Daily News Roundup

Google’s search antitrust trial ends with a whimper; the pitfalls of agency-owned SSPs; Perplexity axes its ads business; and brands are still building big-ticket metaverse experiences.

Google’s SSP tries to cut out its DSP ahead of a possible ad tech breakup; Perplexity’s head of ads skips town; and Amazon’s search ad pause flooded the market with big spenders.

Dentsu might sell its overseas business; a Prebid update worries the buy side; and Washington State imposes a new ad tax.

TTD turns its back on SSPs; scientists are finding a home on Bluesky; and a hacker used Anthropic’s Claude to plan a cybercriminal operation.

Amazon gets a taste of its own AI medicine; LinkedIn continues its pivot to video; and YouTube and Fox are on a fight.

Sillicon valley bigwigs are getting into SuperPACS; turns out, shaming AI companies sorta works; and UK publishers are going “consent or pay.”

Meta’s AI vibes have been very different lately; times are tough for The Trade Desk; and fingerprinting has a bad reputation.

Walmart’s CTV and DSP business shine in a meh Q2; plummeting search traffic is blowing up cost-per-click pricing; and TikTok annoys brands with its black box optimization.

Former Meta employee files a complaint regarding the company’s illegal business practices; virtual AI salespeople are hosting 24/7 livestreams; and Google SPN advertisers will now receive a list of URLs where their ads appeared.

Web publishers are seeing revenue and traffic evaporate thanks to AI searches; LG Ads is finally preparing to go public; and women’s dating safety app Tea has some shady marketing practices.

Walmart has some new rules for third-party sellers; WPP wins Mastercard; and marketers should get into VTubers.

Perplexity didn’t just try to buy Chrome; product placement in TV and film is on the rise; and the FCC is on one again.

Walmart Connect’s deal with The Trade Desk isn’t so exclusive anymore; Amazon is competing with everyone except publishers; and Meta’s chatbots don’t exactly inspire confidence in the company’s ability to deliver effective AI tools.

Some accuse The Trade Desk of becoming a walled garden; short form video clips are the only way to go viral; and a new startup touts “micro-dramas.”

Data brokers de-index their opt-outs; Meta is still the go-to for influencer ads; and Perplexity offers to buy Chrome.

Sometimes, price can itself be promotional marketing; Reddit is no longer playing nice; and AI scrapers are reshaping the web in another way.

Creative agencies are trying to adapt to AI’s sudden invasion of their turf; it’s a sunny day for TikTok travel influencers; and publishers have more than just Google’s AI overviews to worry about.

The pivot to AI has led to a gap in many SaaS and ad tech companies’ payment models; AppLovin bounces back in Q2; and Grok might be your newest media planner.

The New York Times’ growth rate blows other large news companies out of the water; Shopify’s shares leapt by 20% after an upbeat Q2 earnings report; and Google’s AI Overviews may or may not be causing web traffic to plummet, depending who you ask.

RE/MAX gets into the retail media game; Meta loses a class-action lawsuit over how it handled period-tracking data; and the IAB Tech Lab unveils its ad delivery playbook for live events.

Google’s former SSP practices are the legal gift that keeps giving; Perplexity has been disregarding robots.txt files; and ads prop up a large chunk of the US economy.

Coinbase is getting into ads; Etsy can’t rely on search ads for very long; and Zuckerberg wants to buy AI companies.

Dotdash Meredith is People now; brands love influencers again; and Apple’s gonna finally help you with all those spam calls.

X will begin scoring ads according to Elon Musk’s aesthetic preferences; what those Sydney Sweeney jeans ads say about how brands capture attention online; and a Google exploit lets sites be deleted from search results.

SaaS companies are abandoning interoperability in search of more revenue; Spotify’s ad business is growing slower than expected; and sports is an upfronts winner for Disney and NBCU.

Google’s AI search tools are creating a paradox; Amazon pulled its Google ad budgets; and now’s a great time for indie commerce ad tech startups.

ChatGPT will google that for you; the Canadian TikTok shutdown gets real; and Elon’s crusage against media ratings organizations goes on.

Reddit is surging with advertiser demand; not everyone is Substack material; and Trump released his AI Action Plan.

Amazon acquires AI-equipped wearable manufacturer Bee; the UK’s CMA shares competition guidelines for Google and Apple; and AI models may be learning from each other in unexpected, potentially harmful, ways.

Netflix cracks Nielsen’s top 3 channels, but YouTube is still tops; CTV is maturing as a marketing channel, but it comes with zits; and Google rolls out another core update for search.