Comic: Picky Eater

Amazon’s advertising businesses earned a total $19.8 billion in Q2, the company reported in its quarterly earnings on Thursday. That’s up from $15.7 billion in Q2 2025, and good for a 26% year over year growth rate.

Guess there’s no pleasing investors. Despite Reddit delivering an objectively solid Q2, its stock cratered, in part because of search-related headwinds and low referral traffic.

A combination of layoffs, lawsuits and AI operating costs set back Meta’s Q2 earnings, despite increased revenue.

Omnicom is halfway through a major sell-off of IPG agencies. Its future looks healthier as it prunes lower-growth firms, including eliminating certain specialist firms and overlapping agencies in certain countries.

Earlier this month, PubMatic shelved its Prebid integration wrapper, known as OpenWrap Web, and announced it would begin recommending Playwire as an offloading-onboarding partner for the 250-odd publishers that use its wrapper.

Agentic AI shows promise for direct deals. But if Google has its way, Buyer Direct could put an end to all sorts of agentic direct sales opportunities while they’re still in the cradle.