The Internet in "Hard Mode"

Hey there 👋

The digital ecosystem is doing that thing again where it reorganizes itself without telling anyone. Agencies now want to be sales networks, platforms are printing money from low-quality ads, and AI continues unilaterally editing the web’s traffic flows.

Here’s what matters this week. 👇

🛍️ Agencies → “Sales Companies”: Omnicom + IPG

Omnicom has officially closed its $13.25B acquisition of IPG, creating a $26B revenue giant that is… deliberately not calling itself a holding company any more. Instead:
“the world’s leading marketing and sales company built for intelligent growth.”
(The name feels like a soft rebranding of what platforms already do…)

What this signals:

• The Big Three are shifting from “agency groups” → media merchants.

• They buy inventory, negotiate exclusivity, and resell at scale.

• “Outcomes-based contracts” = less visibility into what was actually bought.

In short: the agency model is turning into a distribution model.
And transparency is the first casualty.
🔗 DIGIDAY →

💰 Meta earns more from UK scam ads than publishers earn from all news ads

A new analysis from the Spanish publisher association AMI paints a brutal picture:
In the UK, Meta would have generated more revenue from fraudulent/scam ads than the entire online news industry earns from legitimate advertising.

Let that sink in.

Publishers invest millions in safety, compliance, and verification frameworks, meanwhile, platforms can profit at hyperscale from the very inventory that undermines the ecosystem.

This is one of the clearest examples yet of the misaligned incentives distorting the economics of digital media.
🔗 AMI.info→

🤖 AI search answers = disappearing publisher traffic

Search Engine Land reports what every newsroom already feels:
AI overviews don’t send users to publishers, they absorb the query, answer directly, and close the loop.

The downstream effect:

• Fewer pageviews

• Fewer ad impressions

• Shrinking monetization surface

• Reinforcement of a platform-centric information economy

If Google’s AI answers the question, there’s no page left to monetize.
A quiet redistribution of traffic is happening in the background, and publishers are not invited to the strategy meeting.
🔗 Search Engine Land → 

🛠️ When good marketing tools go bad

Two very different AI roadmaps dropped this week:
A) IAB · ARTF Framework
A technical upgrade focused on making today’s programmatic auctions faster and more efficient for AI agents.
Think: plumbing optimization, not conceptual reinvention.

B) Anne Coghlan (Scope3)
A strategic reframing: AI agents should behave like “smart interns.”
You give them the repetitive work; humans still supervise the final decisions.
Goal: simplify supply paths and stop brands from buying junk inventory that only looks efficient on dashboards.

Two visions:
Infrastructure vs. Intelligence.
Both will define how “agentic advertising” actually works in practice.
🔗 MarTech.org → · 🔗 Adotat →

That’s the pulse for this week. See you next week, with another pulse check on the internet’s increasingly chaotic operating system.

— 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.)