The Media Stack

Reddit, Inc. built communities. AI companies needed them. Reddit charged accordingly. Publishers built journalism. AI companies took it. That's not an oversimplification, it's increasingly what the numbers show. WARC's latest forecast puts Reddit's ad revenue doubling to $4.1bn by 2027, with the platform's role in LLM training data cited as a direct growth driver. Meanwhile publishers are navigating a potential $94bn hole in the global ad market from the Gulf crisis, and still haven't resolved the AI licensing question. New piece on The Media Stack: link in the comments 👇

A Los Angeles jury just found Meta and Google liable for defective product design. Not for harmful content. For how their platforms were built. Infinite scroll. Algorithmic recommendation engines. Notification systems calibrated to keep users returning regardless of whether that was good for them. The jury concluded these aren't features. They're defects. The damages figure — $6 million — is trivial for companies worth trillions. The legal theory is not. There are 2,000 pending lawsuits behind this verdict. A federal case follows in June. Another LA trial in July. Legal commentators are reaching for the Big Tobacco comparison. Publishers should be paying close attention. The design choices at the centre of this case didn't originate at Meta. They spread across the entire industry. Infinite scroll arrived on publisher sites. Push notifications proliferated. Recommendation carousels appeared below articles optimised for clicks rather than editorial relevance. If those choices constitute a defective product when Meta implements them, what are they when publishers implement them? My analysis in The Media Stack article in the comments below 👇

An AI tool reconstructed the face of a masked ICE agent from bystander footage. Someone ran the generated image through a reverse image search. It returned a name: Steve Grove — The Minnesota Star Tribune's own publisher. Within hours, misinformation had linked him to the shooting of Renée Good. It's one of the more remarkable details from a remarkable few months in Minnesota. Grove spoke at a WAN-IFRA, the World Association of News Publishers webinar this week about how the Star Tribune covered the ICE raids, the verification challenges, the safety training, the commercial response, and what other local publishers should take from it. Full piece on The Media Stack

There's an unexpected winner from the FIFA World Cup 2026™ - Canada, Mexico and the United States schedule — and it's not who you'd expect. With fewer than half of matches airing during daytime hours in Western Europe, live broadcast advertising opportunities will be limited for European brands. Bad news for rights holders. Potentially good news for everyone else. Late-night kick-offs mean the games run well past 9pm in the UK — which matters for brands in restricted categories. High fat, sugar and salt products are subject to pre-watershed advertising restrictions. A World Cup running deep into the night effectively removes that constraint for weeks. For quick-service food delivery brands in particular, this is a commercial opening that wouldn't exist in a European or Middle Eastern tournament. New WARC research breaks down where the real 2026 opportunities sit, and where the conventional assumptions don't hold up.

The agency world is splitting into two camps right now. Those building agentic platforms — and those watching. Tom Smith, CEO of GWI, thinks 2026 is the year that divide becomes impossible to ignore. The mega-mergers are partly about funding the infrastructure. Smaller boutiques may find AI gives them reach their size never would have. The mid-tier groups are the ones under most pressure. I interviewed Smith about Agent Spark, GWI's new insights agent now live inside ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot — and what going agentic first actually means when you're trying to reorientate a ten-year-old SaaS business around it. There's also a counterintuitive point in there about AI and workloads that's worth reading if you think automation means doing less. Full piece on The Media Stack https://lnkd.in/efDPTiSw

78% of brands say they deliver seamless customer experiences. 82% of consumers say a brand has disappointed them. Mark Ritson, speaking at SAP's Engage event last week, put it bluntly: the data on that gap hasn't improved in a decade. The Media Stack covers the research findings alongside an interview with SAP Engagement Cloud CEO Joanna Milliken on why fixing it is an enterprise problem, not a marketing one. Link in comments. #CustomerExperience #MarketingStrategy #EngagementDivide #B2BMarketing

Bauer Media Group has built a 47-step content briefing tool. It doesn't write articles. It writes the brief the editor uses to write one. That distinction is doing a lot of work. The tool extracts data, pulls competitor HTML, analyses ranking positions and maps internal link structures. Two versions: one for new articles, one triggered by a ranking drop. Angling Times — without a dedicated SEO resource — is using it to sharpen buying guides. Stuart Forrest, Bauer's Head of Audience Development, is clear about what it's for: "It's shortcutting the research process, not replacing the expertise." His wider piece in The Media Stack covers Google Discover traffic down 50% year-on-year at some publishers, how Bauer is blocking AI crawlers at CDN level, and why he's treating share-of-voice data as an index rather than a count. Link in comments.

8% of agency staff are over 51. The figure is from the IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) Census. The general working population at this age group is 33%. I personally left the industry at this age as well so can relate to this. Katrina Urban at NABS is direct about what she hears from people in that bracket: they feel like they've been put on the scrap heap. Decades of experience. Can't get callbacks. Finding new roles takes far longer. Many leave the industry altogether. It's sometimes framed as a cost issue. But as Urban puts it — coaching people back in is not the same as stopping them being pushed out. New interview on The Media Stack #advertising #ageism #mediaindustry #NABS #diversity

Two of the top three most awarded campaigns in the world last year were B2B. Second place in the WARC Creative 100: Spotify's Spreadbeats — advertising performance data repackaged as a functional spreadsheet to convince media planners of Spotify's video ROI. Third: Michelob ULTRA's F1 tie-up. Consumer, yes — but a sponsorship play as much as a brand campaign. WARC has called B2B creativity a headline theme for 2026. The rankings back it up. Ogilvy leads the networks for the sixth consecutive year. WPP tops the holding companies for the fourth. Serviceplan Group takes both independent rankings. And The HEINEKEN Company and Unilever both reach number one in their categories for the first time. Full breakdown on The Media Stack. Link in the comments below. #B2Bmarketing #advertising #WARC #marketingeffectiveness #CannesLions

The IAB Tech Lab has released a framework designed to force AI companies to agree commercial terms with publishers before crawling their content. It's called CoMP — Content Monetisation Protocols. Public comment period closes April 2. The logic is simple. Chip manufacturers get paid. Energy companies get paid. Publishers, whose content trains the models and populates the answers, largely don't. CoMP isn't an access control system. Think of it less as a lock and more as a till. You still need the lock. But without a till, anyone who does want to pay has nowhere to go. Whether AI companies actually adopt it is the question nobody can answer yet. OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic haven't publicly committed. There's a familiar pattern: industry bodies build frameworks, platforms wait for regulatory pressure, then move. That's not necessarily cynicism. OpenRTB took time to reach critical mass. The IAB Tech Lab has form in building infrastructure that eventually becomes the default. But eventually is cold comfort for publishers losing referral traffic now. The comment period is open. Publishers who shaped OpenRTB had more influence over how programmatic developed than those who simply showed up to implement whatever the spec said. Worth reading if you work in publishing tech or ad tech. Link in the comments below.