October 21st-October 27th // Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes

Stagwell acquires publisher monetization network Freestar - Freestar helps 1,000+ publishers sell their ad inventory, overseeing nearly 1B ad requests a day. In the deal, agency holding company Stagwell acquires Freestar’s publisher relationships and will use the inventory and audience data to train “The Media Machine”, its AI operating system. Owning Freestar shortens the media supply chain between Stagwell’s media buyers and publishers. It also boosts Stagwell’s principal-based media buying practice. Freestar will keep its name, leadership, and team. The deal caps a busy year for Stagwell, which also launched its curation platform, Stagwell Curate, and The Media Machine, while reorganizing its media business under the Stagwell Media banner.

Opinion: AI is eating the agency services business, so agencies are turning themselves into AI companies. An AI company is only as good as the proprietary data and inventory underneath it. So agencies are turning themselves into media and data businesses. That’s why Publicis bought LiveRamp. It’s why Stagwell bought Freestar.

Freestar’s 1,000+ publishers now sell through a monetization platform owned by one of their buyers. Rival holdcos will care about this. Expect WPP, Omnicom, Dentsu etc. to steer spend away from Freestar inventory, the same way they have been steering spend away from LiveRamp since Publicis bought it. Stagwell (like Publicis) is betting that those losses are offset by winning new accounts and making more money on principal-based media.

Meta ordered to pay $25B penalty in New Mexico Cambridge Analytica case - A Santa Fe jury found that Meta misled residents about how it collects and protects user data. The original $219.5B fine was reduced by the judge to $25B. The case dates back to the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, when news broke that the political consulting firm improperly accessed data from 87M Facebook users for political ad targeting. The judge wrote that Facebook never did the full investigation it promised afterward, partly because executives pushed to keep costs down. Meta settled related cases with other states in August, but New Mexico was not part of that deal. This is Meta’s second big hit in the state this year, after it was ordered to pay $942M in a child safety case. Meta plans to appeal.

Opinion: This is a very hefty fine, even for Meta. Meta’s state legal bill this year could reach $44B; $25B in this Cambridge Analytica case, up to $18B from August’s teen social media addiction settlement, and $942M from the New Mexico child safety ruling. That’s roughly two-thirds of a quarter’s ad revenue! But investors didn’t seem to care all that much (they cared more about growing AI expenditure). Data privacy infringement has become the cost of doing business for Meta and other big tech companies.

Pinterest opens its inventory to programmatic buyers, with Magnite as its main pipe🔒 - Brands can now buy Pinterest’s display and video ads through Amazon Ads DVA+, Google DV360, DeepIntent, and Yahoo DSP. The inventory will only be available through private deals. Magnite is Pinterest's preferred SSP partner, while Google Ad Manager handles Latin America and Asia Pacific. Pinterest’s ads are also being made available through Magnite Orchestration, which lets AI agents find and buy ad inventory. The Trade Desk is conspicuously missing from the DSP launch partner list.

Opinion: Pinterest is the latest walled garden to lower its walls, following Uber and Walmart. Only a handful of platforms have enough scale to force buyers to buy from them directly. Everyone else, including Pinterest, get in the programmatic line!

FreeWheel, Universal Ads headed to NBCU - NBCUniversal will take video ad tech company FreeWheel and self-serve platform Universal Ads when it splits from Comcast next year. Since many FreeWheel clients (publishers) compete with NBCU, FreeWheel says it will stay independent, with its current firewalls remaining in place to keep publisher clients’ data private. Universal Ads will stay independent too. NBCUniversal Advertising, Sky Media, and Comcast Advertising will continue to be FreeWheel clients, managed in the same way as they are today. Comcast Advertising president James Rooke will move to NBCU to oversee both businesses. Tipsheet first reported the news last week, and FreeWheel confirmed it on Monday.

Opinion: A bit surprising. Being tethered to NBCU has always been an optics issue for FreeWheel, since many of its publisher clients compete directly with NBCU for ad dollars. Perhaps the idea is that NBCU has owned and operated inventory that FreeWheel and Universal Ads can help monetize, so it makes sense to keep them together, instead of with Comcast, which mostly just has data. 

Retail media platform Kevel raises $52M with M&A on the brain - Kevel builds the tech retailers use to run ads on their own websites and apps. Since brands don’t want to learn a separate ad platform for every retailer, Kevel is making it easier to buy across multiple retailers at once. Part of the new funding will go toward buying companies that make tools retailers use alongside Kevel. CEO James Avery expects consolidation because too many retail media vendors sell to the same customers. Kevel has now raised just over $100M and expects to turn a profit by the end of the year.

Opinion: We agree: retail media is ripe for consolidation. Not only do too many retail media vendors sell to the same customers (retail media networks), too many retail media networks sell to the same customers (advertisers). The entire market must be streamlined and simplified in order to realize the promise of retail media. The platforms that make it easiest for the retailers to monetize their inventory and data, and thus make it easiest for marketers to buy retail media, stand to benefit. Kevel, Criteo, Pacvue, Koddi, and others are vying to become this one-stop retail media shop.

Thanks for reading!