eMarketer discusses Zuckerberg’s latest vision for advertising and it presents a bleak picture for intermediaries:👉
The idea is that advertisers would no longer need to handle creative, production or management. They would just provide Meta with their desired outcome and Meta would deliver that.
This should come as no surprise as the digital infrastructure platforms began their disintermediation of the advertising world in the early 2000s. For proof just look at the valuations of the top worldwide ad agencies and compare to the market caps of Alphabet, Meta and Amazon.
Meta now controls 75% of all social media ad dollars in the US.
All the agencies of the world, be it advertising, talent, digital or other, have had to rush to play within the ecosystems of the infrastructure providers. Google, for example, not only is the market maker of its ad network but the dominant seller on it. It’s as if the NASDAQ also acted as the prop trading and sales desk that was the largest trader by volume on the exchange.
This vertical monopoly is precisely what the latest Google anti-trust suit is all about.
The system Meta lays out maximizes ROI in aggregate.
However with effectively one sales team handling all the volume, advertisers may not maximize their utility on an individual basis. The sales team will likely optimize for efficiency from their own cost standpoint. We’ve seen this time and time again at Google.
The eMarketer podcast episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/1njP0xk2SHA?si=KyYPzwx0joKAsvdX
Sources
[1] Mark Zuckerberg just declared war on the entire advertising industry https://www.theverge.com/meta/659506/mark-zuckerberg-ai-facebook-ads
[2] An Interview with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg About AI and the … https://stratechery.com/2025/an-interview-with-meta-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-about-ai-and-the-evolution-of-social-media/
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