Disney’s $1B OpenAI Bet, Netflix Bids $72B, Social Media Ban & 15% Agency Job Cuts
Welcome back to GTMN! Austin and I are thrilled to be approaching our 10th episode milestone—we made it beyond what 90% of podcasts achieve! This week brought some massive headlines that are reshaping commerce, media, and agency structures.
A quick word from our favorites
Before diving deeper, we had to celebrate a personal milestone—our first sponsorship! I got to tell the story of how I met Mitchell, the founder of Kondo, a tool I describe as “superhuman for LinkedIn”. If you’re looking to control the chaos of your LinkedIn DMs, you’ve got to try Kondo. Austin and I were both early subscribers because we needed a way to manage the DM noise and its a tool we can’t live without now!
The streaming wars get serious (and AI Gets IP)
We kicked off with a huge piece of breaking news: Disney is investing a billion dollars in OpenAI in a deal to bring characters like Mickey Mouse and Luke Skywalker to Sora’s AI video tool. This is fascinating and definitely confirms our earlier prediction that major IP holders would want to be integrated into Sora AI. This shift might just shape what content deals with OpenAI look like over the next couple of years, essentially turning valuable IP into something akin to “game characters” that users can interact with through the AI.
“...will actors become just like game characters and you’re you’re playing with these with this IP that’s basically what’s happening in Sora...”
Right alongside that, the streaming landscape saw a tectonic shift: Netflix made a bid for Warner Bros. for $72 billion. As Austin noted, streaming is definitely eating linear media. If this acquisition goes through, the combined entity could generate U.S. ad revenue of roughly $2.3 billion. Critically, this consolidation is expected to strengthen Netflix’s negotiating hand due to their combined inventory and audience. Experts predict this would put upward pressure on CPMs and stall some of the advertiser-friendly pricing trends we’ve seen recently, which is a key side effect of consolidation in the media buying market.
The AI slop backlash and the power of creators
We had to spend some time on the dangers of using AI for the sake of AI, particularly concerning the infamous McDonald’s Christmas ad in the Netherlands. McDonald’s released a 45-second commercial created entirely with generative AI that suggested escaping holiday chaos—like family stress, burnt cookies, and shopping disasters—by hiding out at their restaurants.
The ad was met with massive backlash and widely mocked as depressing, creepy, or “AI slop”. The execution hit a backlash threshold because consumers rejected the work they saw as soulless or cynical, especially during a culturally resonant time like Christmas. The visuals were found to be uncanny, glitchy, and emotionally hollow, lacking the warmth people expect from holiday work. Marketers, the lesson here is clear: don’t use AI just to use AI.
I think people are afraid to be creative like there’s been so much washing of what is acceptable and appropriate in today’s kind of political and socioeconomic landscape that people are afraid to take risks...
This need for authenticity is backed by new data from TikTok confirming that creator-led ads generate significantly higher engagement than non-creator ads. The data shows creator ads have a 70% higher click-through rate (CTR) and 159% higher engagement rates compared with non-creator ads purchased at the same cost per thousand impressions (CPM). This performance gap exists because of the creators’ cultural fluency and the trust they build with their audiences, making their content far more compelling and actionable.
This authenticity shift is impacting B2B, too. The old-school automated outbound campaigns—the “spam 100,000 people” motion—is failing because the channels are saturated. A lot of companies are now going back to the roots of high-quality, high-touch outreach. For B2B, we’re seeing startup founders moving budget from paid ads into influencer ads on LinkedIn, where paying a creator to talk about a product converts leads highly effectively.
The end of the “Agency as Agent” era?
The juiciest industry news came from Forrester, which predicted a 15% agency job loss in 2026, following an estimated 8% cut in 2025. This decline is driven by AI, automation, consolidation, and structural pressure on the traditional labor-based agency model. However, the global advertising market is more resilient than expected, with WPP raising its guidance, forecasting global ad revenue will grow 8.8% this year (totaling $1.14 trillion) and another 7.1% in 2026. This shows a significant juxtaposition: spending is increasing, but agency headcount are dropping.
..when you have an agency whose goal is percent of spend like that is a f$%#$ waste of money like because their job is to spend money not to be efficient.
The classic agency model, where they act solely as client advocates selling hours and talent, is being redefined. Agencies are pivoting away from being pure “agents” and are instead evolving into hybrid enterprise vendors that sell products, platforms, inventory, and outcomes. This means they are becoming “principals as well as agents”. The economic forces driving this include eroding retainers, marketing insourcing, procurement squeezing margins, and AI cutting out repetitive roles. For agencies to thrive, they must pivot to productized offerings and own IP, while talent needs to embrace deep strategy, technology fluency, and creator ecosystem skills over execution-heavy roles.
I think you’re going to spend more money behind bad money bad data bad creative and the reduction in the human force is actually going to make this worse not better...
Regulation and ad tech updates
We wrapped up with two pieces of important news:
1. Australia enacted the world’s first nationwide ban on social media accounts for anyone under 16. Platforms like TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and X must take “reasonable steps” to block these users and implement age-verification systems, such as document uploads or camera/biometric checks. Critically, the law doesn’t punish children or parents who bypass it; instead, enforcement targets the platforms themselves, which face fines of up to A$49.5 million for non-compliance.
2. Google has launched the Data Manager API. This is a new centralized ingestion API that gives advertisers a simpler, unified way to feed first-party data—such as customer lists, offline conversions, and event data—securely into all of Google’s advertising systems (including Google Ads and Display & Video 360) using a single programmatic endpoint. This move consolidates what previously required multiple custom tools, custom pipelines, or manual uploads. If you like Meta’s Conversion API (CAPI), this is Google’s comprehensive answer.