YouTube is no longer competing with broadcasters, audio companies, or sports rights holders. It is building the plumbing for something much more powerful.
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The effectiveness case hasn’t failed. It’s just stopped being the right answer to the question clients are actually asking amid an international energy crisis.
The brand safety debate is the industry’s equivalent of arguing about which cigarettes are safer.
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.