Hold That Stock
There’s bad news afoot for agency holding companies, according to Barclays equity analysts, who have downgraded Interpublic Group, Omnicom Group and WPP.
Why? AI.
(Publicis, notably, maintained its rating.)
However, agency holdcos might just be going through a few growing pains. In the long run, Barclays and other banks are “optimistic that agencies will adapt and AI will create new opportunities,” The Wall Street Journal reports.
In the meantime, though, steep costs and education gaps are holding agencies back from making AI pay off, the analysts wrote. And Barclays was blunt: “[We] see the current low growth persisting for longer than we initially thought.”
It makes sense that many agencies are in the doldrums. By the end of 2026, Meta says, it plans to release tools that fully automate advertising and creative services on Facebook or Instagram. Which is, you know, the stuff agencies do.
But don’t worry!
Goldman Sachs analysts assuaged concerns that the AI revolution will ruin agencies.
For example, AI might unlock budgets from entirely new classes of advertisers, like small and local businesses running CTV ads. AI automation could lower the barriers to entry and “expand the number of businesses globally that deploy ad spend,” Goldman writes.
The Re-Temu
Nature is healing?
More specifically, Temu is back to advertising on Meta and Google after almost entirely pulling its ad spend following Trump’s massive “Liberation Day” tariffs announcement earlier this year.
In mid-April, the Chinese retailer only had four active ads on Meta and six on Google, The Information reports. Now, it has 610 active Meta ads and 300 active Google ads.
This return to paid media could be related to the trade agreement between the US and China last week.
But what there’s no doubt about is that Temu needs to advertise on social platforms in order to attract US users. The app’s monthly active users reportedly decreased 51% between March and June.
Or perhaps Temu wants to juice as many sales as possible as people stock up before August 12, which is when the 90-day temporary agreement between the US and China to reduce tariffs on each other’s goods expires.
That is, assuming the deadline is actually enforced, of course. (But, hey, waiting out the clock has worked for TikTok so far.)
Either way, it’s worth pointing out that Temu’s not exactly in the clear just yet. The budget bill currently making its way through Congress contains language that would officially repeal the de minimis loophole, essentially codifying Trump’s executive order into law.
The Crawling Race
Cloudflare has introduced a product that it calls “pay per crawl,” which represents a new policy to block AI crawlers from the sites that it provides infrastructure for.
Site owners and content creators “currently feel like they have a binary choice – either leave the front door wide open for AI to consume everything they create, or create their own walled garden,” per Cloudflare’s blog post.
Scraping is a big problem in web publishing.
Formerly, a search crawler like Google might visit a site a handful of times per referred visitor. But AI crawlers today are a new beast. They scrape every inch of the web constantly.
Cloudflare’s CEO previously posted that Google Search scrapes a website roughly 15 times per visitor, while OpenAI’s crawler scrapes a site 1,200 times on average for every visitor it delivers. Anthropic is at 6,000.
And that was in May, practically ages ago.
Some of Cloudflare’s publisher and ad tech launch partners include Adweek, Atlas Obscura, BuzzFeed, Fortune, Stack Overflow, The Atlantic, Raptive and the IAB Tech Lab, according to Search Engine Roundtable.
With the pay-per-crawl model, publishers can require AI crawlers to provide a credit card and then meter access to their sites. Otherwise, Cloudflare will block AI crawlers entirely by default.
But Wait! There’s More
The Senate has removed the AI moratorium from its enormous budget bill. [TechCrunch]
Most AI tech requires a huge amount of unseen labor (or “ghost work”) in developing nations to actually operate. [Rest of World]
Small businesses are getting bombarded by AI scams. [Business Insider]
The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children is partnering with GSTV to launch a nationwide campaign with the goal of finding Kevin Verville Jr., who was kidnapped 45 years ago. [PR Newswire]
President Donald Trump and Paramount Global are in “advanced negotiations” to settle their $20 billion legal dispute over “60 Minutes.” [The Washington Post]
AMC now “warns” its patrons to expect 25 to 30 minutes of ads and trailers before their movie actually starts. [The Verge]
