total independence, or the chickenization of the ad agency?

In the news: Cindy Rose says WPP agencies stopped using LiveRamp to retain ‘total independence’ by Zac Wang.

Total what?

LiveRamp is a data broker that provides a kind of directory lookup for personal information, for advertising purposes. The company was recentlyacquired by Publicis, which competes with WPP. A third competitor, Omnicom, is alreadydropping LiveRamp.

But also in the news: With AI ad tools expanding, Meta courts agencies while reshaping their role by Kimeko McCoy.

The platform made a series of announcements at the festival, including expanded ad tools, a unified creator marketplace hub and AI-powered end-to-end creative solutions. With the updates, creative and media teams can share a new Meta software tool to understand what ads are performing and generate new ones. There’s also a “brand memory” feature that learns about a brand’s identity from existing ads and brings those insights into the creative generation capabilities within the tool, per Meta.

So Meta is going to take a bigger role in “creative generation” as well as measuring how well the ads do. Gosh, I wonder how Meta’s AI will rank human-made ads for effectiveness compared to ads made using Meta’s AI.

And remember WPP and Google forge groundbreaking partnership to redefine marketing with AI from last year?

The collaboration aims to revolutionise how brands approach integrated creative, production, media, experience and commerce, enabling real-time personalisation for millions of customers simultaneously, and moving beyond traditional efficiency initiatives to unlock growth.

That “efficiency” means more than measuring social media ads, or search, or web ads, in isolation. Meta and Google are each building a machine learning stack to measure every ad against every other ad. Part of that stack is theattribution cartel at W3C—an in-browser ad measurement feature—backed by Meta, Google, and Apple—to make sure that their own search, social, and app store advertising shows better results than “open web” ads on independent sites.

That’s a problem for anyone other than Google and Meta.

In ChatGPT Needs to Launch Its Own Version of Google Analytics, Myles Younger writes a good reminder of how important the measurement systems behind advertising really are. The “grand bargain” of content for traffic and ad revenue depends on Google Analytics (which isn’t necessarily providing correct numbers, but is so widely used that traffic as measured by GA is traffic for anyone else’s business purposes, too. It’s like Microsoft Excel: a correct formula is not as saleable as one that matches Excel’s.)

The virtuous cycle of that “grand bargain” was made tangible to website owners by Google Analytics, which launched in 2005 as a free service. This was a really big deal. Access to Google Analytics caused pretty much the entire world of publishing, entertainment, travel, B2B, etc completely ADDICTED to search traffic and eager to keep feeding into the virtuous cycle. The virtuous cycle of web search turned Google into the greatest money-printing advertising machine ever known.

If OpenAI wants to be in the ad business, they’re going to have to make their own analytics, too. Because there’s no way any measurement system controlled by Meta is going to rank anything but Meta as tops for effectiveness, or any measurement system controlled by Google is going to fail todo the same for Google.

And WPP is worried about LiveRamp? I guess all the big agencies are. Ronan Shields and Seb Joseph:The hunt for a post-LiveRamp successor is already underway. With Google, Meta, and Apple—and possibly OpenAI—taking control of measurement, I’m not seeing a path to total independence here, or anything like it. A.G. Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times,said,

Tech giants strip-mine news websites without permission or compensation. They repackage these stolen goods as their own, siphoning off the audiences and revenue that otherwise would go to the news organizations that created this work.

And ad agencies might have it even worse than publishers. Not only are original ads going into the training sets to generate slop ads for competitors, the advertising results produced by a legit agency are beingstrip-mined by Big Tech schemes to take credit for sales they surveilled, not caused. When the agency’s work is measured and driven by someone else’s algorithm, that’s classicchickenization. Google and Meta take the role of Perdue and Tyson, and the ad agencies are the farmers raising birds, I mean ad campaigns, for them.

The likely main role of the future, hollowed-out, ad agency will be as a way to deal with theAI and Liability problem. If Google and Meta are held responsible for their own “AI” generated ads, they’re going to have to, on paper, turn “creative control” over to an agency that can be the defendant in disinformation and false advertising cases—kind of like how the owner, on paper, of an Amazon.com delivery van is an “Amazon Delivery Partner” that can be held responsible for crashes.

More: living with a bigger ad duopoly

Bonus links

How to talk about “AI” without adding to the anthropomorphization by Emily M. Bender and Nanna Inie. (More good usage notes.)

Why Does Everyone Hate AI? by Paul Krugman. Google has replaced its search engine with AI, without offering the option to opt out. One has to turn to obscure workarounds or third-party sites to get traditional search results. (The workarounds aren’t that obscure. I would bet most people couldfix Google Search faster than they could read a Paul Krugman paper. ICYMI:The Theory of Interstellar Trade (PDF).)

‘Tell Him He’s a Piece of Shit’: Meta’s New AI Unit Is a Total Mess by Paresh Dave and Zoë Schiffer. Zuckerberg reiterated a vow to not carry out additional mass layoffs this year. He introduced a plan to limit the number of employees per manager, which on some teams, such as Applied AI, had deliberately ballooned to a ratio of 50 to one. Budgets for team events would increase, he said, and a large hackathon planned for next month could also help bring the company together.

Traditional advertising is dead, says the marketer who cut Mastercard’s ad budget by 70% by Jessica Orwig, Leon Siciliano, and Lara O’Reilly. During his tenure as CMCO from 2013 to the start of 2026, he made a decision that many marketers would consider unthinkable: He permanently cut Mastercard’s advertising budget by 70% as part of a progressive shift during Mastercard’s marketing transformation. The move didn’t hurt the business, Rajamannar said. (Maybe not a fair example of who doesn’t need to advertise? There are cheaper options but they’re as available here as Chinese electric cars:Brazil’s instant payment system PIX under US scrutiny)