August 12th-August 18th // Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes
Below is a roundup of last week’s notable industry news, with summaries and our opinions. WPP just got caught red-handed. Does it matter?
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Top Story 👁
New court filing says Sony caught WPP pocketing $350M in hidden rebates🔒
Sources: Adweek / Digiday
August 14th-17th, 2026
Summary: Sony investigated WPP's media rebate practices in China and found that WPP kept $350M in 2024 media rebates, passing only $110M back to clients, according to a new court filing. WPP allegedly negotiated rebates directly with vendors before routing the money through shell brokers and converting it into profit. Sony is said to have confronted WPP with its findings.
The filing is part of a whistleblower suit brought forth by former WPP exec Richard Foster, who says he was fired in July 2025 after flagging the rebate scheme internally. Foster alleges WPP generated $3B-$4B in rebates over five years and kept $1.5B-$2B undisclosed. He's seeking $100M in damages.
That isn’t WPP’s only legal headache. WPP also faces a securities class action🔒 filed by investors who bought WPP shares between March 2024 and October 2025 alleging that WPP made misleading statements about the progress of its transformation. As part of that case, 13 former WPP execs gave testimony describing WPP's stalled transformation, a data platform (Choreograph) they said was years behind Publicis's Epsilon, and a rocky rollout of WPP Open, its AI platform. Insiders tied these failures directly to lost accounts, including Coca-Cola, Mars, PayPal, TJX, Abbott, and Paramount.
Opinion: It’s a tale as old as time: agencies make extra margin wherever they possibly can. Remember the 2016 ANA transparency report? They got caught and they continued doing it anyway. WPP just got caught doing it again.
The $350M number is eye-popping, but the tactic itself is old news. Holdcos negotiate scale discounts in the form of rebates with media vendors that clients never see, then keep some of the rebates as margin. What's new is the paper trail: shell brokers, a Sony-initiated investigation, and a fired exec willing to put five years of numbers in a court filing. And, hoo boy, the paper trail is nasty work.
Sure, pocketing rebates is smarmy, but we’ll play devil’s advocate for a second. Clients need agencies. Publicis, Omnicom, Dentsu, Havas, and other agencies provide tons of value to their clients in a variety of ways. Even while pocketing some of the media rebates as margin, the holdcos still get their clients better media rates than if they were to buy media through other channels, because of the volume they buy and their ability to negotiate pricing. And it’s not like the agency holdcos are flush with cash. Their margins are razor thin. If they weren’t generating margin through rebates, and principal-based media buying🔒, and arbitraging AI tokens🔒, and weird barter agreements, and whatever other whacky schemes they’re running, they’d probably go out of business!
This lawsuit will probably lead to new rules around media rebates, transparency, and the like. Clients will keep working with the agencies because they need them. The agencies will comply with the new rules (or they won’t) and just move on to the next new whacky scheme that helps them make margin and stay in business.
Nothing changes. It’s a tale as old as time.
A Few More Q2 Earnings…
Nexxen (👍): Revenue was up 11% to $100.5M, beating estimates. Programmatic revenue rose 12% to a record $95.2M, and CTV revenue hit an all-time quarterly high of $37.8M. Nexxen raised full-year contribution and programmatic revenue guidance for the third time this year. Shares dipped before rallying more than 8%.
Liftoff (👎): Revenue was up 35% to $220M, beating estimates in its first earnings report since its IPO. Core ad revenue, powered by its Cortex AI platform, was up 36% to $219M, driven by gaming and verticals like finance and travel. Q3 guidance was soft. Shares fell 5% in after-hours trading.
Dentsu (👎): Organic revenue was down 0.2%, though that's an improvement from the 0.7% decline a year earlier. Japan was the bright spot with 5.4% organic growth, while the Americas fell 6.9% organically and EMEA declined 1.2%. Shares fell 8%.
Other Notable Headlines 👀
German regulators are cracking down on Apple's App Tracking Transparency - Under a new agreement between Apple and Germany’s antitrust regulator, Apple has four months to redesign its consent screens to make them more neutral and let developers add extra information to make their case to users for tracking. Apple must also apply its rules more evenly across its own and third-party apps. The changes will only apply across the EU and stay in place for seven years. Germany's Federal Cartel Office launched a formal investigation of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework in 2022, and France and Italy have also fined the company for ATT. The framework wreaked havoc on the mobile app advertising ecosystem when it launched in 2021, hurting ad targeting and measurement, and costing companies like Meta billions of dollars in lost revenue. Apple has been using privacy to diminish the digital ad industry, while quietly creating digital ad products to replace what it's been breaking. Since then, Apple has been adding to its ad arsenal, including rolling out its "Ads on Maps" platform. It's also trying to maintain some commissions on app purchases made outside the App Store, after courts forced it to allow external payment for in-app purchases.
The Trade Desk introduces the all-new Koa, an in-platform chatbot - Koa has powered bid optimization and budget pacing inside The Trade Desk for years, but now it's becoming a chat-based assistant that advertisers can talk to directly. Users can ask it to build campaigns from an uploaded media plan, explain why a campaign is underperforming, or surface which creatives are driving conversions. The Trade Desk says the goal is to cut down on manual reporting and dashboard digging so marketers can focus more on strategy. The tool is currently in closed beta, with features like AI-built audience targeting on the way. Pretty much every DSP should have an AI chat interface of some sort at this point; it’s table stakes. Is Koa meaningfully differentiated?
YouTube will now count a view as soon as a video starts playing - YouTube previously waited until someone watched a video for about 30 seconds before logging a view, but now the count starts the moment a video starts playing or a live stream begins. The new approach brings YouTube in line with how TikTok and Instagram handle view counts. YouTube says the update responds to creator feedback about confusing, inconsistent metrics and unclear reach. YouTube will keep the old 30-second metric, and rename it "Engaged views," so creators can still see how many people actually stuck around. Expect numbers to climb across the platform as a result of the change. The news comes after YouTube increased the requirements for new creators to earn money through its Partner Program.
Google wins bankruptcy auction for Spirit Airlines emails, chats, documents - Spirit Airlines will literally sell anyone, ANYTHING! Google agreed to pay $10M for Spirit Airlines' business data, including about 100M emails and 500M Microsoft Teams chats, along with other business documents such as chat logs, spreadsheets, HR files, and financial documents. Google plans to use this data to help build and improve its AI models. Passenger information and frequent flyer records are not part of the deal, and the data will be cleaned of personal details before Google receives it. Spirit shut down earlier this year after its second bankruptcy attempt failed. A judge still needs to approve the sale. This is an interesting, cheap way for Google to stock up on real-world training data. We wonder if Spirit will charge Google extra for priority data onboarding, too. 🤣🤣🤣
Other Notable Headlines
(that you should know about too) 🤓
NBC News strikes ad sales deal with Taboola for programmatic display ads - The exclusive deal means Taboola will handle NBC News' automated display sales across sites like NBCNews.com and TODAY.com, on top of the native ads it already powers.
Moloco launches an agency partner program, in part to expand beyond mobile programmatic🔒 - The mobile performance ad tech firm is teaming up with about a dozen agencies, including Dentsu UK and PMG, to co-sell and expand its reach into CTV.
Brands suddenly care about Reddit. Redditors don't return the feeling🔒 - As marketers race to influence what AI chatbots recommend, moderators across Reddit are cracking down harder on promotional content and brand posts disguised as genuine conversation.
DOJ backs Musk push to revive case against advertisers - The Justice Department is asking an appeals court to reinstate X's antitrust claims against Shell, Mars, CVS, Lego, and other advertisers accused of coordinating a boycott after the case was tossed.
Maryland strikes digital ad tax - A state tax court struck down Maryland's first-of-its-kind digital ad tax, ruling it conflicted with federal law and ordering refunds to Google, Peacock, and Apple.
Pinterest names Jason Fairchild GM of programmatic and affiliate - Fairchild will remain the CEO of tvScientific, the performance CTV startup Pinterest acquired last year, while expanding his role to include selling Pinterest audience data through programmatic and affiliate channels.
Instagram rebrands and responds to criticism - Instagram's redesigned wordmark drew mockery because its cursive "r" is easy to mistake for a "z".
That’s It For This Week 👋
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