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The Refresh News: June 2nd - Interview with James Rosewell on Saving the Open Web + AI Anxiety and Media Upheaval on The Refresh weekly news
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Ad Tech God
Welcome back to today's episode of the Refresh, your weekly download on what's shaping the world of advertising media and ad tech. I'm your host and co founder of Market Adtech God. In this episode we're joined by James Roswell, the co founder at Movement for an Open Web, also known as Mo, as well as 51 degrees. Before I start the interview, just a few architecture media announcements. We are going to be at Cannes. We have live interviews scheduled with many. Reach out if you'd like to talk. We also have our series called Hot Yachts. It's basically similar to what we did in Miami called Preach on the Beach. We're going to be rolling out content live while we're there and posting it across LinkedIn and our social channels. And last but definitely not least, Ad Tech God's having a party with Adweek at the Majestic Hotel on that first Monday of the event. We will be announcing and sending out invite lists shortly, so stay tuned as that starts being sent out. James, thank you for being here and thanks for responding to my LinkedIn.
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James Roswell
Well, thank you for inviting me. Pleasure to be here.
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Ad Tech God
So James, looking at your background like it's really diverse, incredible background in the space. Can you just give me like a quick two minute of, you know, how you started this movement for an open web company and then maybe what the open web means to you? That could differ to what it means or how I define it myself of course.
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James Roswell
So I'm an engineer and then became an entrepreneur when I started a data business, 51 degrees. We do device intelligence, IP intelligence, location information, et cetera. And on 26 January 2020, I became aware of Privacy Sandbox as something that Google were going to promote. I'm based in the UK and I contacted the Competition and Markets Authority, which I think many people now know as the cma. The UK cma. And I wrote them a letter about some of the engineering impacts that Privacy Sandbox was going to have on myself, my customers and the market. And to keep a long story short, I ended up coming into contact with other professions, economists and lawyers as a result of this and in doing so raised the question, well, what happens next? The CMA were doing a market study at the time. They published in July 2020, still the most comprehensive study of the advertising digital ecosystem. And in the uk they like complainants to come forward. Same in Europe, they like complainants to come forward and we were encouraged to come forward. So we formed Movement for an Open web as a not for profit when it was clear that the CMA were going to be very receptive to our concerns. And then that ultimately led to the commitments that many of you know about in relation to Privacy Sandbox. But the same arguments were made to the European Commission and the DOJ and the Texas Attorney General and others, and they've fed through into cases and statements of objection over the last five years. So we've grown over those five years and our focus is really on defining the modern open web and guiding through regulation and outreach like this towards that outcome. And what we mean by a modern open web is it has to have certain features, it has to offer advertisers a good return on investment. They need to have it as a viable option compared to other medium they can spend their money on. In order to get a return on investment. It has to encourage publishers to come forward, it has to protect content rights holders rights at a hot topic at the moment with AI, it has to be something that people can trust. So there's a lot of features that the open web needs and sadly some of those features are lacking at the moment, very difficult to achieve or there are competing concerns. So Movement for an Open Web is trying to educate regulators, the market and technical standards bodies in order to bring the web back to perhaps what it once was in 1999.
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Ad Tech God
So the regulation, the antitrust has been like a hot topic for a while now. The judgment's out for the antitrust for Google at a high level. How has that changed what the Industry will look like. And with Privacy Sandbox, is it being sunset or is it just not as important? How does that change people that were interested in Privacy Sandbox or weren't?
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James Roswell
Well, I think we got associated with Privacy Sandbox because that was the subject of our initial complaint. But as I've just described, our concerns are a lot wider than that. Apple, att, itp, for example, are all subjects that we're interested in. It all relates to that vision. In relation to Privacy Sandbox. Google have now done what they should have done at the very beginning. Privacy Sandbox can now compete on its merits. And they're not using the stick of the cookie in order to drive adoption. People will use it because it's a better solution. Just like Henry Ford didn't go around and poison all the horses to drive adoption of the automobile. He produced a better personal transportation solution.
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Ad Tech God
Competition.
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James Roswell
Yeah, exactly. So we're very much about the free market and the role of the market. So Privacy Sandbox can now compete on its merits. Now, we now know from all the testing that was done, so it's not been a complete waste of five years that the value and utility of interoperability enabled through third party cookies or other similar mechanisms, you know, has very much been proven. So with all of Google's infinite money, these sorts of pet solutions really aren't cutting the mustard yet as far as publishers and advertisers are concerned. And as long as the interoperability continues, then the market can function and ideas can come forward. And now maybe more ideas, maybe better ideas will come forward. So that's very exciting.
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Ad Tech God
You had commented about the importance of web browsers. We've talked a lot about cookies, alternative IDs in the space, the antitrust. But web browsers rarely comes up. I think we all know the association of cookies in web browsers and we understand how that plays a role. But you seem to have a different perspective on web browsers and even some sort of standardization. I'd love to hear that and what that means for the space and what you're really pushing towards.
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James Roswell
Well, the space of the web browser is ultimately the sort of crucible of collusion effectively between Apple and Google and Mozilla. So we now know, I mean, we knew some of this before the DOJ case and the evidence that came out that basically Apple had every incentive to produce ITP and ATT because it meant for an audience on an Apple product, the addressability could only be achieved through Google's product, where they were providing all that logged in data and facilitating all that logged in data. So that resulted in a 36% or the results of that 36% revenue share with Google on Apple products equated to tens of billions of dollars for Tim Cook for doing virtually nothing other than employing three browser engineers to restrict interoperability in Safari. And they did the same in iOS as well through ATT, which is relatively well known. So I think through conversations like this, we really need to raise the importance of the web browser and the operating system as the gates. And it's control over those gates that these two companies want to retain. I think Google, in their case with Judge Meta, it's been suggested by the DOJ that they need to divest Chrome. The DOJ have reached that conclusion because they now understand exactly how much control over the market Google's ownership of Chrome gives them. And of course we've got Android as well, which is yet to be tested in the US at least the same is true of Apple as well. So I think the browser vendors, Apple and Google, have done a good job from their perspective of kind of diverting and for the industry not to talk about these gates. And they've made it really complicated by, you know, involving standards bodies like the W3C and the IETF, the Internet Engineering Task Force as well, which just normal people wouldn't attend and wouldn't necessarily be able to follow. But this is the key effectively to the future of the industry because through the control of these gates, they can set the rules. So ultimately, what we need to see, and I think we'll get there over the next two or three years, is regulation around the web browser and around the operating system, just like we see in say, telecoms and payments. These are tools that are part of common carrier. These are laws that go back hundreds of years on both sides of the Atlantic. But what Google and Apple have been doing is exactly that. They've been interfering with communication and that's why the web browser is so important. And finally, the web browser has effectively become a piece of public infrastructure. We haven't paid for the web browser correctly. It's come from a byproduct of a very complicated model where there's a load of counter incentives effectively that banks and shops have been kind of getting a free ride on this access method effectively. So we need to look at how we properly fund the web and recognize the value of each of the components. And again, I can see that offering a huge amount of opportunity, not just for the advertising industry, but the digital industry as a whole. We could see another golden age of digital in the next couple of years.
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Ad Tech God
What would regulation be? What would it look like? Would it be just the inability to do what they're doing today? Does it mean paying the dues for the browser differently? How would you change this and how would regulation be applied to the browser to not give so much control?
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James Roswell
Well, I think regulation has to be as simple as possible to drive the most amount of benefit for society. So one is separating ownership, for example, or at least an organizational remedy where it's ring fenced from the rest of the business. It has to be run at arm's length and has to be running following certain laws that wouldn't necessarily apply to the rest of the business. And then it needs to be restricted into, you know, what it can do. So, you know, the owner of an airport can't also operate an airline. So, you know, we would have those kind of restrictions in place. And as I say, once you put those restrictions in place, the economic model to maintain the web browser engine starts to change because you don't get, as Google, the benefits effectively associated with the advertising or the sign in service or tying maps and search and all these other things. So that means we've got to face up to what that challenge means. And that means more diversity of funding. But also the features that go into the web browser need to be distributed like we have with other aspects of computing. So if you are producing the best password manager in the world, why should you also need to operate an entire browser stack in order to get that password manager out there? So there's something called extensions which exist today. We can make much more use of extensions and actually start to treat it more like a series of applications for these additional services that could then also include advertising, sign in services, et cetera. So with regulation backing that up so that the monopolists can't abuse their control over the gate, we can actually get towards a better future where there's more innovation.
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Ad Tech God
James, there's been a lot of change politically everywhere in the last few months or over the last year. Does that play a role in benefiting or not benefiting these types of initiatives?
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James Roswell
Yeah, if you went back to November, I think everyone was kind of scratching their heads going, well, I'm not going to give you an answer to that question because we just don't know how the cards are going to land. Right.
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Ad Tech God
Nobody knew.
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James Roswell
Nobody knew. We know now. Okay, so a lot of the cases in the US were brought under Trump 1 and Trump 2 is continuing there. There's no change of direction whatsoever. What I'M seeing is that the motivation is changing. So it's not just the antitrust side of things, it's also a freedom of speech issue now for the Trump administration. So there's even more ideological motivation to do this and to remove the stranglehold that the monopolists have over communication. Effectively coming back to the common carriage that I mentioned earlier. So that's good because it now means the European Commission and the uk, who are the notable other regulators with all the things that were going on, wanted to understand where Trump too was going to be in terms of these issues. So they can now move forward, not worried about creating tension between the US and the Europeans. So overall, whatever you like to think about the various different politicians and governments, I think we're seeing more unity, more direction and different motivations, though, on the US side, which as far as we're concerned, is a. Is a good thing.
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Ad Tech God
Where do you see things heading over the next year? What are, what are some of the big opportunities that people listening can look forward to?
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James Roswell
Well, I think it's inevitable that Google are going to appeal. What we are asking the judge to do and the DOJ to ask for is during that appeal, Google will not be able to change their products. So they can't just run out the clock and the market gets some certainty. So they go, well, there's a timeline for the appeal. It's going to be two years over this timeline. We're going to keep having IP addresses and we're going to keep cookies and all these things. So we need market certainty. That has been my biggest frustration over what happened with the commitments that the CMA entered into, is they kind of created a form of purgatory. We asked them to use interim measures to effectively do what I've just described, which is to prevent Google from degrading the interoperability. By all means, work on privacy sandbox, but let it compete on its merits. Don't use this stick. So anyone who's listening, if you have the means, then write to the doj. If you don't write to me, contact me through all the usual channels and we can help you kind of get your voice heard. But I think that's really important, otherwise we'll just end up with more uncertainty during the appeal process. We've also got the European Commission issued a statement of objections in June 2023, which has gone virtually unreported anywhere, even in Europe, not just in the US and they were pretty clear about the need for divestiture. But the way things play out in Europe is. There's a lot less theater, virtually no theater. It happens behind closed doors. And then you get these sort of statements. I'm expecting a statement within the next few months in relation to the European Commission, which will mirror the US largely. That would be what I'm expecting. And then the cma, they got new powers in May last year. That came into effect at the beginning of the year. So they now have, like superpowers compared to what they had when we raised our original complaint in 2020. And it looks like they're going to use it. So we're going to see more slowing down of the big tech plans. And I hope by the end of the year there's more discussion around Apple and starting to look at how do we repeal things like ITP and ATT to benefit the market.
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Ad Tech God
James, where can people learn more about this? Because some of this stuff maybe I was aware of at a high level, but where can people go to read up on the status that's easy and centralized?
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James Roswell
Well, we have a list of articles on our website, so movement for an openweb.com news. We also have a newsletter, comes out once a month. And of course, we're on predominantly LinkedIn now. There's a limit to how many social channels we can handle. We're not all as omnipresent as yourself. So LinkedIn is where we tend to put notices out there. And we have quite a broader audience, so we do try and flag, you know, who the audience is. So if, you know, competition lawyers are different to people who are working in the advertising or publishing industry. So, you know, don't necessarily read everything that we put out there. But we'll try and market for sort of general consumption and try and keep the gist.
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Ad Tech God
I'd love to introduce you to the Monopoly Report, which we write about at Architecture. It's written by Alan Chappelle. He has a great newsletter. So after this podcast, I'll make an introduction. He is a privacy competition expert, writes about this, has a podcast about it. I think you guys would have a great conversation where you can dig in deeper.
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James Roswell
Yeah, we know Alan very well. He's one of our kind of friends of mayor, shall we say.
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Ad Tech God
Great, great.
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James Roswell
And he is particularly good at summarizing these things for a wider audience. I'd say our strength can often be talking to regulators. I mean, it's undeniable that we've had an impact with regulators. Our messages landed. It's not just been us, of course, there's been others as well. But Alan does write incredibly well for a wide audience on quite complex subjects. So yeah, definitely following Alan is a good shout out.
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Ad Tech God
Amazing. Thank you. James. Thank you for joining me today. And thanks for just giving us an overview of what's happening and the importance of your nonprofit.
- [18:19]
James Roswell
Thank you very much. I look forward to possibly meeting in Cannes.
- [18:22]
Ad Tech God
Maybe. Maybe. I'll be there. Thank you James.
- [18:25]
James Roswell
Thank you.
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Ad Tech God
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Kate
Brace yourselves, we're about to get a little bit existential. To be fair, the past couple weeks in adland in general have been somewhat existential thanks to AI antitrust trials and ongoing streaming trends. So we're going to talk about it. I'm Kate with Market and this is the Refresh, your weekly download on what went down in advertising. Today is Monday, June 2, and this week we're covering WPP's Group M rebrand, the conclusion of Meta's antitrust trial, and Nielsen's the Gauge report for April. So let's get into it, starting with wpp, who just gave its media division a fresh look and outlook. Along with a new name, Group M is now officially WPP Media. WPP framed the rebrand as an effort to align the media investment army, formerly known as Group M, more directly under the parent brand, positioning WPP as a unified AI first enterprise, powered by its flagship platform, wpp. Open to support the overhaul, WPP launched a sleek global B2B campaign built around intelligence, simplicity and scale, using AI at every turn. Personally, I think the campaign could have used more of a human touch, and an almost 90 second video spot was entirely too long and lacked focus. Internally and among facets of the industry, the rollout has largely been received with negativity. Just days after the rebrand was announced, layoffs quietly hit WPP's media agencies. Staff reported being locked out of systems without notice and in a town hall shortly after, leadership confirmed that up to 45% of employees would be impacted. While the messaging is all about future facing clarity and AI powered integration, the immediate impact inside WPP has been confusion, cuts and a lot of unease, and these feelings have started to spill over into the overall industry. I want to zoom out for a minute and talk more broadly about an overall mood shift toward AI that I've felt happen in the past week or so. And maybe you felt it too. Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT back in November of 2022, there's always been some level of apathy, skepticism, disdain, or outright rejection of generative AI. But recent events and announcements surrounding AI have quickly soured the mood and narrative on a larger scale. For example, Google's VO3 release is a little too good, immediately spewing hyper realistic video content, while Anthropic's Claude Opus 4 model carried out sophistic blackmail techniques against its creators. And then you have recurring pivots toward AI first, business priorities and platforms like we saw with Microsoft shutdown of Invest, formerly known as Xander, and of course WPP's rebrand and restructure of Group M. And these business decisions, of course, have had very real human impacts in the form of job loss. Alongside Microsoft and wpp, Business Insider also experienced significant layoffs this past week. What's becoming central to the conversation is that AI is advancing and being made accessible at a rate that we've never seen tech advance at before, and we're having a hard time keeping up. This rapid pace of innovation creates a legitimate business imperative to move at a similar speed. Whether they like it or not, companies are being forced to take on a move fast and break things mentality. Google's IO conference last week was a giant tell that they can no longer afford to take a conservative approach to AI in the name of maintaining the status quo with advertisers, publishers and consumers. While there are obvious upsides to being an early mover, there are also obvious harms. There are virtually zero guardrails on AI right now. In fact, in some cases, we seem to be going backward. OpenAI was just ordered to stop deleting chat data, full stop in their ongoing lawsuit with the New York Times. Regardless of legal demands like HIPAA compliance, deception has never been easier or more convincing. Phishing scammers have even been able to pull off attacks in Icelandic, a language only 350,000 people speak. And of course, the AI replacement jobs that we've been promised aren't being created at a rate that keeps pace with jobs that are being eliminated because of AI. We're being rushed into a future that isn't sufficiently accounting for the very real human impact this transformation is having. As society's mood ring on generative AI darkens, I can't help but wonder if calls to action to rein in the technology will be launched, and if so, will they grow loud enough to be effective? Moving over to Meta, whose antitrust trial officially wrapped up last week after seven weeks in court, with the FTC pushing to unwind the company's acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. At the heart of this case was the FTC's allegations that Meta pursued a buy or bury strategy, alleging that the company deliberately neutralized competitors by acquiring them. The FTC introduced internal emails from as far back as 2012, including one where Mark Zuckerberg floated acquiring Instagram to, quote, neutralize a potential competitor. End quote. Not exactly subtle. Meta, of course, defended its moves by saying these were approved acquisitions made in a very different regulatory era, and that both apps have become more successful under Meta's stewardship. The other factor the fate of this case is hinging on how the court ultimately defines the market that Meta is competing in. The FTC sought a narrow definition that primarily included Snapchat, while Meta focused many of its arguments on proving that they face sn sizable competition from other social powerhouses like TikTok and YouTube. We're now in the post trial waiting game. Each side has four months to make its case in writing, so we're going to need to sit tight for a while until we have a decision. Regardless, alongside Google's antitrust cases, this case is one of the most consequential tests of antitrust enforcement since Microsoft in the late 90s. One thing from this trial that I haven't been able to stop thinking about is Mark Zuckerberg's admission that social media isn't all that social anymore. And it's definitely not great at fostering community or connection. And honestly, I think most of us would agree we've become slaves to the algorithm, whether actively trying to please it in order to get viral fate to smile down on us, passively consuming content it deems worthy of surfacing or succumbing to the rage bait it seems to favor. And maybe I'm projecting my own experience here, but most of the time I think the consistent prevailing feelings we have when we exit our social apps are boredom, unfulfillment or anger, possibly some combination of all of these. At the same time, the creator economy that thrives on social media is projected to grow big time, and I still believe there's strong potential for brands to generate meaningful impact with these creators. But I also think we should start reevaluating the value and purpose of these investments. They're increasingly better suited for pushing a quick sale rather than creating genuine connection. That fosters deeper brand loyalty in a disconnected digital first world populated by screen zombies. What does it mean for a brand to build legitimate community and connection? What is the value of that connection? And do you as a brand, find it valuable enough to pursue? Finally, Nielsen's the Gauge report for April 2025 is out, and while the trend lines haven't changed much, the numbers keep reinforcing the story. Streaming now commands a whopping 44% of total TV usage, up half a percentage point month over month. Broadcast and cable remained relatively unchanged, landing at 20.8% and 24.5% of total TV viewing time spent, respectively. While YouTube and Netflix remained dominant on the streaming side, Paramount saw the largest monthly share increase among all media companies, capturing 8.9% of total TV watch time. Vouching for Paramount for a quick second here, they actually have some great content. I highly recommend Mobland. However, their ad load can be kind of a turn off. Speaking of ads, Nielsen reported ad supported TV viewers account for 72% of all viewers, with streaming seeing 42% of viewers as ad supported. When it comes to where all this growth is coming from, streaming viewership was bolstered by, you guessed it, live sports and crowd pleaser shows like the White Lotus. The top streaming title of April is one you might not guess though. Grey's Anatomy Millennial Nostalgia as a coping mechanism for the win. That's all we have time for today. Thanks for joining us for the refresh and we'll catch you next.