Good morning {{first_name|friends}},

You know that nagging feeling when the numbers look too good? When your Meta dashboard shows engagement up and to the right, but your CFO keeps asking why revenue isn't following? Turns out your gut was onto something. Reuters just published an investigation that should make every performance marketer's blood run cold—and suddenly, a lot of those "high-performing" campaigns might need a second look.

There's an uncomfortable truth the industry has been dancing around for years: we've built a measurement house of cards. Meta's $3 billion fraud problem isn't just a brand safety story—it's a symptom of an industry that's been optimizing for metrics nobody can verify. Meanwhile, DemandScience reveals that 25% of marketing spend drives zero outcomes, and BCG confirms 74% of companies haven't unlocked AI ROI. The throughline? We're spending more than ever on tools, platforms, and "intelligence"—but the actual intelligence (knowing what's real, what's working, and what to do about it) is in critically short supply. The 2026 winners won't be the ones with the biggest budgets or the fanciest AI. They'll be the ones who finally invested in measurement infrastructure that tells the truth.

This is the biggest story the ad industry doesn't want to talk about. A Reuters investigation reveals that between 2022 and 2025, Meta's China ad revenue ballooned from $7.4 billion to $18.4 billion—and approximately 19% of it (over $3 billion annually) came from fraudulent ads promoting scams, illegal gambling, and prohibited goods.

Here's the damning part: Meta initially built an enforcement team that cut scam ads in half. Then leadership scaled it back. The fraud came roaring back, but so did the revenue. For advertisers who've been trusting Meta's self-reported metrics, this is a five-alarm fire. If 19% of China revenue is fraud, what's the number globally? Your finance team should be asking hard questions about every dollar going to Meta right now.

(Via Reuters)

The "2026 State of Performance Marketing Report" dropped today, and the numbers are brutal. A full 25% of marketing budgets are wasted on initiatives that fail to produce desired outcomes. For companies with frequently misleading metrics, that number jumps to 30%.

But here's the stat that should make data teams cringe: 87% of organizations report that their marketing investments yield unreliable or exaggerated intent signals—and only 26% of those signals convert into qualified opportunities. We've built an entire industry around optimizing for metrics that don't mean anything. The report also found that 76% of organizations create content without leveraging verified buyer signals. At this point, we're not even guessing intelligently.

(Via GlobeNewswire)

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Remember all those AI announcements from 2024? Turns out the checks cleared but the returns didn't. A Boston Consulting Group study found that 74% of companies have yet to unlock significant value from their AI investments. Forrester's numbers are even grimmer: only 15% of executives observed improved profit margins due to AI over the past year.

The problem isn't the technology—it's the implementation. Companies bolted AI onto broken data systems and expected magic. OpenAI and Anthropic are now embedding specialists inside enterprises to build custom solutions, essentially admitting that general-purpose AI isn't delivering. For CMOs who pitched "AI transformation" to the board, 2026 is going to involve some uncomfortable conversations about what "value" actually means.

(Via Reuters)

Finally, someone is putting their money where their mouth is. Netcore Cloud has launched a Variable Pricing Model for its Agentic Marketing Platform—the first in the industry to tie martech costs directly to measurable business outcomes.

Instead of paying a flat subscription regardless of results, brands pay in proportion to actual impact: engagement uplift, conversions, or revenue acceleration. It's a radical departure from the "pay us whether it works or not" model that's dominated SaaS for a decade. For CFOs tired of writing checks for tools that may or may not be driving value (see stat #3 above), this is the accountability model they've been asking for. Watch for competitors to follow—or explain why they won't.

(Via PR Newswire)

Follow the money if you want to see where the industry is heading. The Advertising Effectiveness & ROI Measurement Market is projected to explode from $4.6 billion in 2025 to $16.4 billion by 2034—a 15.2% CAGR that dwarfs most martech categories.

The drivers? AI-powered attribution, privacy-first analytics, and the desperate need for unified cross-media measurement. Translation: the industry has finally accepted that the old measurement paradigm is dead, and companies are willing to pay serious money for solutions that actually tell the truth. If your 2026 roadmap doesn't include "figure out what's actually working," you're already behind the curve. The measurement vendors are about to become the most important players in the stack.

(Via USDAnalytics)

The regulatory hammer is coming. Senators Richard Blumenthal and Josh Hawley have called on the FTC and SEC to investigate Meta for profiting from scam advertisements. The bipartisan letter cites internal documents showing that Meta's platforms may be implicated in a third of all successful scams in the U.S.—potentially accounting for over $50 billion in consumer losses.

The investigation request follows Reuters' findings that Meta's "Trusted Experts" and "Badged Partners" actively helped run prohibited ads. Meta claims it has removed 245 million fraudulent ads in the past 18 months, but the senators aren't buying it. For advertisers, this creates a new compliance question: if you're running ads on a platform under federal investigation for fraud, what's your liability?

(Via Reuters)

In a year where everyone's obsessing over AI efficiency, D&AD just dropped a manifesto that hits different. Their new campaign with Uncommon Creative Studio, titled "Is Creativity Dead or Alive?", is a direct challenge to an industry that's been "scrolling instead of doing."

The campaign argues that creativity isn't being stolen by technology—it's being left undone because we're overthinking and under-executing. "Ideas are only as powerful as the people brave enough to make them real," says D&AD President Lisa Smith. It's a refreshing counterpoint to the measurement-obsessed discourse dominating the industry. Sometimes the most valuable thing you can do isn't optimize another campaign—it's actually make something worth measuring in the first place.

(Via D&AD)