. It lost its nerve because the people paying for advertising stopped caring whether it was any good.

The real disease

Here is a different diagnosis.

Over the past two decades, client-side organisations underwent widespread digital transformation that fundamentally changed how they procure services. They need ROI demonstrated numerically. They need it fast. They need it cheap. It is very difficult to show the true impact of great creative work on long-term brand value; it is very easy to demonstrate that you got a programmatic buy 15% cheaper.

So creativity stopped being a premium service. Technicians and software-as-a-service became more important than people who claimed to understand culture. The people who claimed to understand culture responded by pivoting to DEI — which at least offered a measurable metric, a census figure, a box to tick.

Which brings us back to Unilever and Harrison’s claim that consumers buy Radox to “make their skin soft”.

Unilever’s products are, to borrow a technical term, boring as fuck. Shampoo. Washing powder. Margarine. Commodities sold in a market where every competitor offers functionally identical goods at similar prices to consumers who increasingly refuse to fit into the demographic boxes that made advertising visible to Harrison’s generation.

But Harrison’s claim devalues the premise of brand building. People don’t buy products for purely rational, transactional reasons. They buy stories. They buy identity. They buy a version of themselves they want to believe in. That is not a progressive invention; it is the founding logic of the industry Harrison spent his career working in.

Diversity and inclusion, whether you think it’s a moral imperative or fashionable nonsense, is part of how people see the world — and therefore part of how brands must speak to it. “Anti-woke” is itself a rather effective brand attribute, as anyone who has watched Elon Musk monetise grievance from a $44bn acquisition will have noticed.

For a company like Unilever, serving young, affluent consumers who don’t fit neatly into the old boxes, not exploring cultural positioning as a viable brand strategy would arguably be the irresponsible choice. The mistake wasn’t reaching for purpose; the error was reaching for it lazily, or as a substitute for a genuine point of view.

The woke ads are a symptom of the same disease as the miserable jobs. But Harrison treats them as the cause.

The record, corrected

The trade press is also in the dock. Campaign magazine is Harrison’s exhibit A for the progressive capture of industry journalism.

I worked at Campaign for several years. I don’t take his criticisms personally (how hypocritical of me would that be?) but on at least one significant instance, he gets it wrong. And I know this because I was there.

The most famous example of what Harrison calls Campaign “surrendering to online mob rule” is the Nigel Farage front cover — a deliberately provocative feature interview, Farage’s hideous rictus grin splashed under the headline “Advertising? I might fancy it myself one day.” The resulting fury from industry leaders, who were appalled that their trade magazine appeared to implicitly endorse a man with a long track record of excreting racist, fearmongering political garbage, was real and considerable.

Harrison’s retelling of the episode deserves a correction. He writes that editor-in-chief Claire Beale “was forced to meet the progressive gaze — and blinked. Within two days she’d issued a humbling apology. Indeed, I’d hazard it was this brutal experience that persuaded her to quit her role several months later.”

The actual account of what went wrong with the Farage cover was pretty well conveyed at the time by former Campaign editor Dominic Mills in his Mediatel News column: the error wasn’t interviewing Farage or even putting his malevolent visage on the front page. The real mistake was producing an interview that simply wasn’t very good — we didn’t ask the man enough difficult questions. A trade press failure of nerve, yes. But not the kind Harrison thinks.

As for Claire being so scarred by the experience that she quit months later… no. She was made redundant when its publisher Haymarket restructured. This was, to be fair, communicated quite plainly for all to see at the time. It’s a shame Harrison hadn’t included this when he hazarded in print.

It exposes an otherwise laudable book for, at times, clutching too quickly for vivid characterisation over the verified fact. I’d hazard this is exactly the kind of sloppiness Harrison would skewer in a piece of advertising copy.

The meritocracy myth

Harrison’s treatment of class is the book’s most emotionally freighted section, and the one most worth taking seriously — and then pushing back on.

The author is from Blackpool. He mentions this in passing but doesn’t explain it. To the attuned, overly class-sensitive British ear, he doesn’t need to: the mere mention of a Northern seaside town, in a book aimed squarely at London’s media-professional class, is the point. This is an exercise in getting middle-class progressive types to have a long, hard look at themselves.

You can catch the live version of this rhetorical flex in, of all places, the ‘This Isn’t Working’ podcast last year, in which Harrison defiantly proclaims from his kitchen: “I’m 68 years of age… I don’t give a shit.”

Naturally, we are presented with working-class creative heroes — copywriter Paul Burke and art director Dave Dye — as fallen idols of what the industry once was and no longer is. Burke laments that a talent like Alan Parker, “however much they try to deny it,” would today be unfairly marked out as privileged by virtue of his gender and skin colour, and that his “astonishing creative talent might today go undiscovered.” Dye recalls being attracted to advertising because creative departments were meritocratic: “the best idea won. I wouldn’t be beaten by someone from a country estate just because I was from a council estate.”

Take that, posho! But wait.

Meritocracy is far easier to perceive when everyone in the room has grown up in roughly the same cultural soup — watching the same television, reading the same papers, speaking the same slang. Burke and Dye’s meritocracy was real, but it was also bounded; a meritocracy of a specific type of working-class British man. The world has changed — not only because UK adland’s capital city London became more racially diverse, but because the internet has disrupted those cultural references.

Through small, connected screens, we have a permanent window into the whole world and widening array of niche interests. It’s not enough to bluntly ask everyone where they went to school or how many holidays they went on as a child. Diversity isn’t a policy that arrived from outside and disrupted a functioning system. It is the world that already exists, and has existed for long enough that ideologues like Farage have built a career out of resenting it.

It’s not that there are no more Paul Burkes. It’s that there are very few people left, of any background, who can be put in such a neat box. And nor would they expect to be.

Of course grave mistakes are being made in our industry and this book does well to catalogue them. The case of white, male, creatives Chas Bayfield and Dave Jenner — fired from JWT and ruled to have been victims of discrimination — still raises the blood temperature after reading Harrison’s retelling. It wasn’t just that Bayfield and Jenner were victims of a policy to keep women and sack men in a redundancy round; the sheer hostility thrown back at them for raising the issue by creative director Lucas Peon and HR director Emma Hoyle, as revealed by the employment tribunal, is indicative of advertising’s weakness for brutal management regimes.

And there’s the anecdote of a global agency CEO arriving late to a meeting and loudly whining about the monoculture of “middle-aged, white men” staring back at them across the conference table. Harrison is right to find this shocking. It is intellectually wrong, not to mention abusive and illegal under employment law.

But ask yourself what it reveals: this does not look like a bunch of woke ideologues in full control of an agenda, but a litany of incompetent leaders with little of substance to say. Without a DEI agenda, they are simply an overpromoted middle manager with no ideas, no entrepreneurial spirit, and no sense of humour.

That doesn’t seem like progressive capture. It’s a story about the vacuum that created the conditions for it.

The wrong moment

There is also the matter of timing.

This book feels about three years late and some distance away from the actual emergency facing the industry it purports to defend.

We are in the middle of a right-wing authoritarian assault on the world’s largest democracy. The industry’s biggest platforms — the ones that sell the most advertising, that shape the most attention, that generate the most revenue — are extracting acts of tribute and fealty from the companies that depend on them, in exchange for regulatory goodwill. Whether you read that as cheerful complicity or coercion under duress, the result is the same: the structural conditions of the industry are being rewritten in real time, by people with no interest in whether the work is any good. Meanwhile, AI is loudly trying to convince the world that it can now replace the white-collar creative jobs that survived the holding company consolidations of the last decade.

So now, the enemy Harrison describes — progressive HR departments, purpose-obsessed planners, woke awards juries — is real, but increasingly marginalised. It is also, notably, powerless.

The enemy rewriting the actual structural conditions of the industry doesn’t care whether your last campaign won a Cannes Lion for social purpose. It cares about market cap, regulatory compliance, and what the president’s people will tolerate.

That enemy is structural, well-capitalised, and accelerating. And it doesn’t appear in this book.

What he actually believes in

In fairness, the book’s closing pages do gesture at a positive vision. Sort of.

Harrison argues that increasing the number of young women or BAME employees in agencies won’t make the 68-hour weeks any less arduous — and that the jobs they’re being recruited into are precisely the ones AI will eliminate within 18 months anyway.

“Sharing the shit jobs amongst the favoured groups is actually doing no one any favours,” he writes. “Improving those shit jobs is surely the priority.”

He calls for an industry that opens “its doors to people who might make us feel uncomfortable” and then gives everyone “a sense of pride in their work, and crucially the chance to master their craft to a degree that cannot be matched by artificial intelligence.”

And he closes with a borrowed line — a “cri de coeur“ from creative director Nils Leonard: “Honestly, don’t you just want to wake up and matter a little bit more?”

Here is the problem. While powerful in isolation, Harrison’s closing vision and his opening charge make for an incoherent union.

He spends the book arguing that progressive ideology has been actively imposed on adland — a coordinated cultural takeover that has corrupted hiring, warped the work, and driven out the lads wot dun good. But his remedy — craft, openness to discomfort, pride in the work, mattering — requires no ideology to be removed. It just requires leadership with taste and nerve. Which means either the progressive capture was never really the structural problem he claims it is, or his solution doesn’t address it. He can’t have both.

And that Leonard line — “don’t you just want to wake up and matter a little bit more?” — is doing enormous load-bearing work for a sentence borrowed from someone else. It is a feeling Harrison wants adland to recover, not a programme for how to get there. It is also, unmistakably, a statement about purpose, dignity, and the quality of working life.

Those are, of course, exactly the things a well-executed diversity and inclusion agenda is supposed to deliver.

You might even say it could have come from a diversity consultant’s keynote.

The verdict

Adland’s Progressive Gaze is brave — it says things out loud that a lot of people in this industry think quietly and would never publish. It is necessary — an industry where everyone wears trainers on stage and nobody says anything uncomfortable produces very little useful self-criticism.

Ultimately, Harrison is right that advertising has lost its nerve. He’s just wrong about who took it.

The industry’s real problem isn’t that it has been captured by progressives. It’s that it has been abandoned by serious people — on the client side, in the holding companies, increasingly in the trade press — who might have insisted that the work itself was worth taking seriously. Into that vacuum rushed the only language available that could simulate seriousness: the language of social purpose, of representation, of impact.

Harrison wants irreverence back. So do I. But irreverence requires courage, and courage requires having something to lose. The industry spent 20 years making itself too safe to fail and too bland to matter.

That’s not the progressive gaze. That’s the market.

Ad-verse Reads is an occasional series reviewing books about advertising, media, and the business of persuasion.

Welcome to Ad-verse Reactions

I’m Omar Oakes: a journalist and industry critic who’s spent the last decade picking apart how media, marketing, and content actually work — not how they pretend to.

I bring together an increasingly rare mix of network, voice, and track record: building publications, growing audiences, and challenging the stories this industry tells itself. I was global tech editor and media editor at Campaign magazine before becoming founding editor-in-chief of The Media Leader.

I have no plans to put this newsletter behind a paywall; I just love writing and sharing ideas.

As well freelance journalism I run a specialist clinic, oomph., where I help agencies, media owners, and senior marketers sharpen their positioning, craft industry-leading narratives, and turn complex issues into content that actually moves people. This Substack is where I share the same ideas, challenges, and provocations I bring to my clients.

• A weekly ‘Stories That Matter’ edition on Tuesdays in which I dissect the major story (or stories) of the week

• Other deep dives based on work I’m doing as a journalist and/or consultant.

• Stuff I’m reading.

Always happy to chat about ideas for this newish Substack and please say hello if you’re a fellow writer or someone who just wants to share notes about the world of media, advertising and marketing.

📩 Email me: omaroakesmedia@gmail.com

🔗 More about me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/omaroakes/

🖥️ More about oomph.: www.oomphoomph.com

The rumours that former Google EMEA boss Matt Brittin would become the actual director-general of the BBC didn’t seem credible. (If it did, it would have been the ‘big story that matters’ in last week’s edition.)

My cynical head software led me to conclude that Brittin’s name was being leaked as a spoiler; perhaps to make the real choice seem more appealing by comparison. In hindsight, it’s more likely the BBC leaked it to dampen the shock of the announcement, and it will still be a surprise to anyone who’s interested in the fate of the BBC (including some newspapers for which the BBC seems to be all they care about, other than Princess Diana and Madeleine McCann).

Why so shocking? Google’s former president for Europe, Middle East, and Africa, where he spent 18 years — will be the first director general in more than 80 years to lead the corporation without any experience of broadcasting or programme-making.

Even his arrival at Google was, in his own words, “completely random”, according to Brittin himself.

Brittin told me in a 2023 interview that Google needed someone strategic, who understood the media industry and “a bit about technology,” and he “looked like the right kind of person.”

Looked like the right kind of person. The BBC’s board has run the same calculation in reverse. And It’s not random at all.

Subscribe now

The board doesn’t do eccentric - it does signals

The BBC's governing board may be many things, but it does not make eccentric choices. It sends signals about how it wants the Corporation to change, like a chameleon willing itself to change colour.

Except here’s the thing about chameleons: they don’t change colour to blend into their environment as is commonly thought. They change colour to reveal their internal state or their change in mood; it’s more about declaration than camouflage.

Go back to every notable DG appointment since John Birt — whose departure in 2000 broadly coincided with the rise of 24-hour news and popular use of the internet — and the signals are easier to interpret than the credentials:

Greg Dyke (2000–2004): Commercial TV man from LWT and Pearson who would “cut the crap” and play nice with Tony Blair’s New Labour government — famously criticised for having donated £55,000 to the Labour Party.

Mark Thompson (2004–2012): A BBC lifer who’d left to turn around Channel 4’s finances, brought back to steady the ship after Dyke’s forced resignation over the Hutton Inquiry — the safe pair of hands who understood both editorial and commercial.

George Entwistle (2012): The insider’s insider — Newsnight editor, Panorama editor, controller of BBC One — a signal that the BBC wanted to recommit to programme-making after Thompson’s commercial turn. Lasted 54 days before the Savile and McAlpine scandals ended it.

Tony Hall (2013–2020): BBC news man turned chief executive of the Royal Opera House — a signal that the corporation wanted gravitas, cultural credibility, and someone who could defend public service broadcasting on principle. A restoration appointment.

Tim Davie (2020–2025): Former PepsiCo marketing VP who’d crossed into BBC Studios and Worldwide — a signal that the BBC’s future was commercial, global, and brand-led. Resigned over the Panorama Trump edit scandal.

Matt Brittin (2026–): 18 years at Google. No broadcasting. No programme-making.

The man who ‘tried to save the newspaper industry’

Before Google, Brittin spent nearly three years at Trinity Mirror — as commercial director, then head of strategy and digital — where, by his own description on LinkedIn, he “tried to save the newspaper industry.” He did not succeed.

Then he spent 18 years at the company that was the primary reason it couldn’t be saved. Now he’s running the BBC.

In that same 2023 interview, Brittin told me he was “proud that Google’s probably the biggest supporter of journalism on the planet in terms of sending traffic and the partnerships that we have.”

So that’s something. Will his view on Google’s impact on publishing evolve now that he is the editor-in-chief of BBC News?

Since February 2025, Brittin has been a non-executive director of The Guardian. So he currently sits on the board of an editorially independent news organisation that competes with the BBC for journalism talent, audience, and institutional prestige. But not for much longer, you’d think.

But hiring the man who ran Google’s advertising business across an intercontinental region? That tells you what the BBC has decided its future is — even if nobody has said it aloud yet.

And frustratingly, what a shame that a woman is yet to be appointed to this high-profile and consequential role in UK media. Not Matt’s fault, but what kind of signal does it send that it still hasn’t managed to find a suitable leader among half the British population?

Subscribe now

Protect the form, replace the function

In the same Cannes interview, Brittin described YouTube’s living room screen as the fastest-growing in the world and creators as “one person broadcast companies.” Hold that thought while we look at the other big BBC story from the last week.

Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy proposed a permanent Royal Charter for the BBC, replacing the 10-year renewal cycle that currently expires at the end of 2027. Under the new model, the BBC would sit alongside the Bank of England and the British Film Institute as a permanent chartered body — constitutionally embedded, protected from what Nandy called “culture war” attacks.

I recently appeared on the Media Club Podcast with Matt Deegan where this idea was broadly dismissed as an ‘old chestnut’ — something which the BBC always demands in Charter Renewal negotiations but is not taken seriously. Personally I think politicians should be made to debate the future of the BBC, just like anything taxpayers are forced to pay for, but that’s for another day.

Made together, these two moves tell a clear story.

The charter preserves the form: this institution is so important we’re giving it constitutional permanence.

The appointment replaces the function: the thing that made the BBC so important — journalism, broadcasting, programme-making — is no longer what the board needs from the person at the top.

If those two decisions were made about a brand you were buying media against, you’d call it what it is: a rebrand dressed up as continuity.

The name stays. The reputation persists. And the thing that earned both gets quietly swapped out.

Reputation is a lagging indicator

This isn't disruption (the cinematic version of history that the industry tells itself). It's quieter than that and worse.

The BBC will still be "the BBC." The charter will still be permanent. The editor-in-chief will still be the editor-in-chief. But underneath each of those titles, the thing that made them meaningful has been quietly replaced.

When you invest in an institution — as an advertiser, a partner, a hire — you’re buying against its reputation. The question worth asking is whether the thing that earned the reputation is still the thing happening inside.

The BBC’s board looked at what the corporation needs and concluded it isn’t a journalist, a broadcaster, or a programme-maker. They may be right.

But if they are, what is the “BBC” the permanent charter is protecting?

Welcome to Ad-verse Reactions

I’m Omar Oakes: a journalist and industry critic who’s spent the last decade picking apart how media, marketing, and content actually work — not how they pretend to.

I bring together an increasingly rare mix of network, voice, and track record: building publications, growing audiences, and challenging the stories this industry tells itself. I was global tech editor and media editor at Campaign magazine before becoming founding editor-in-chief of The Media Leader.

I have no plans to put this newsletter behind a paywall; I just love writing and sharing ideas.

As well freelance journalism I run a specialist clinic, oomph., where I help agencies, media owners, and senior marketers sharpen their positioning, craft industry-leading narratives, and turn complex issues into content that actually moves people. This Substack is where I share the same ideas, challenges, and provocations I bring to my clients.

• A weekly ‘Stories That Matter’ edition on Tuesdays in which I dissect the major story (or stories) of the week

• Other deep dives based on work I’m doing as a journalist and/or consultant.

• Stuff I’m reading.

Always happy to chat about ideas for this newish Substack and please say hello if you’re a fellow writer or someone who just wants to share notes about the world of media, advertising and marketing.

📩 Email me: omaroakesmedia@gmail.com

🔗 More about me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/omaroakes/

🖥️ More about oomph.: www.oomphoomph.com

And now, apparently, an adtech trade body with the nerve to expel Meta. You know, the same Meta that, by its own admission, makes billions of dollars from scam ads?

For British advertising people, used to an industry that treats accountability as a reputational inconvenience, this must feel slightly unreal. IAB Sweden didn’t just vote Meta out — they did it on a Tuesday, got it thrown out on procedural grounds, came back the following day, and pushed it through anyway. They were serious about this.

In the UK, our IAB, er, gave Meta a Gold Standard.

Same organisation. Same member. Same week. Different answers.

But oddly, our industry’s trade press read it as a geography story. Sweden acted, UK didn’t, file under Nordic exceptionalism (next to flat-pack furniture) and move on.

Let’s not be fooled by geography and nationality. What matters here is a choice between two emerging strategies between how publishers deal with the direct harms caused to them from Big Tech.

Subscribe now

What actually happened in Sweden

Bonnier News and Schibsted — the two largest news publishing groups in Scandinavia, between them owning hundreds of titles across the Nordic region — didn’t initiate the IAB case because they’d read a Reuters investigation.

They did it because Meta was using their journalists’ faces to sell crypto garbage to pensioners. Every day, their editorial teams were watching their reporters’ names and likenesses turn up in fake ads on Meta’s platforms. The wider Swedish publishers’ group filed a criminal complaint against Zuckerberg personally.

Joakim Flodin, CEO of Schibsted Marketing Services, put it plainly: “We cannot be part of an organisation that allows a company like Meta to be a member, while the company earns an estimated SEK 136 billion from fraudulent advertisements and advertising for prohibited products.”

“Earns” is the important verb here. As I argued last month, Facebook and Instagram are among the most heavily governed distribution systems ever built. The idea that there is a global deluge of scammers that making fools of this $1.5 trillion market cap juggernaut is naive in the extreme.

So any trade body that implicitly endorses this very lucrative enablement of crime is, let’s be clear, implicitly condoning scam as an acceptable business model.

The UK version of this story is embarrassing

UK publishers have the same documented injury.

The UK Payments Systems Regulator found Meta platforms were linked to more than half (54%) of payments scam incidents in 2023.

Press Gazette has shown that scam ad revenue on Meta in the UK likely exceeds the entire online news advertising market. The faces being stolen here belong to money-saving expert Martin Lewis and CNN’s Richard Quest — and Press Gazette joined one of the fake “Richard Quest” investment WhatsApp groups to document it.

UK publishers know all of this. They’ve written about it. They’ve documented it in granular, damning detail.

And then, earlier this month, The Times and The Sun publisher News Corp signed a £50m-a-year content deal with Meta.

Is this hypocrisy? Well, it’s certainly a calculation. A defensible one. The revenue from accommodation outweighs the cost of confrontation.

Swedish publishers ran the same numbers and landed differently — partly because they had less to gain from Meta’s goodwill, and more to lose from their editorial brands being deployed as scam infrastructure.

‘Making digital advertising better.’ But for whom?

Which brings us to the trade body.

In 2025 (also known as “just a few months ago”) IAB UK awarded Meta its Gold Standard certification — its own quality mark, its signal to the market that this member meets the highest standards in digital advertising.

Here’s what the IAB UK said about the Gold Standard when launching a 2023 ad campaign: “[it] requires certified companies to implement tools to tackle ad fraud; uphold brand safety; improve the online experience for consumers; help businesses comply with GDPR and eprivacy laws; and strengthen supply chain transparency.”

Implement tools to tackle ad fraud? But Meta was awarded after the Reuters investigation. After the criminal complaints. After the Payments Systems Regulator data.

“If this is Gold Standard, what’s sub-standard?” asked Thinkbox CEO Lindsey Clay mordantly in The Media Leader in December.

It’s a good question. So what was the answer?

Well, yesterday IAB UK CEO Jon Mew told Marketing Week the organisation aims “to work with the broadest possible membership to help make digital advertising better for everyone.”

“For everyone”?

Platforms account for 68% of UK digital ad spend — and Meta sits on IAB UK’s own Measurement Advisory Boardalongside Google, TikTok, and Amazon. The structural independence required to expel a member that powerful doesn’t exist.

You might as well ask the hotel to evict the conference.

This is what the collapse of self-regulation actually looks like

There are a hundred ‘sensible’ decisions that slowly add up to an industry that, before you know it, is no longer able to police itself.

And that should worry you — not for ethical reasons, but strategic ones.

The harm here isn’t abstract. It’s pensioners losing savings to fake investment schemes wearing Martin Lewis’s face. That story makes headlines. Most ad industry complaints don’t. Headlines make politicians act. And when the victims are voters and the industry’s response is a Gold Standard certificate, you’ve written the politician’s press release for them.

And here’s why that matters beyond ad formats and targeting rules. Advertising funds media. Media funds journalism. If the state gets to define what advertising is acceptable — which advertisers are legitimate, which platforms qualify — it acquires structural leverage over the revenue model of every independent publisher.

You don’t need to ban a newspaper. You just need to make its ad model precarious enough that it learns to moderate itself. That is not a theoretical risk. It is the logic of intervention.

Sweden kicked Meta out. The UK gave it a Gold Standard. One of those decisions is going to look smarter in 10 years.

It won’t be ours.

Welcome to Ad-verse Reactions

I’m Omar Oakes: a journalist and industry critic who’s spent the last decade picking apart how media, marketing, and content actually work — not how they pretend to.

I bring together an increasingly rare mix of network, voice, and track record: building publications, growing audiences, and challenging the stories this industry tells itself. I was global tech editor and media editor at Campaign magazine before becoming founding editor-in-chief of The Media Leader.

I have no plans to put this newsletter behind a paywall; I just love writing and sharing ideas.

As well freelance journalism I run a specialist clinic, oomph., where I help agencies, media owners, and senior marketers sharpen their positioning, craft industry-leading narratives, and turn complex issues into content that actually moves people. This Substack is where I share the same ideas, challenges, and provocations I bring to my clients.

• A weekly ‘Stories That Matter’ edition on Tuesdays in which I dissect the major story (or stories) of the week

• Other deep dives based on work I’m doing as a journalist and/or consultant.

• Stuff I’m reading.

Always happy to chat about ideas for this newish Substack and please say hello if you’re a fellow writer or someone who just wants to share notes about the world of media, advertising and marketing.

📩 Email me: omaroakesmedia@gmail.com

🔗 More about me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/omaroakes/

🖥️ More about oomph.: www.oomphoomph.com

That’s exactly the problem Ad-Verse Reactions exists to solve.

A case in point: two stories this week that, read separately, look like routine trade news. Read together, they reveal something significant about where Netflix is taking its platform strategy.

Story one: Netflix has a plan to double its advertising revenue to $3 billion in 2026.

Through expanded targeting and better outcomes measurement, it’s a serious pitch to serious media buyers. The trade press covered this as good news for the industry — AdExchanger called it Netflix’s ads business having “grown to scale,” while CNBC ran the headline “Netflix’s advertising strategy shift is starting to pay off.”

More premium inventory, more competition, more options. What’s not to like?

Story two: Netflix is throttling the third-party distribution of its exclusive podcasters.

Netflix controls how many clips they can share outside the platform. Bloomberg reported the consequence: channel growth on YouTube is slowing by as much as 50% year-on-year. On its own, you could call this a ‘platform metrics story’ or a ‘creator ecosystem story’, rather than a ‘strategy story’.

But put these stories together and you get something neither one says on its own.

Netflix is open for advertiser money, but closed for creator autonomy. That is what happens when a mature platform stops competing for your attention and starts engineering your dependency on it.

If you’re a Netflix employee or shareholder, it’s fine to shrug your shoulders and say “good for us”.

If you’re an advertiser, media buyer or strategist, you might want to consider what happens next.

This is what platform maturity actually looks like

Let’s break down what’s going on..

Netflix signs exclusive podcast talent, like The Bill Simmons Podcast (pictured, below). That talent builds audience — some of it on YouTube, some of it on social, some of it through the frictionless clip culture that makes podcasts spread.

Netflix then restricts the clip distribution. So the creator’s external audience growth slows, their leverage outside Netflix erodes, and their dependency on Netflix deepens.

Meanwhile, Netflix takes that captive audience — now harder to reach anywhere else — and sells access to it to advertisers, at scale, with expanding targeting capabilities.

That means that Netflix is not just ‘signing talent’ — it is restructuring the terms of audience ownership. Creators built the following. Netflix controls the exit.

Advertisers are not bystanders in this. They are the business model that makes the whole structure viable. Every insertion order on Netflix inventory is a financial vote for a media ecosystem with one fewer door.

You’ve seen this film before. You were in it.

And why does this playbook sound familiar? Because our industry wrote it!

Publishers handed Google and Facebook the programmatic keys in the early 2010s and spent the following decade watching their own audience data used to undercut them. Just last week, Reach’s CEO described his company’s current approach to AI platforms as a “mixture of courtship and courts” — simultaneously trying to sign deals and threatening legal action — after Google Discover traffic fell 50% in the second half of 2025. That is what negotiating from dependency looks like.

The pattern isn’t new. Nor is the rationalisation: the inventory is good, the targeting works, the CPMs are defensible.

All of that was true of Facebook in 2013, too.

And yet. Of course Netflix has the audience, the targeting is improving, and the buy makes sense on this quarter’s plan. That’s not the argument.

The point is what happens to your negotiating position in three years — on pricing, on data access, on measurement terms — once you’ve helped fund a platform with no meaningful competitor for that audience?

Rate cards don’t stay competitive when there’s nowhere else to go. And there won’t be, because the people who might have built the alternative are now locked inside the garden.

Share Ad-verse Reactions by Omar Oakes

Know what game you’re playing

“But it’s a collective action problem!” my imaginary marketer friend whines. “This is the problem with platforms — no individual advertiser can move the needle, so everyone acts in their own short-term interest and the platform wins by default.”

Of course that’s true. But I’m not suggesting you should take your ball and go home, or “boycott Netflix”.

The ask is simpler than that: know what you’re building toward. Model what your negotiating position looks like when there’s no meaningful alternative. Build that into your planning now, while there still is one.

Because the platform isn’t waiting for the industry to coordinate. It’s already collecting.

Welcome to Ad-verse Reactions

I’m Omar Oakes: a journalist and industry critic who’s spent the last decade picking apart how media, marketing, and content actually work — not how they pretend to.

I bring together an increasingly rare mix of network, voice, and track record: building publications, growing audiences, and challenging the stories this industry tells itself. I was global tech editor and media editor at Campaign magazine before becoming founding editor-in-chief of The Media Leader.

I have no plans to put this newsletter behind a paywall; I just love writing and sharing ideas.

As well freelance journalism I run a specialist clinic, oomph., where I help agencies, media owners, and senior marketers sharpen their positioning, craft industry-leading narratives, and turn complex issues into content that actually moves people. This Substack is where I share the same ideas, challenges, and provocations I bring to my clients.

• A weekly ‘Stories That Matter’ edition on Tuesdays in which I dissect the major story (or stories) of the week

• Other deep dives based on work I’m doing as a journalist and/or consultant.

• Stuff I’m reading.

Always happy to chat about ideas for this newish Substack and please say hello if you’re a fellow writer or someone who just wants to share notes about the world of media, advertising and marketing.

📩 Email me: omaroakesmedia@gmail.com

🔗 More about me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/omaroakes/

🖥️ More about oomph.: www.oomphoomph.com

It was one of the most consequential military actions in decades. At the time of writing, I’m not sure anyone knows what is going to happen next.

This newsletter is not about politics, or whether starting yet another war in the Middle East is a good idea.

But I’m asking you to look at the power mechanisms and systems that shape media and advertising — because right now, those systems have put a man with an especially weak grasp of consequence in command of the world’s most powerful military.

Anthony Scaramucci — Trump lackey turned critic — once claimed he had to walk Trump through the plot of Lawrence of Arabia just to hold his attention during a Middle East policy discussion.

That man now has hypersonic missiles. The stakes don’t get any bigger than that.

Which is why it’s important to explain why our industry helped put them in his hands.

Minnesota was the A/B test

We used to take American restraint for granted.

When a country possesses overwhelming military superiority — as the US has for decades — restraint is the deal the rest of the world makes with that power. You accept American dominance because American presidents, whatever their flaws, understood the weight of the trigger. Congress is supposed to vote for war. The Cabinet is supposed to remove a president who becomes unfit. The system has brakes.

Those brakes appear to be gone.

Trump clicks his fingers and Nicolas Maduro is captured and whisked from Venezuela. Then Khamenei and his entourage are blown apart. All of it apparently a surprise to everyone except Trump and the top brass.

Is any country Trump doesn’t like now a drone strike away from overnight assassination? What about individuals and groups this president simply dislikes?

These are not hypothetical questions anymore. Look what’s happening in his own country.

Earlier this year, Trump sent thousands of ICE and border patrol agents into Minnesota under Operation Metro Surge — a large-scale enforcement operation targeting undocumented immigrants and alleged fraud.

Look at the format, not just the policy.

Federal agents in tactical gear, led by a thug dressed in what German newspapers were comparing to SS garb. Arrests and stress confrontations captured on camera and for news bulletins and ‘viral’ posts. Clear villains and clear defenders. High contrast. High emotion. Low ambiguity.

Renée Good and Alex Pretti — both US citizens — were gunned down by these federal agents. Pretti, a nurse, was shot in the back several times while on the ground, moments after asking a woman in distress “are you okay?” Good was shot by officers for the heinous crime of… driving away from them.

These were not just unfortunate incidents involving goons with guns. They were the inevitable result of a culture of escalation that had been deliberately cultivated and publicly performed.

And why were these agents in Minnesota in the first place?

Before the surge, a MAGA influencer named Nick Shirley had posted a video about alleged fraud in Minneapolis’ Somali community. It went viral, triggered partisan outrage across the right, and identified a pressure point — a community, a grievance, a visual. Political actors moved directly toward it.

You don’t need to prove a conspiracy to see how this works. Viral content identifies a flashpoint. Power moves to the flashpoint. The operation gets filmed. The footage travels. The cycle intensifies.

The clashes in Minnesota were supposed to happen. The federal agents and their heavy-handedness were content. Arrests as clips. Confrontation as the product.

The only calculation for Trump is ‘will my people like this and will my enemies hate this’?

And, at its heart, the monumental act of attacking Iran is much the same.

This is what the system teaches

Marshall McLuhan's famous line — the medium is the message — is usually treated as a metaphor.

But here, it’s a way of actually governing.

Social media platforms are not neutral. They’re built to reward what makes people react — anger, fear, pride, outrage. Politicians, like every influencer chasing likes and ad revenue, get conditioned by the same feedback loops. They notice what works. They do more of it.

So why bother with quiet diplomacy when it doesn’t trend? Why seek the centre ground when compromise doesn’t spike?

You get shock instead. Dominance. Escalation. Interruption — and in an attention economy, interruption is power.

This is not about cynical calculation by Trump, Farage, Le Pen or any particular demagogue. The system teaches the behaviour whether or not the actor understands the lesson.

Minnesota was the logic at street level. Iran is the same rationale, with a different kind of firepower.

Share

The mechanism is bigger than the man

The reflex reading of the Iran strikes is “wag the dog” — a reference to the 1997 film in which a US president fabricates a war to distract from a domestic scandal. The phrase stuck because the film released within weeks of Bill Clinton launching missile strikes on Sudan and Afghanistan during an impeachment crisis.

There’s no doubt Trump would like you to forget that he appears in the Epstein files hundreds of thousands of times. The distraction motive is real.

And yet it’s still too small an explanation. It makes this a story about one bad actor buying himself a news cycle. Fix the actor, fix the problem.

The fuller, more unsettling story is this.

Populist politics in the social media age aren’t about policy. It’s about the size of the play. The daily disruption. The headline that makes yesterday’s headline vanish.

The politics our democracies used to reward — serious people, arguing seriously, about the machinery of government — is now algorithmically invisible.

What replaces it is a permanent competition for the most radical, most disruptive, most attention-saturating move available. We’re sending armed troops into Minnesota to round up immigrants. We don’t like the election result so we’ll send a mob to overturn it. We’re getting rid of dictators we don’t like because we can show how uncompromisingly strong our military is, without bothering to explain (or even contemplate) what the actual purpose is.

In other words, there must always be a big show of conflict to keep our social media audience ‘engaged’. Each show must be bigger than the last, because the algorithm doesn’t reward repetition — it rewards escalation.

In that context, a military strike isn’t a foreign policy decision that happens to generate coverage.

It’s the ultimate content drop. Nothing competes with it. Nothing trends alongside it. It collapses every other story in the cycle instantaneously.

And that’s exactly how Trump announced it in the early hours of Saturday. Not from the Oval Office — not with the gravity that the assassination of a head of state demands — but on, er, Truth Social. A poorly lit video, shot in a baseball cap, flung out on his personal blog like he was hawking Trump Steaks again. He couldn’t even be bothered to put on a tie or put his ridiculous combover through the usual two cans of hair spray.

And here is the part that should make you genuinely cold.

Iran wasn’t attacked because it posed a serious threat. Paradoxically, it was struck partly because it didn’t.

A genuinely powerful adversary creates risk, negotiation, consequences — none of which are ‘good content’. But a weakened Iran — its proxies degraded, its economy strangled, its air defences already compromised — is a manageable target. One that produces spectacular imagery without an unmanageable response.

The cruel irony is that the only way Iran now damages anyone is in retaliation to these strikes. The attack didn’t neutralise a threat. It created one. But that retaliation? That’s just the second wave of ‘content’.

The Iranian people are the victims of a content strategy.

We built this

Our industry should recognise we are not bystanders to this.

The advertising industry funded the optimisation engines. We plugged brand budgets into platforms that monetise visibility, virality and emotional intensity. We professionalised engagement metrics. We made shareability valuable. We turned interruption into a premium format.

Of course we didn’t know we would reshape how military decisions get made. No media buyer sat down and decided to restructure the incentives of geopolitical power.

But we built the architecture that made spectacle the highest-performing currency in public life.

Trump didn’t invent this populist playbook but he’s the most fluent reader of this system.

Which is why the question that should keep you up at night isn’t what Trump does next. It’s what the next person learns from watching what works. Someone smarter. More disciplined. Willing to deploy the same logic with greater patience and fewer visible seams.

We used to think the unthinkable was unthinkable because rational actors would stop before it. But this system doesn’t produce rational actors. It produces optimised ones.

And optimised actors, given enough runway, don’t stop at the last responsible moment.

They stop when there’s nothing left to escalate to.

Welcome to Ad-verse Reactions

I’m Omar Oakes: a journalist and industry critic who’s spent the last decade picking apart how media, marketing, and content actually work — not how they pretend to.

I bring together an increasingly rare mix of network, voice, and track record: building publications, growing audiences, and challenging the stories this industry tells itself. I was global tech editor and media editor at Campaign magazine before becoming founding editor-in-chief of The Media Leader.

I have no plans to put this newsletter behind a paywall; I just love writing and sharing ideas.

As well freelance journalism I run a specialist clinic, oomph., where I help agencies, media owners, and senior marketers sharpen their positioning, craft industry-leading narratives, and turn complex issues into content that actually moves people. This Substack is where I share the same ideas, challenges, and provocations I bring to my clients.

• A weekly ‘Stories That Matter’ edition on Tuesdays in which I dissect the major story (or stories) of the week

• Other deep dives based on work I’m doing as a journalist and/or consultant.

• Stuff I’m reading.

Always happy to chat about ideas for this newish Substack and please say hello if you’re a fellow writer or someone who just wants to share notes about the world of media, advertising and marketing.

📩 Email me: omaroakesmedia@gmail.com

🔗 More about me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/omaroakes/

🖥️ More about oomph.: www.oomphoomph.com

“The entire panel appears to squirm in their seats while discussing this raunchy music video, which begins with a woman’s body symbolising a beach, and a female sex organ depicted as fresh water. Throughout the video, [Busta] Rhymes and fellow rapper Bia pair dance, vibe, and flirt with beachgoers.”

The feature in question, written during my time as editor of The Media Leader, was published when BARB, the UK TV audience measurement company, was in the early stages of trying to bring YouTube into its reporting system.

The challenge BARB faced then (and now) is this: even if you can measure and publish data about everything that is watched on YouTube, not all content published on YouTube is ‘fit for TV’.

Most content published every day on YouTube would, in fact, fail the ‘fit for TV’ standard.

That’s because it lacks at least one of the following:

• editorial oversight

• clear separation between editorial and advertising

• high enough production standards

• adequate brand safety or suitability

So BARB got a bunch of industry experts to watch a range of YouTube classics, including MrBeast and Chicken Shop Date, and rate how ‘fit for TV’ they were.

Why Busta Rhymes’ Beach Ball was my favourite of the bunch was because, despite being soft-porn trash, it is indeed ‘fit for TV’, while comparatively benign fare like ‘Every Book I’m Reading in June’ and a product review for Air Up water bottles would fail the test.

Broadcast is from Venus, YouTube is from Mars

In other words, what disqualifies most YouTube content from being TV is not that it is offensive or objectionable. It’s that YouTube’s publishing system is fundamentally at odds with UK broadcast television, which is:

• commissioned

• regulated

• scheduled

• advertiser-structured

• compliance-audited.

Meanwhile, YouTube is

• platform-led

• creator-driven

• algorithmically-surfaced

• commercially integrated at creator level (native ads)

• governed by platform policies, not industry regulation

And yet today, as was true three years ago, you can watch all of the above on a television set in your living room because the TV is now connected to the internet.

This is important to remember when reading BARB’s new What People Watched in 2025 report, which leads with an important finding that more than half (54%) of YouTube viewing is now on a TV set.

And the audience is broadening: YouTube viewing is “prevalent in all age cohorts” and BARB notes that TV-set reach among 55+ viewers has almost doubled since 2022.

So the caricature of YouTube as merely “kids on tablets” is obsolete. And yet the same data that proves YouTube’s maturity also proves its difference.

The screen has converged. Behaviour hasn’t.

If you stop at the headline figure — 54% of YouTube viewing on TV sets — you might conclude that YouTube has finally crossed the Rubicon. The big screen was historically the last redoubt of broadcast power, but now it’s algorithm territory.

But the detail tells a subtler story.

BARB’s navigation analysis shows that YouTube is the “fourth most-viewed navigation platform” on the TV set. When people switch on their TV sets, YouTube competes with Freeview, Sky, smart TV interfaces, Netflix and others.

However, looking at TV set viewing during different times of the day is particularly revealing.

YouTube’s share of being first destination at switch-on “ranges from 10 to 15% for clock hours outside peak, but that dips into single figures during the evening peak of 7–11pm.”

For UK broadcasters, 81% of viewing to their content still happens on the day of broadcast. That gravitational pull towards shared, synchronous viewing remains intact. YouTube’s viewing curve looks very different.

In other words: when Britain sits down for prime time, very few of us are curling up on the sofa to watch MrBeast and Sidemen.

Because ‘television’ is not just what comes out of a certain size of device. Because it carries expectations of content standards, viewers adapt their behaviour in line with those expectations.

UK broadcasters are required to separate advertising from editorial, to schedule programming within regulated time bands, and to maintain compliance oversight before and after transmission. That architecture produces predictability: in tone, in timing, and in commercial interruption. Viewers know what they are getting at 8pm on BBC One in a way they do not when opening YouTube.

Over time, that predictability shapes behaviour.

Which is why linear broadcasters still anchor shared evening viewing. Netflix and other streamers have built their own peak rhythms around episodic drops and event launches. Appointment viewing may have weakened, but it has not vanished.

YouTube, by contrast, is strongest mid-morning, late night, and outside classic peak. It thrives outside peak hours, in the margins of the broadcast day.

Same screen. Different species.

Cross-generational — but not evenly weighted

The other uncomfortable fact that BARB confirms is compositional.

The chart (below) shows YouTube’s TV-set viewing over-indexing by 72% among 4- to 15-year-olds versus their share of the UK population.

That does not mean children are the majority of total YouTube viewing on TV sets. But it does mean something structurally important: YouTube’s living-room footprint is disproportionately child-skewed.

That matters commercially. An audience that is structurally over-represented among under-16s is not economically the same as a broadcaster whose peak-time audiences skew 35+. Reach may look comparable in aggregate, but audience composition drives pricing, brand suitability and regulatory exposure.

At the same time, older audiences are coming in fast. The report highlights rapid growth in 55+ reach.

So, while YouTube is not a youth ghetto, nor is it a mirror of broadcast demographics.

For children, it is often long-form cartoons (Peppa Pig, Miss Rachel, CocoMelon), creator content, looping comfort videos. For adults, it is podcasts, clips, niche interests, news fragments, music, tutorials. For many households, it is a utility — something to occupy, accompany, or explore.

Television, by contrast, remains structurally organised around programmes, schedules, and shared events. Even on-demand, Netflix and Disney+ revolve around episodic series and film libraries. Their release cycles still create collective moments.

YouTube creates moments too — but algorithmically, not editorially.

Navigation gives the game away

Perhaps the most telling detail in the report is how YouTube is categorised.

It is not treated merely as a channel; it is described as a navigation platform. That’s a subtle but profound distinction.

Broadcast channels are destinations: you switch to BBC One or ITV1 because ‘something is on’. Streamers are increasingly destinations too: you open Netflix because you intend to watch a series.

But YouTube is often something else. You open it to see what’s there. To search. To browse. To let the recommendation engine decide.

That inversion changes everything — from ad placement to content rhythm to expectations of interruption.

If you assume equivalence — that a YouTube TV-set impression is functionally the same as a BBC One peak-time spot — you are ignoring the behavioural context in which it sits.

Even Netflix, with its algorithmic interface, operates within a commissioned, budgeted and compliance-cleared production model. Episodes are constructed around ad breaks or subscription tiers. YouTube’s commercial logic is decentralised at creator level. That distinction is not cosmetic.

Context shapes our attention. Our attention shapes our memory. And our memory shapes value.

Measurement makes that visible. Which is why, in case you haven’t noticed, I’m writing about measurement a lot as I chronicle how power and influence are changing in advertising and media.

When independent measurement places YouTube in the same frame as broadcasters and streamers, the difference becomes visible. And difference complicates equivalence claims like “YouTube is the new TV”.

Why independent measurement still matters

The debate about whether YouTube “is TV” has never been about screens alone. It’s about comparability.

Of course no medium stands still. The shift from analogue to digital has reshaped television in myriad ways, but these changes happened within a regulated and commissioned framework. Incidentally, BARB’s report also shows that streaming viewership is growing on TV sets for all providers… it would be interesting to know how much YouTube indirectly benefits as more consumers watch iPlayer and ITVX on their TVs (all video channels are curated on modern TVs as apps).

But YouTube’s architecture is different at the root.

If YouTube is competing for television budgets — and it is — then advertisers deserve to understand not just reach totals, but behavioural patterns. BARB’s panel-based system, imperfect but transparent, puts those variables in the same frame as broadcast and streamers.

What this report shows is not that YouTube viewing is huge. Even with all obfuscation around what an impression means, we know directionally that a lot of people are watching YouTube content, young and old.

But the data suggests something more nuanced: YouTube has moved into the living room but it has not become television.

Conflating the two may simplify a pitch deck. But it doesn’t simplify the buying decision.

Welcome to Ad-verse Reactions

I’m Omar Oakes: a journalist and industry critic who’s spent the last decade picking apart how media, marketing, and content actually work — not how they pretend to.

I bring together an increasingly rare mix of network, voice, and track record: building publications, growing audiences, and challenging the stories this industry tells itself. I was global tech editor and media editor at Campaign magazine before becoming founding editor-in-chief of The Media Leader.

I have no plans to put this newsletter behind a paywall; I just love writing and sharing ideas.

As well freelance journalism I run a specialist clinic, oomph., where I help agencies, media owners, and senior marketers sharpen their positioning, craft industry-leading narratives, and turn complex issues into content that actually moves people. This Substack is where I share the same ideas, challenges, and provocations I bring to my clients.

• A weekly ‘Stories That Matter’ edition on Tuesdays in which I dissect the major story (or stories) of the week

• Other deep dives based on work I’m doing as a journalist and/or consultant.

• Stuff I’m reading.

Always happy to chat about ideas for this newish Substack and please say hello if you’re a fellow writer or someone who just wants to share notes about the world of media, advertising and marketing.

📩 Email me: omaroakesmedia@gmail.com

🔗 More about me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/omaroakes/

🖥️ More about oomph.: www.oomphoomph.com