Through The Lookalike Glass
Eyewear company Blacksheep made a name for itself by asserting that the eyewear industry is predatory with unfairly marked-up prices. Now, it’s arguing that Google does the same.
Last month, the “Today” show aired a segment that compared Blacksheep’s $8 prescription glasses to high-end pairs surpassing $350. Search traffic skyrocketed. But the company almost immediately lost its top organic position on Google searches for “Blacksheep.”
Instead, Google replaced Blacksheep’s site with a lookalike domain that led to an error page.
Blacksheep responded on Tuesday morning with a fleet of 25 LED billboard trucks outside Google’s NYC offices that read, “SHAME ON YOU GOOGLE – from blacksheep.io.”
It wasn’t just about the broken link, either, but the sea of sponsored ads above the link.
“Google effectively forced users into the paid ads section,” Blacksheep Founder Pierre Wizman tells AdExchanger, “draining almost $100,000 from our account in 24 hours just to capture the brand traffic we created.”
When Blacksheep contacted Google about the apparent error, “we faced a wall of automated silence,” Wizman says.
“Their system didn’t just fail,” he adds. “It failed on purpose for their own financial benefit.”
Worm In The Apple
Legendary Apple analysts Jason Snell and John Gruber wrote parallel posts on Six Colors and Daring Fireball, their respective sites, about the slow and dangerous descent Apple has made by prioritizing short-term revenue over its intangible brand cache.
Apple has always eschewed being the low-price leader, Snell writes, citing early examples, such as Apple being the only laptop manufacturer not to carry Intel stickers or not loading promotional third-party software onto the device.
Nowadays, though, Apple Maps is stuffed with ads, and so is the App Store, where it’s virtually impossible to organically break into the top charts. Apple aggressively upsells what was once free creative software – at “a terrible value,” Snell notes – and uses notifications and annoying app icon badges to push AppleCare subscription plans.
“Apple’s competition is lousy with ads,” Gruber writes. “Downright lousy.”
There’s an opportunity to reestablish Apple’s brand at or even above its former pristine level, according to both longtime observers. But that’s going to require Apple leadership to say no to a lot of incremental services revenue and advertising encroachment.
M&A Palooza
It’s not quite a three-letter acronym, but ad tech still loves M&A.
During the second quarter of 2026, M&A activity across the ad tech sector rose 5%, according to Luma’s Q2 2026 Market Report. The “headline transaction” was Fox’s $22 billion decision to gobble up Roku. Honorable mentions include Walmart buying the self-serve ad platform Vibe.co and demand-side platform Viant acquiring TVision.
While the M&A growth rate for Q2 was flat year over year, Luma forecasts M&A to ramp up throughout the year, as large companies and investors chase the industry’s shiniest objects: CTV and AI.
Investors keep throwing money at companies focused on AI, including ad tech companies, and programmatic is ripe for a major AI overhaul.
On the investment side, Anthropic recently raised $65 billion while AppsFlyer closed a $1 billion funding round from a consortium of mobile marketing platforms.
Anthropic vowed not to put ads on Claude when it roasted OpenAI via its viral Super Bowl ad this year. But when startups reach the end of their investment tether, ads businesses become nearly inevitable. Anthropic recently rolled out a browser extension that serves ads while Claude Code processes prompts. The ads are not in the chatbot experience… yet.
In other words, expect AI and streaming TV to keep dictating the rise in M&A.
But Wait! There’s More!
Amazon is winding down most of its in-house flagship AI models as part of an AI overhaul. [Business Insider]
Let’s all please welcome HBO Max to the vertical video feed train. [TechCrunch]
Why media teams are reducing their number of ad tech partners. [Ad Age]
AI slop is fooling advertisers’ verification tools. [Adweek]
Streaming media captured 48.6% of TV viewership in May. [TheWrap]
