Monday Briefing: The Open Web Is Running Out of Ads to Sell

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Good morning, it's James here. The trade press spent last week ranking America's hottest brands and tallying WPP's latest layoffs. The number that actually matters came out of a London ad exchange, and it says the shelf space your display budget sits on is disappearing. Let's get into it.

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The Lead: The Open Web Is Running Out of Ads to Sell

For two years the AI search debate has been about traffic. Last week it showed up in the ad supply itself.

What happened: Publisher ad request volumes fell hard in Q2. Ozone, the UK ad exchange whose network includes the Guardian, News UK, and the Wall Street Journal, shared data with Digiday covering roughly 20 billion impressions, and it found that "publisher ad request volumes were down by roughly 32% to 37% YoY in the U.S and 39% to 41% YoY in the U.K." (Digiday, July 15). Ozone COO Danny Spears told Digiday that platforms, "particularly Google, are intervening in the user journey and providing content in situ rather than redirecting to the underlying website." Fewer visits means fewer pages, which means fewer ad calls. And scarcity is already repricing what remains. Per the same data, "in June, average eCPMs were about 30% higher YoY in the U.K., and 7% YoY higher in the U.S."

Why CMOs should care: Every media plan built on the assumption that open-web display is an infinite, ever-cheaper reach pool is now wrong on both counts. A third of the inventory evaporated in a year, quality publisher supply is getting scarce, and the price of what survives is climbing. This is structural, not cyclical. The pages are not coming back, because the answers now happen on the platform instead of the publisher's site.

The take: Shrinking supply plus rising eCPMs is a landlord's market, and the landlords know it. Two moves this week. First, ask your agency or programmatic team what share of your display spend still assumes last year's supply curve; if your CPM benchmarks predate 2026, your forecasts are fiction. Second, start treating direct publisher relationships and their first-party audiences as scarce assets worth locking up early, the way you treat upfront TV. The open web is becoming a boutique. Buy like it.

The Cautionary Tale: Meta's AI Rewrote the Ads. The Brands Found Out Later.

REI ran an Instagram ad for a road bike with two sets of handlebars. Nobody at REI designed it that way.

Business Insider spent last Monday's news cycle on an investigation, built on interviews with eight advertisers and agency executives, into Meta's generative AI ad features altering live campaigns without approval (MediaPost, July 14). The REI ad ran for about a week before it was pulled. A pajama dress in another advertiser's creative was redrawn as a shirt-and-pants set. An ad for a women's networking group featured a man. Karissa Tuccio of agency Mediassociates said 15 of her clients hit the problem regularly. The mechanism is the damning part. An REI spokesperson said, "Meta auto-enrolled us in an AI personalization tool that produced an inaccurate and inappropriate alteration of a vendor-provided image in some of our ads." Meta's reported response amounts to a shrug, saying AI can make mistakes and it is the advertiser's responsibility to review AI outputs.

The operative word is auto-enrolled. Meta shipped a tool that edits your brand's creative by default, and the burden of catching it sits with you. So catch it. Have someone audit the Advantage+ creative enhancement settings on every ad account you own before Friday, document what is on, and turn off anything you would not defend to your brand team. Opt-out hygiene is now a standing operational discipline, the same as brand safety. The platforms will keep shipping defaults that favor their automation; your job is to make sure nothing edits the brand without a human signature.

By The Numbers: 43%

43% of CTV buyers have somewhat or no confidence in the quality of premium streaming inventory, even when buying through programmatic guaranteed, the most trusted path available, per an IAB report covered by Marketing Dive (July 14).

It gets worse down the stack. Fifty-five percent lack confidence in private marketplaces, over two-thirds say the same for open exchanges, and 59% distrust inventory sourced through retail media networks. Meanwhile the same buyers keep writing bigger checks, with US CTV spend forecast to rise 11% this year to $29.3 billion. Spending is outrunning believing by a wide margin, and that gap is where wasted budget lives. Before your next upfront commitment, make transparency a term sheet item. Log-level data, sourcing disclosure, and placement reporting are things sellers produce when buyers make them a condition of the check, and almost never otherwise.

The Reading List

• WPP plans to cut hundreds more jobs this year as its restructuring continues: Cindy Rose's overhaul keeps cutting, with hundreds more roles going globally before year-end. If WPP holds your business, ask your account lead who owns it in January. (Ad Age)

• Meta's AI ad tools are creating new risks for marketers: The consumer side of this week's cautionary tale. EMARKETER's own survey work found 65% of US consumers are uncomfortable with AI-generated ads. The tools misfire, and the audience is primed to punish it. (eMarketer)

• Google changes default Local Inventory Ads behavior: Starting August 31, local inventory ads switch on by default in eligible Shopping campaigns and the old "Local products" setting disappears. Retailers with separate online and in-store budgets need to reset the inventory filter before the flip. Forward this to your ecommerce team. (Search Engine Land)

• Introducing America's Hottest Brands 2026: Ad Age's annual list rolled out last week, opening with Grillo's Pickles, Nuuly, NeeDoh, Dutch Bros, and Pink. Worth scanning for how mid-size brands are manufacturing cultural heat without mega budgets. (Ad Age)

One More Thing

Put the week's stories side by side. AI answers are consuming the pages your display ads run on. Meta's AI is redrawing your creative unless you tell it to stop. And nearly half of CTV buyers admit they cannot vouch for what they bought. Each layer of the media supply chain that automation absorbs becomes a layer you can no longer inspect by default. The CMOs who come out of this era ahead will treat verification the way finance treats audit. Not a vibe. A function, with an owner and a calendar.

See you next Monday.

- James