Rory Sutherland used a MAD//Fest London livestream published on July 17, 2026 to argue that advertisers who route most of their budgets through Google and Meta have handed the two companies a structural hold over their businesses, and he pressed the case for influencer marketing as the clearest way to loosen that grip.

The remarks came during the July edition of MAD//Masters, a monthly question-and-answer session tied to Sutherland's advertising course, hosted by MAD//Fest London and posted to the programme's YouTube channel. Sutherland, described by the organisers as a best-selling author with a long career in advertising, was responding to audience questions rather than delivering a set-piece talk. His answers on platform concentration and creator marketing were unusually pointed.

A duopoly built on dependence

One question, submitted by a viewer in the Netherlands, put a figure on the table: almost 70 percent of digital marketing spend in the country flows to just two players, Google and Meta. Sutherland did not quibble with it. "I completely agree with you," he said, before turning the observation into a diagnosis of how junior media buyers are trained and paid.

Most people at a junior level in digital media, according to Sutherland, do not sell customers, sales, or relationships. They sell self-justificatory metrics. He was blunt about the incentive structure behind that behaviour, describing practitioners who are "bonused on how well you can give money to Google." The problem, in his telling, is not individual competence but a system that rewards volume of spend routed to the largest platforms over business outcomes.

The concentration he was describing is well documented. Data from the ad intelligence firm Guideline, presented publicly in May 2026, shows the top four demand-side platforms now controlling roughly 85 percent of the global programmatic market, up from about 75 percent in 2022. In the United Kingdom, separate figures show close to two in every three advertising pounds going to Google, Meta and Amazon. Across the United States, the three companies command 58.8 percent of total ad dollars, a share that has climbed from 47.1 percent in 2020.

Part of the pull, in Sutherland's account, is psychological rather than strictly commercial. Asked during the session whether routing budgets to the largest platforms amounted to a modern version of the old maxim that nobody was ever fired for buying IBM, he accepted the comparison. The platforms, he suggested, supply advertisers with a steady stream of familiar metrics, and the safety of reaching for a default option that produces reassuring numbers can matter more to a career than whether the spend builds the business. The metrics become their own justification, and the easiest place to direct money becomes the place that reports back most legibly.

Divide and rule

Sutherland reached for history to explain why, in his view, the dominant platforms benefit from a fragmented field of advertisers. He pointed to British rule in India, citing figures of "200 million people and 20,000 troops," and argued that such control is never achieved through force of numbers alone. What secures it, he said, is a strategy of division. "What you do is you play divide and rule," he told the audience, "and you get different factions basically fighting against each other." His conclusion was direct: "Google makes money by being the balance of power in a marketplace."

He offered a worked example. The perfect commercial sector for a search platform, in his account, is one populated by several equally famous competitors who cannot escape one another. Online travel agents and insurance comparison sites fit the pattern. Where Expedia, Booking.com, Hotels.com and Trivago are all similarly recognisable, each depends on the platform to appear more prominent than the next. The effect, as Sutherland framed it, is that the players are pushed to "pay us money to become the winner" - and to keep paying to stay there, rather than winning the position once.

He recounted an anecdote to illustrate the point. A friend, he said, launched an app that performed strongly through Alphabet's channels at first and then plateaued. The friend's own theory was that this might not be a deliberate act by Google at all. Instead, "the algorithm has worked it out for itself," learning to keep any single advertiser from growing so dominant that it no longer needs to keep bidding.

These are assertions, not findings, and the platforms were not represented at the session to answer them. Where practitioner complaints about auction mechanics have surfaced before, the companies have offered their own rationale. When a recent change to Google Ads bidding drew criticism from paid-search managers who argued it would push advertisers toward higher spend, Google said the update corrected a longstanding inconsistency and improved predictability. The gap between the two readings is precisely the terrain Sutherland was working in.

Advertising or a protection racket

The sharpest section of the discussion turned on a distinction Sutherland has used before. There are, he said, two forms of advertising that the industry rarely separates. The first he called madmen advertising: give a platform money, and it will make a brand more famous. The second he called sopranos advertising, defined by a colder proposition - "unless you give us the money we'll make you disappear." One is an advertising agency, he said, and "the second one's a protection racket."

To ground the second category, he described how a large retailer with its own private-label range might approach a branded manufacturer. A platform could produce its own budget batteries, then remind the owner of a well-known rival brand how unfortunate it would be if that rival slipped beneath the fold whenever a shopper searched. The implied remedy is payment. "Is that advertising or is it a protection racket?" he asked, leaving the question open but weighted.

Sutherland extended the critique to measurement itself. The metrics that advertisers compete against, he argued, largely originated with the dominant platforms rather than with the businesses spending the money. Over the course of his answer he attributed their design variously to Meta, Alphabet and Amazon, at one point suggesting the standard yardsticks were "purpose-designed by Amazon and Meta to enrich themselves." The naming was inconsistent across his remarks, but the thrust was steady: the tools used to judge success were built by the parties that profit from the spending.

Concerns of that kind are not confined to marketing commentary. Competition authorities have examined whether large platforms tilt their own auctions in their favour, with an Australian inquiry flagging self-preferencing in advertising auctions and opaque pricing among 35 recommendations. Sutherland's framing is more provocative than a regulator's, but it points at the same structural question.

The case for creators

Having laid out the dependency, Sutherland offered his alternative. Influencer marketing, he argued, does not hand any single platform a stranglehold over a brand, because the relationship runs through a person and an audience rather than an auction. He cited research findings that surprised him: influencer activity appears to work over the long term as well as the short, behaving more like television than like search engine optimisation, which he characterised as a purely short-term channel.

He recalled making the case to a colleague, Lauren Ezekiel, for investing in creator marketing even where it is "more expensive and less predictable than Google and Meta." The reasoning was defensive rather than performance-led. A business, he said, "cannot afford to be entirely dependent on two providers for your continued existence." The value of the channel, on this reading, lies partly in the independence it buys.

The market context supports at least the direction of travel. United States creator-economy ad spend reached 37 billion dollars in 2025 and is projected to hit 43.9 billion dollars in 2026, a growth rate outpacing most other digital categories, with the discipline shifting from one-off campaigns toward always-on creator programmes. In Germany, an industry association mapping the sector for the first time placed the global creator economy at 191 billion dollars in 2025 and projected 528.39 billion dollars by 2030. Sutherland's pitch is not that creators outperform paid search on cost or predictability; by his own admission they often do neither. It is that concentration itself is the risk worth pricing.

What it means for the wider market

For marketers, the interest of Sutherland's argument lies less in any single claim than in how it reframes a familiar dependence. Concentration in digital advertising is measurable and rising, and a portion of the industry has already begun to act on the discomfort. Newsletter advertising climbed 40 percent as brands sought alternatives to walled gardens, and vendors building for the open web have leaned on the same anxiety, with one survey finding advertisers see automation gains mostly inside Google and Meta even as they look for ways to replicate those gains elsewhere.

None of that vindicates the protection-racket label, which remains Sutherland's interpretation rather than an established fact. The session was a monthly Q&A for course subscribers, delivered by a commentator who prizes contrarian framing, and the companies he named had no seat at the table. What the remarks do supply is a language for a structural problem that the concentration data describes only in the aggregate: the difference between spending money to build something a brand owns and spending money to rent a position that must be re-won each day. Whether influencer marketing is the right answer to that problem is contested. That the problem is real is harder to dispute.

Timeline

  • November 13, 2025 - Germany's BVDW publishes the country's first influencer marketing market landscape, placing the global creator economy at 191 billion dollars in 2025 and projecting 528.39 billion dollars by 2030.
  • January 22, 2026 - Reporting shows newsletter advertising up 40 percent as brands seek alternatives to walled gardens.
  • May 6, 2026 - Guideline figures presented publicly show the top four demand-side platforms controlling roughly 85 percent of the global programmatic market.
  • May 7, 2026 - United Kingdom data shows close to two in three advertising pounds going to Google, Meta and Amazon.
  • July 17, 2026 - Rory Sutherland's MAD//Fest London MAD//Masters livestream is published, containing the remarks on platform dependence and influencer marketing.

Summary

Who: Rory Sutherland, a veteran advertising figure and best-selling author, speaking in a MAD//Fest London livestream.

What: He argued that heavy reliance on Google and Meta creates a structural dependency he likened to a protection racket, criticised the metrics advertisers optimise against as platform-designed, and made the case for influencer marketing as a hedge against that concentration.

When: The livestream was published on July 17, 2026, as part of the July edition of the monthly MAD//Masters programme.

Where: MAD//Fest London's MAD//Masters livestream, posted to the programme's YouTube channel.

Why: His comments land against documented and rising concentration in digital advertising, and a measurable move by some brands toward channels outside the largest platforms, making the trade-off between rented platform positions and owned audience relationships a live question for the marketing community.