The Trade Desk posts its first revenue decline since its 2016 listing

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For a decade, The Trade Desk was the company that did not shrink. On Monday, November 9, it did. The independent demand-side platform reported third-quarter revenue of $736 million, 0.5% below the $739 million of a year earlier and its first year-on-year decline since it listed in 2016. It beat the low bar it had set in August, and it said political spending helped, but the guidance for the fourth quarter points lower still. The same day, Meta's own filings showed why it believes it must raise hundreds of billions of dollars before its rivals soak up the market's capital, Google quietly gave AI agents the power to write to Google Ads accounts, and a Washington think tank warned that four companies could end up owning the agents that choose what people buy.

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The independent buyer stalls

PPC Land reported that Trade Desk revenue dropped 0.5%, its first decline since its 2016 IPO, even as the figure came in $86 million above the $650 million floor the company had guided to in August. Net income fell 67% to $38 million, weighed down by a $44.3 million restructuring charge tied to the roughly 575 jobs cut in September and an effective tax rate of about 64%. Operating expenses rose 11.3% to $643.4 million. For the fourth quarter, the company expects revenue of at least $755 million and adjusted EBITDA of at least $280 million, about 11% and 30% below the prior year's $847 million and $400 million. The board added $731 million to its buyback authorisation. Chief executive Jeff Green said the quarter was "well ahead of our expectations entering the quarter" but conceded the business is "still operating below the level of growth we expect from ourselves." PPC Land pointed to Safari blocking the company's ad domain, competition from Amazon and Walmart's non-exclusive renewal as pressures, while customer retention stayed above 95%.

Adweek's account of The Trade Desk clearing Wall Street's low expectations as revenue stalls noted that revenue grew 18% in the same quarter of 2025 and that adjusted EBITDA margin slipped from 43% to 36%. Green opened the call by welcoming back co-founder Dave Pickles and called 2026 the company's "biggest political cycle yet", even in a midterm year. AdExchanger's James Hercher argued that if The Trade Desk wants to grow, it must evolve. Green told analysts that buying decisions are moving from hands-on traders to senior agency leaders, procurement teams and chief executives. Video now accounts for a low-50% share of spend, mobile for the high 20s and audio for 7%, which Green called the fastest-growing channel. North America has plateaued while Asia Pacific grew 30% in the first nine months of the year. On acquisitions, Green said: "I will just transparently say we're looking more now than we historically have."

A smaller rival chose to buy. AdExchanger reported that Viant bought Waymark for $20 million, an AI platform that turns a brand's inputs into a finished video ad with script, visuals and voiceover in minutes. Viant's third-quarter revenue rose 29% to just over $110 million, with connected TV now more than half of spend, though its shares fell about 7% after hours as it guided to costs rising about 25%. "TV is no longer reserved only for the world's largest brands," said chief executive Tim Vanderhook. His brother Chris, the chief operating officer, put it more bluntly: "the down market opportunity is incredible."

The pitch for cheaper TV is already visible in the data. The Video Advertising Bureau counted 160 brands that bought national TV for the first time in the first half of 2026, spending $355.6 million between them, and found that AI and pharma brands took 43% of that first-time spend. The largest newcomers were the prescription drug Yeztugo at $36.0 million, the AI company Genspark at $35.9 million, Starlink at $29.7 million and the app builder Base44 at $21.6 million. Most were small: 61% spent $500,000 or less. PPC Land noted that the brand-level evidence rests on Google Trends charts without control groups, and that a Comcast study VAB cited also found AI search summaries produced 23% lower brand recall, a finding VAB left out.

Sellers are also pitching targeting without identifiers. A Magnite case study claims that a retailer's ID-free TV ads reached homeowners 43% more efficiently using Comscore's Predictive Audiences than with ID-based audiences in the same campaign. The study does not define the efficiency metric or disclose CPMs or spend. In audio, SiriusXM named Tubi's chief executive Anjali Sud as its next CEO, as Jennifer Witz exits after nearly 25 years. Sud takes over on January 1, 2027, after growing Tubi past 110 million monthly users. "Premium audio experiences will be more important than ever to the future of entertainment," she said. Adweek reported that her Tubi role had been affected by a restructuring after Fox completed its purchase of Roku, which folds Tubi into Fox One. SiriusXM's advertising revenue was flat at $456 million in the third quarter, while podcast ad growth slowed from nearly 50% a year earlier to 20%.

The bill for artificial intelligence

The most remarkable document of the day came from Meta. An information statement filed with regulators shows that Meta's forecasts say it must raise hundreds of billions as soon as fall 2026. To do so without diluting Mark Zuckerberg's control, Meta is creating non-voting Class C shares, paid as a dividend of one Class C share for every Class A and B share, effective January 19, 2027. A special committee of independent directors wrote that "timing is important to secure capital before competitors saturate various funding options," naming Alphabet, SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI. Its adviser, Moelis, estimated in June that Meta could raise about $700 billion in equity before Zuckerberg's voting power fell below 50%. Zuckerberg holds about 60.6% of the vote and said he would not back financing that reduced it. Debt was considered and set aside because of its effect on credit ratings. "This is quite the paragraph from Meta," wrote the analyst Benedict Evans.

Google showed where some of that money goes. It added two systems to its eighth generation of chips and said its AI chip business nears 100 customers as it adds TPU 8tx and 8i Max. "This is the first time we have introduced four TPU systems in a single year," wrote Amin Vahdat, Google's chief technologist for AI and infrastructure. Alphabet's inventory rose from $2.4 billion to $13.3 billion, and Anthropic's filings estimate additional Google TPU compute at $125 billion to $150 billion for 2028 to 2031. Google also opened Pathways, the system that trains Gemini, to Cloud customers, about 19 months after first promising it. "When every chip is busy, the next workload waits until capacity frees up," the post conceded.

OpenAI, meanwhile, is selling through the clouds of its rivals' partners. AWS customers can now buy ChatGPT Enterprise against their cloud commitments, with OpenAI selling and AWS billing. Anthropic's Claude Enterprise is on the same marketplace, and Anthropic's filing put cloud marketplace sales at 44% of its revenue for the nine months to September 30. On the advertising side, Adweek reported that OpenAI's head of monetization told ad partners that user trust means some things "we just can't" do. Speaking at a Luma Partners event, Benji Shomair said OpenAI remains bound by its pledges to keep ChatGPT conversations private from advertisers and never to sell user data, and declined to own a reported target of $100 billion in annual ad revenue by 2030.

Amazon's infrastructure ambitions reach orbit. Its first Amazon Leo mission on a United Launch Alliance Vulcan rocket, scheduled for November 13 from Cape Canaveral with 40 satellites, is the first of 38 planned flights, and Amazon's satellite internet relies on Vulcan rockets for 1,500 satellites, close to half its first-generation network. "Vulcan will launch close to half our first-generation constellation," said Melissa Wuerl, Amazon Leo's director of launch systems.

The leadership of the AI boom also faced scrutiny. A shareholder filed a proposed class action after Nvidia shares fell 4.27% to $178.67, and PPC Land reported that the investor sues Nvidia over Huang's ties to a suspected spy. The complaint alleges that Nvidia and Jensen Huang described his dealings with the Singapore company Megaspeed as routine while omitting his relationship with an executive the complaint calls a suspected Chinese spy. Nvidia's board had opened an independent investigation a day earlier, saying it had "no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised." The allegations are untested.

The cost of AI is also counted in jobs. Vodafone Germany is cutting 2,300 positions over two years as AI use expands, merging customer service into its sales units and using AI to analyse network faults, support staff and "create and steer" advertising campaigns. "AI will reduce costs in the company and strengthen revenues in new business areas," the company said. Talks with employee representatives begin in early 2027.

Agents, and who controls them

The Open Markets Institute, a Washington anti-monopoly group, published a 71-page report warning that Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta could dominate AI agents by using their control of cloud computing, operating systems, browsers, search and social platforms. Its central claim is that an agent "does not present options so much as it selects them," which gives its owner outsized influence over what is bought. "It is currently impossible to audit agentic AI recommendations," the report says. It proposes loyalty duties to users, fair access for rival agents and, in some cases, cloud divestment, though it concedes that consumer lock-in is currently low.

Spain's data protection authority offered the user's side of the same problem. The AEPD issued a 10-point guide for people who let AI agents act for them, built on the principle that the agent prepares and the person approves. It warns against blanket "always allow" permissions and treats every email and web page an agent reads as a possible carrier of hidden instructions. "No measure completely eliminates this risk," the guide says. "When the assistant only answers, an error is a wrong answer," the authority's press release adds, citing an agent that sold an item and handed the buyer the seller's address.

Google moved further than it said. Version 0.0.6 of its open-source Google Ads MCP server, released on November 2, means the Google Ads MCP server gains four write tools but still cannot change budgets. AI agents can now create assets, upload videos and manage labels, and the tools are on by default. Each write needs a dry run and a checksum before it commits, but the server cannot verify that a human approved the change. Google's developer guide still calls the server read-only. The Swiss consultant Thomas Wismer, who tested the tools in a client account on November 9, reported: "Created a test label, read it back, removed it again. Works."

Publishers are putting agents to work on their own side. AdExchanger reported that TIME's AI agents do the coordinating while its sellers still do the selling. Using agents from the start-up Kana, TIME turns a request for proposal into a draft in minutes rather than days. "Premium media sales is still a highly personal, relationship-driven business," said Mark Howard, TIME's chief operating officer. "We don't do it with our journalism, and we're not going to do it with our sales." A Sell Sider guest column in AdExchanger by Jonathon Shaevitz of GrowthCode argued that for publishers, agentic AI is less about price than about whether agents bid at all. "Anyone telling publishers they are already behind on agentic AI is selling something," he wrote, citing IAB data that 96% of 360 video buyers see a role for agents in programmatic.

Sellers on Amazon are being offered agents too. Feedvisor says business buyers drove 45% of one brand's Amazon revenue after it extended its Agentis software to Amazon Business. In its single example, an unnamed office supplies brand, business buyers converted at 41% against 15% for consumers and made up 16% of sessions. "B2B isn't another audience segment. It's a different buying context," said Victor Rosenman, Feedvisor's chief executive. The release gives no time period, spend or control group.

Search keeps rearranging itself

The cost of AI Overviews came into sharper focus. Glenn Gabe found that AI Overviews cut a French site's daily clicks from 750 to 400 after Google switched them on in France on July 22, with impressions stable. Of five French sites he studied, three saw clicks or click-through rates fall roughly 45% to 70% almost at once, while two held steady. "I don't know if there is a clearer example of the impact of AIOs on a site than this one," Gabe said. An Ahrefs study of 963 French domains found a median decline of 23.1% in click-through rate for highly exposed sites. Rankings may be moving again, too: Search Engine Roundtable reported possible Google search ranking volatility on November 8 and 9, about two weeks after an October 27 update that "lingered on for like a full week," with one forum poster describing "the worst weekend traffic in 6 years."

Google is also making its ads more generative. Search Engine Roundtable reported that Google is testing AI-generated summaries above and within ads on mobile, with one summary above the whole sponsored block naming each advertiser and another below each ad's description. "Google's sponsored results on mobile are increasingly becoming more generative," wrote Brodie Clark, who spotted it. Microsoft is following the same path: Search Engine Roundtable reported Bing ads at the top of AI Mode results, the feature formerly called Copilot Search, including shopping ads. Barry Schwartz said Bing's sponsored labels were so muted that "at first I didn't notice they were ads." PPC News Feed separately reported that Bing now shows a sponsored product carousel at the bottom of its results page.

Other changes reached local and travel results. Search Engine Roundtable reported that Google's aggregator and supplier units gained support for "things to do" queries, search features shown to users in the European Economic Area. It also asked whether Google is adding booking links to Business Profiles automatically, after Schwartz found a "Book Online" link on his own profile and Joy Hawkins found some pointing to pages that returned errors.

For advertisers, the changes were in the rules. PPC News Feed reported that Merchant Center no longer allows dates in promotion titles, in any format, and that "Google or its affiliates may modify promotion titles to enhance clarity and relevance," while the old 60-character limit is gone. Google told developers that it moves the Demand Gen Display opt-out to ad groups from December 1, so that campaign-level requests to stay off the Display Network will fail with an error. Display-only ad groups in campaigns that had opted out will be paused, although Google says that "overall default campaign serving behavior will remain unchanged." On YouTube, PPC News Feed reported that the "Skip" ads button has become "Next", a wording change it said encourages viewers "to proceed through ads rather than skipping them entirely." And Google AI Studio now builds Maps apps free for 100 calls a day per API, letting anyone describe a map app in plain language, though production use moves onto standard billing.

When the numbers mislead

Several of the day's stories concerned what marketing metrics hide. A 96-page guide from the Swedish data company Funnel shows how a 3.0 ROAS can hide $0.40 returns on extra spend, arguing that attribution assigns credit rather than proving cause. "Organizations are buying the engine but forgetting to build the steering wheel," it says. Of platform lift studies, it adds: "They're essentially grading their own homework." PPC Land found the structure sound but the sourcing uneven, with outdated details on Google's cookie plans.

Retail media offered a concrete case. On an IAB Europe podcast, Lisa Avery of Zitcha described how a beer promotion with strong ROAS cut the retailer's margin: a four-pack offer cannibalised a pricier six-pack, so "people had actually bought less overall at a lower product margin." She said "retail media has kind of become this sideshow" for merchants who care about sell-through. IAB Europe's latest survey found buyers asking for ROAS fell from 89% to 49%. Creators face the same shift: Digiday reported that performance metrics are rewriting creator rate cards, with brands asking for cost per lead and engaged views rather than follower counts. "Every client has a cost per conversion benchmark," said Joseph Perello of Props.

The supply chain's blind spots were on show as well. DecryptAds found that Adobe and Pepsi ads ran on AI recipe sites with fake chefs, about 400 sites whose owners and chefs appear AI-generated, expanding to more than 2,100 linked domains. Two sales houses manage the ads.txt files for 96.3% of the tracked sites, and ads for HBO Max, Siemens, Subaru and Capital One also appeared. "Any site using AI personas should have to disclose it," said Zach Edwards. In Australia, Adorn Cosmetics faces closure, blaming a 30% sales drop on its Adobe site. Its founder Briony Kennedy told 7NEWS that "all of those ads that we were paying for were not linking back to the website." Adobe declined to comment, and PPC Land stressed the account is one-sided.

Brainlabs raised a subtler worry. In a November 9 post, Liz DeAngelis warned that Meta's AI creative could leave brands unsure what worked. "Meta is bringing in a landscaper to their walled garden," she wrote, adding: "I'm just not ready to outsource the learning with it." Meta says nearly 10 million advertisers used its generative creative tools in the third quarter.

Discounting, meanwhile, is turning into data collection. Amazon opened a holiday sale on its low-price store as the Amazon Haul buyer count gains nearly 350%, with $0.11 deals on November 10 and 11 and selection up more than 25-fold in two years to over 10 million products. Haul products now appear in main Amazon search results, where brands buy ad placement. Papa Johns, whose North American comparable sales fell 8.3% last quarter, trades free pizzas for SMS opt-ins, photos and $15 orders, with an AI system judging customers' photos of their pizzas. The announcement promises "a direct line to real customer feedback."

Brands dress up for the holidays

Disney put its whole company behind one idea. In its first holiday season since creating a company-wide marketing organisation in January, Disney ties four businesses to one holiday campaign, "Make the Holidays Magic," spanning parks, cruises, streaming, TV networks and consumer products. Adweek reported that Disney hitched its holiday campaign to an invisible horse, a short film directed by Dougal Wilson about "a boy who believes he has outgrown the magic of the season." The same day, Adobe announced a multi-year alliance in which Adobe gains marketing tie-ins with five Disney units, including Walt Disney World and ESPN, in exchange for Firefly models trained on Disney characters for its Imagineers. "The best technology amplifies human creativity," said Kyle Laughlin of Walt Disney Imagineering.

Celebrities did the rest. Xfinity cast John C. Reilly as the Ghost of Christmas Very-Recent-Past in a campaign about people distracted by their devices, Adweek reported, introducing a "Holiday Mode" feature. Kendall Jenner's 818 Tequila released its first product spot, "Nothing Extra.", in which a voiceover says "Some things don't need dressing up." David Schwimmer chases the perfect red sweater in Quince's biggest-ever campaign, its first celebrity-fronted TV ad; Quince's Antonieta Moreland said he "knows a thing or two about red sweaters." Amazon's AI workspace tool got its first ad campaign as Amazon Quick became AWS Quick, pitched as "built for the job." And Mirakl got a rebrand for the AI age, its first since launching in 2012.

Mark Ritson used Dior's animated holiday short to argue that the AI-or-not debate is advertising's most pointless argument. After viewers spotted an extra finger joint and warped lettering, the director denied using generative AI but acknowledged using it to smooth the animation. Ritson's conclusion: "The work is the work." What matters, he argues, is honest disclosure, particularly for luxury brands that sell provenance.

The creator economy is building its own institutions. Adweek reported that Terry Crews will host the inaugural Clio Creator Awards on November 18 at the Dolby Theatre, presented by YouTube. "Brands and ads have taken the place of sitcoms," Crews said, and "this is not about numbers and volume." And the CPG Guys want to build a business bigger than podcasts, acquiring two executive groups from Coogan Partners and planning a second show.

Charts, airwaves and billboards

Music measurement is shifting toward advertising. YouTube will rejoin the Billboard charts as ad-supported streams gain 67% weight: from charts dated January 16, 2027, one album unit will equal 1,500 ad-supported streams instead of 2,500, ending a boycott that began when Lyor Cohen complained that Billboard "weights subscription-supported streams higher than ad-supported." Apple, for its part, named Olivia Dean its Apple Music Artist of the Year after 14 months in its daily top 100, the first UK act to win, though it gave no listening figures. "It's the best thing in the world," Dean said.

Podcast audiences grew. Podtrac's October rankings showed DailyWire gaining 20% in US podcast audience, while iHeart stayed first with 64.3 million listeners but grew downloads only about 3%. Audio is becoming easier to buy programmatically: StackAdapt advertisers can now buy ads on 150 audio publishers via SoundCast, mostly French, including Radio Classique and Le Figaro. "Audio connects brands with audiences across different moments of their day," said StackAdapt's Ed Mullins.

Outdoor consolidated further. Global agreed to acquire Alight Media and its 5,500-plus UK ad sites, to be sold through its DAX exchange and AdPower self-service platform. "This is brilliant news for advertisers of all sizes," said Global's chief executive Simon Pitts. PPC Land noted that Alight's own map shows about 320 frames, far fewer than the 1,500-plus roadside sites claimed.

Courts draw lines

European courts and regulators set limits on what telecom companies and platforms may do. A Cologne court banned a Telekom ad that replaced the network name on phones with the slogan "Im besten Netz," ruling it harassment under German unfair competition law. "The display of the network identifier was repurposed as an advertising banner," the court wrote, adding that "consumers who pay for a service, in particular, will not wish to be confronted with further advertising." Telekom has appealed. In Portugal, by contrast, Vodafone won a planned obsolescence case over a EUR 49.90 GPS tracker whose service it withdrew; the Lisbon Court of Appeal found "nor is there a legally imposed obligation to ensure the perpetuity of a given service."

The age of users is becoming a cost line. A study for the European Commission puts the median cost of an age check at 7 euro cents, based mostly on UK experience, while warning that "age assurance deployments can be used to facilitate the commercial profiling of individuals." Meta extended its AI age detection worldwide so that Instagram moves teens with adult birthdays into Teen Accounts, tying the work to a settlement with 52 attorneys general. "Ensuring all teens receive these protections depends on knowing their age," Meta said. It has not said whether reclassified accounts are removed from adult ad audiences.

That question, who is on the other side of the screen and who answers for what the software does, ran through the day. The Trade Desk is learning that the people who buy media are changing. Meta is raising money for machines it cannot yet fully pay for. And from Cologne to Madrid, the rules are being written for agents and algorithms that act faster than the laws that govern them.