Below is a roundup of last week’s notable industry news, with summaries and our opinions. Q4 earnings are HERE! Some are bad and some are good…

Meta (👍): Q4 revenue was up 24% to $59.89B, beating estimates; 2025 revenue was up 22% to $200.97B. Meta will spend up to $135B on AI in 2026. Investors shrugged. Q1 guidance topped estimates, pushing shares 10% higher in after-hours trading. 

Microsoft (👎): Quarterly revenue was up 16.7% to $81.3B, beating estimates. Microsoft Cloud revenue was up 26% to $51.5B, and Azure revenue was up 39%. Microsoft spent $37.5B on AI. Investors worry about AI spending, its OpenAI investment, and light margin guidance. Shares fell 10%, wiping out $357B in market value!

Apple (👍): Revenue was up 16% to $143.8B, beating estimates. iPhone revenue was up 23% to $85.27B, driven by iPhone 17 demand. Services revenue, which includes advertising, was up 14% to $30.01B. Current quarter guidance topped estimates. Shares rose more than 1% in extended trading.

Comcast (👎): Revenue was up 1.2% to $32.31B, missing estimates. Broadband and cable are hurting, so Comcast is leaning into its growing mobile business. Peacock added 3M paid subscribers to 44M, but lost $552M. NBA rights helped boost ad revenue by 1.5%. Shares fell 4%.

Disney (👎): Revenue was up 5% to $25.98B, beating estimates. Experiences (theme parks, resorts) crossed $10B in quarterly revenue for the first time. Streaming revenue was up 11% to $5.35B. ESPN ad revenue grew on higher rates, but costly sports rights hurt operating income. Disney named a new CEO. Current quarter guidance was modest. Shares fell 7%.

Publicis (👎): Quarterly organic revenue was up 5.9%, beating expectations. Full-year 2025 organic growth was 5.6%, driven by AI and data services. The agency holding company predicts 4-5% organic growth for 2026, the same target it had set for 2025 but kept raising. Investors wanted more. Shares fell 8%, the biggest 1-day percentage drop since 2020.

Opinion: As in past earnings seasons, the story you tell about tomorrow matters more than the numbers you post today. Everyone except Comcast beat revenue estimates, but only Meta and Apple saw share prices rise. The difference? Strong forward-looking guidance, driven by AI.

AI spending scrutiny is real. Meta's $135B AI spend for 2026 got a pass because investors can connect it directly to revenue growth. But Microsoft's $37.5B AI spend wiped out $357B in market cap because of their increasingly complicated partnership with OpenAI; a company that is facing tons of pressure from all angles.

We’ll watch this dynamic closely in the upcoming Alphabet and Amazon earnings. Alphabet needs to prove that AI search monetization can outgrow any declines in their high-margin, traditional search business. Amazon needs to show AWS can keep its lead as customers increasingly pick cloud providers based on AI capabilities.

Publicis’ earnings tell us something important about 2026, too. They delivered great 2025 results, crushed every other agency holdco, but got hammered for not raising their 2026 outlook. In the AI era, investors want to see faster growth, even from traditional services businesses. 

AI giveth, but more so, AI taketh. Let’s see how the rest of Q4 earnings play out…

Amazon opens its ad stack to AI agents with MCP rollout🔒- Amazon wants to make it easier for advertisers to connect their AI agents to its ad platform through a single standardized integration. At IAB's Annual Leadership Meeting this week, Amazon revealed an open beta of its “Amazon Ads Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server”, which will act as a translator between AI agents and the Amazon Ads APIs. This layer will help agents handle tasks like campaign setup, budget adjustments, and report generation through simple conversational prompts. The move solves a key problem Amazon found in internal testing: Agents often struggled with "reasoning overload,” sometimes writing their own code instead of using existing APIs. By providing agents with explicit instructions for common workflows, the Amazon Ads MCP allows them to focus on strategic decisions rather than getting tripped up on technical basics. 

Yahoo DSP opened its ad stack to agents in similar fashion a few weeks ago.

How long before DSP user interfaces don’t matter anymore?

IAB introduces new measurement initiative and adds high-profile board members - Also at IAB ALM this week, the trade group unveiled Project Eidos, a new program uniting its various measurement initiatives under one banner. Named after the Greek word meaning "to see," Project Eidos aims to centralize existing programs like the retail media standardization initiative and will begin standardizing media-mix modeling terms and data inputs in late 2026. General Motors CMO Shenan Reed joined the IAB Tech Lab's board of directors, the first brand marketer to participate. And the IAB's board of directors also appointed Alison Levin, NBCU's president of advertising and partnerships, as its new chair after serving as its vice chair. The board's new vice chair will be Alan Moss, Amazon Ads' VP of global advertising sales.

After a bumpy start, brands adjust to US-controlled TikTok🔒- TikTok's new US ownership faced immediate challenges out-of-the-gate that impacted advertisers and users. A data center power outage disrupted ad campaigns and prevented users from uploading videos, causing some users to accuse the platform of censorship. Some buyers reported missing ads, broken campaign features, and campaigns ending prematurely. TikTok has promised refunds🔒for misspent ad dollars and the ad platform has mostly returned to normal service, but advertisers are keeping a close eye on engagement metrics, such as when users are served ads and if they take action, which have been off compared to old TikTok levels. The US owners are retraining TikTok's algorithm based on US data, so everyone is waiting to see how those changes will play out. The platform updated its privacy policy to collect more types of user data, which contributed to a backlash and spike in US users deleting the app.

Snowflake strikes another $200M AI deal, this time with OpenAI - The deal will give Snowflake's 12,600 customers direct access to OpenAI models across AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. The partners will also co-develop and deploy new models for joint enterprise customers. The move comes just two months after Snowflake signed an identical $200M deal with Anthropic. Workflow automation platform ServiceNow inked similar multi-year deals with both OpenAI and Anthropic in January. The trend reflects how tech companies are approaching AI productization: Rather than betting on a single model provider, companies want to offer their customers different models for different tasks in order to diversify their AI strategy.

Google quietly tapped a veteran ad exec to revamp its mid-market agency machine🔒- Google promoted vet Jitendra Kumar to oversee relationships with 200+ mid-market agencies as it shifts from selling individual ad products to comprehensive Google service packages, including AI tools.

Prebid takes over AdCP’s code For creating sell-side AI agents - The move aims to prevent the interoperability problems that could arise if each publisher built proprietary AI agents from scratch, and could help make agentic ad monetization more universal.

Google to pay $68M over allegations its voice assistant eavesdropped on users - Turns out your Google Home was listening to what you were saying, recording it, and using it to serve you ads.

Disney names parks boss Josh D’Amaro as its next CEO to succeed Bob Iger - Effective March 18th, it's the second Bob Iger succession attempt in six years after Bob Chapek's failed tenure prompted Iger's return in 2022.

Will Publicis Groupe keep exploring M&A or does it need to focus on what it’s already got?🔒 Industry speculation is brewing about whether Publicis will pursue acquisitions like LiveRamp or sports assets to counter Omnicom's new scale advantage.

Skyrocketing Super Bowl ad rates hit $10M for 30 seconds - There are about 80 Super Bowl ad slots, and the $10M price tag is up 43% from four years ago. This year's commercials include the first mainly AI-generated ad, for better or worse, and the Backstreet Boys announce they’re ‘so back’🔒for T-Mobile’s Super Bowl ad.

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