The brand safety debate is the industry’s equivalent of arguing about which cigarettes are safer.
More Omar Oakes articles
Publicis and The Trade Desk seem to be arguing about hidden fees. It is actually a battle over who controls programmatic spend.
Netflix is absorbing podcasts while independent creators achieve studio-grade production. When everything looks like television, advertisers need a new way to tell what’s actually worth paying for.
AI is reshaping how brands are discovered, ranked and recommended. If agencies design for algorithms before audiences, they risk diminishing the very influence they claim to sell.
Quibi failed because it sought to launch a mobile-first premium product while remaining anchored to an ad-funded media logic that was already fracturing. The future of short-form won’t make the same mistake.
As YouTube blurs the line between platform and broadcaster, Google’s real priority becomes easier to spot.
The real danger of AI isn’t job loss. It’s what disappears when judgment, dissent and cultural texture are treated as inefficiencies to be engineered away.
Omar Oakes assesses what 2025 actually revealed about media agencies and why the usual scorecards are lying to us.
By absorbing Interpublic, Omnicom becomes the world’s biggest agency group but also its biggest target. In a market where scale forces prices down and clients have the upper hand, this acquisition won’t fix the problem. It accelerates it.
Disney quietly announced something radical: letting fans create their own short-form IP on Disney+. But it exposes just how defensively the rest of the industry has been playing.