Below is a roundup of last week’s notable industry news, with summaries and our opinions. Lightning round format this week, starting with brain drain at The Trade Desk…

The Trade Desk CRO Anders Mortensen out after 7 months🔒 - COO Vivek Kundra will absorb Mortensen's responsibilities in an expanded role. Mortensen joined The Trade Desk from Google last October, replacing 14-year TTD veteran Jed Dederick. Mortensen's departure adds to a long list of TTD executive departures over the past eight months, including the chief strategy officer, CMO, multiple CFOs, and several board members. Mortensen's focus was on “ensuring [the company’s] global commercial strategy harnesses the full power of Kokai, Koa AI, and industry innovations such as Unified ID 2.0 and OpenPath," but the business struggled during his tenure. The Trade Desk's stock is down 72% year over year, Q1 revenue growth hit its lowest rate since the beginning of the pandemic, and a falling out with Publicis has added to the pressure.

Opinion: In the last earnings report, The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green said: “We are convinced that the evolution and changes being made in the open internet today will make it soon become a place where, consistently, an advertiser’s first dollar is spent. Once the open internet consistently gets the first dollar, most of the walled gardens will open up their inventory and join the open internet. I view this as inevitable.” This quote is mind-boggling. When the growth strategy is predicated on something happening that is completely out of the company’s control, and something that so very obviously is not happening in the real world that we all live in (in fact, the very opposite is happening), guess what? The company’s share price will fall and people will leave.

Accenture Song will buy Whalar, gaining global scale in influencer marketing🔒 - Whalar works with brands like Nike and Ikea to build out creator campaigns, overseeing about $600M in campaigns annually. Accenture Song sees an opportunity to layer in its data, commerce, and AI capabilities to help clients build deeper, ongoing relationships with creators, rather than treating influencer work as a series of one-off activations. Publicis, WPP, and Omnicom have each made significant moves in the creator space over the past few years, and this deal gives Accenture Song comparable global reach. Creator-related ad spend is projected to approach $44B next year, and total revenue from the creator economy could reach $377B by 2030.

Opinion: The big consultancies are increasingly copycatting the agency holding company playbook. But, as the industry moves into the AI era, the consultancies have a distinct advantage versus holding companies: they’re positioned to help their customers transform their business while holding companies are positioned merely to represent their customers as agents (hence the term “agency”). AI doesn’t need human agents, it replaces them. AI does need humans to help companies transform their business for the AI era. Watch out for the consultancies!

Roblox opens up advertising to kids under 13 - Youth-focused ad marketplace SuperAwesome will serve as Roblox's exclusive partner for this audience. All buys will be direct deals, with contextual targeting only and no programmatic. No behavioral data will be collected, and rewarded video is not part of the offering. Roughly a third of Roblox's age-verified user base falls into this age group. The news arrives at a sensitive moment: Roblox is dealing with a large consolidated federal lawsuit over child safety concerns. Roblox's response is putting up guardrails that are stricter than what kids encounter in most other advertising environments.

Opinion: If Roblox can build a compliant, contextual-only child ad product, it gives every other platform a viable template. Gaming platforms, edtech companies, kids' streaming services—they've all been sitting on monetizable under-13 audiences with no clear path forward. SuperAwesome's exclusive partnership is also notable; they could become the infrastructure layer for compliant child advertising at scale.

Apple shows off Siri’s AI update while blasting Android And Chrome In new iPhone ad campaign - At its Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, Apple unveiled Siri AI, a substantially upgraded version of its long-stagnant assistant that can pull context from a user's personal data, browse the web on behalf of users, and perform work across apps. The update relies on Google's Gemini model under a multi-year partnership announced earlier this year. Analyst reaction was cautious, with some describing it as a box-checking exercise rather than a breakthrough. Things could get a little awkward with Google, since Apple also launched a new ad campaign for Safari that takes direct shots at Chrome and Android, depicting data trackers as chrome-suited figures clinging to anyone not using an Apple device. 

Opinion: Oh, Apple, you’re adorable. Nothing says 'We've figured out AI' quite like licensing it from the company you're publicly mocking for violating user privacy.

Independent ad tech is reframing itself around cloud hardware - Ad tech and cloud have been on the path to convergence for some time, but now, owning server infrastructure rather than leasing it from public cloud providers has become a new differentiator for SSPs looking to stand out in a crowded market. The case is straightforward: Ad tech processes enormous volumes of data that needs to be deployed at high speeds, making public cloud costs a real concern. The use of AI in ad tech exacerbates this. Infrastructure control can give AI models a major performance edge. PubMatic and Index Exchange have both launched products in this space, enabling DSPs to run targeting and curation directly within the SSP's own environment. Magnite's CTO pushed back a bit on the hype, though, noting that “on-prem” has its limits and that renting flexible capacity still makes more sense for high-volume moments like live sports.

Opinion: Commoditized auction infrastructure and inventory access, along with margin pressure from DSPs and walled gardens, have been squeezing independent SSPs for years. Owning the compute layer moves the battle from data and inventory access to infrastructure. Could be a valuable frontier for SSPs. That said, the walled gardens will have an advantage here as well. Because the walled gardens (Google, Amazon, Microsoft) own cloud infrastructure!

DoorDash levels up its commerce media business with LiveRamp and new ad formats - DoorDash Ads announced a wave of upgrades designed to give advertisers more precise targeting, better measurement, and higher-impact ad placements. A new partnership with LiveRamp enables clean room audience matching, with one early test finding that 81% of customers engaging with a national restaurant chain on DoorDash were exclusive to the platform. DoorDash is also rolling out Spotlight, a full-screen display and video format on the app homepage that saw 2x higher click-through rates versus banner ads in early testing. DoorDash crossed an annualized ad revenue run rate of $1B in 2024 and now serves over 400K advertisers across DoorDash, Wolt, and Deliveroo. 

Opinion: LiveRamp was acquired by Publicis Groupe last month for $2.2B. Now every time one of these partnerships is announced, all the tough questions have to be asked. Will Publicis use DoorDash audience data to enhance its own data solutions and ID graph? Will it use DoorDash spend data by brand to help its agency business? Will it hold DoorDash hostage as a media vendor? And all the other tough questions that come along with an agency holding company owning data pipes.

Massachusetts House passes sweeping privacy bill - The measure would require companies to get explicit consent before handling sensitive data, ban the sale of precise location information, and give consumers the right to sue over violations. Ad trade groups are not into it.

Scaling Viewer‑First Premium Advertising on Disney+ - Disney's new Ad Selector lets viewers pick which ad creative they want to watch. Pause+ Trivia ads serve up brand-themed trivia questions when content is paused, delivering brand recall at 10 times industry benchmarks in beta testing.

Outgoing Prebid president Mike Racic on his departure and the org's next act - Racic, director of product Christian Janelli, and board chairman Garrett McGrath are all stepping down. Prebid's next big priority is agentic advertising protocols.

Meta's CTV play: What it really means for advertisers - Brainlabs programmatic MD Alex Glover argues that Meta is building an Audience Network model for streaming. Meta has been quietly engaging SSPs and ad servers to plug its demand and targeting into third-party streaming inventory. 

Instagram opens up post-view Reels ads to all advertisers - The placement drops a skippable video ad after an organic Reel ends, tapping into a format where users already spend 50% of their Instagram time.

OpenAI files for IPO, the latest in a stream of possible AI mega-sales - OpenAI had FOMO after Anthropic and SpaceX filed for IPOs recently. The company hasn't committed to a timeline yet, but the filing keeps its options open. A May fundraising round put its value at nearly $1T. But given the company’s financial struggles, who knows if an IPO will actually happen this year.

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