Platforms print, agencies scramble, and the streaming playbook gets rewritten

Hey there 👋

As the ad world keeps reshaping itself, one pattern has become hard to ignore:
power is consolidating at the infrastructure layer.

Those who own the pipes (cloud, data, ad exchanges) are thriving.
Those who build on top of them are scrambling to adapt.

Here’s this week’s pulse across platforms, agencies, and audiences 👇

📈 Big Tech keeps printing money

Alphabet hit its first-ever $100B quarterly revenue (driven by ads and AI infrastructure).
Amazon also beat expectations, with AWS up 20% YoY and ad revenue surging +24%.

While agencies and service providers rethink their models, the companies that actually own the cloud platforms, ad stacks, and data rails are locking in their dominance.

💬 If you’re wondering where the real power lies, follow the infrastructure.
🔗 Sherwood · Google → 
🔗 Sherwood · Amazon →

📉 WPP’s fall from grace and its AI gamble

Profits are plunging, clients are fleeing, and WPP’s new CEO has called recent results “unacceptable.”

Their response? Open Pro, a self-service AI platform for SMBs — an attempt to modernize the traditional agency model.
The problem? Google launched Pomelli and Canva rolled out Grow the same week, both offering low-cost “agency-in-a-box” solutions with massive reach and zero legacy overhead.

💬 Software-as-a-service becomes service-as-software.
🔗 The Guardian →
🔗 Digiday→

⚖️ Google’s ad-tech empire faces new pressure

The U.S. Department of Justice wants sweeping remedies to Google’s ad-tech dominance, including open-sourcing its auction logic and even splitting off parts of its ad exchange business.
Google’s counterproposal? “Behavioral fixes”, of course.

💬 When infrastructure power becomes too concentrated, regulation becomes inevitable, even if it rarely arrives on time.
🔗 AdExchange →

📺️ The FAST lane: streaming’s back-to-the-future moment

The future of streaming might look a lot like… traditional TV.
FAST (Free Ad-Supported TV) continues to grow, particularly in Europe and Brazil, as viewers swap subscriptions for ad-supported experiences.

💬 Everything old is new again just with cooler acronyms.
🔗 Adotat →

The next big advantage in advertising might not be creativity or reach, but control of the rails everything runs on.

That’s the pulse for this week.
If you made it this far, congrats!

— Alessia Cappello
International Markets & MarCom | adjinn
(Curated from adjinn’s internal “Friday Pulse” newsletter, which provides me my weekly excuse to read industry news before anyone else does.)