In many ways, the week of March 23 was one of the worst in recent memory for both Meta and YouTube, as courts in New Mexico and California ruled that they were found liable for harming young users (read teenage and younger) by using addictive tactics.
Although the actual amounts of damages represent not even pocket change for the tech giants ($6 million in total in the California cases and $375 million against Meta in the New Mexico case), the specter of a tidal wave of similar lawsuits following the same blueprint could deal them a reputational blow similar to the Stop Hate for Profit boycott campaign that swelled up in the summer of 2020.
But here’s the reality, whether you like it or not: That effort spurred a short-term burst of advertisers leaving, but it was in fact short-lived. Within months most had returned in some form or another. And one major holding company executive said he expects little no impact on ad sales this time around.
“That was, I would argue, a way bigger deal, because that was peak woke and all of that, and the anti tech movement was at its zenith — and yet it didn’t really generate any long-term effects because of activism,” said the holdco executive who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The exec said no advertisers that spend on Meta or YouTube have signaled they wish to pull back on ad spend on either platform due to this week’s rulings. They did acknowledge that the cases could lead to other changes internally at Meta and YouTube.
“The strongest downside case you could make about this is that long term, it’s going to lead to changes in platform design,” said the exec. “It’s possible because some of the involved prosecutors are pushing for this, and that this will ultimately lead to court ordered design changes.”
Even so, the short- and long-term implications are minor to this exec’s thinking. “From a raw media market perspective, even in the medium term, (a three- or four-year time horizon), I don’t really see there being much of a much of an impact,” said the exec. “I think there’s an outside possibility that this catalyzes some kind of mass movement against these platforms. But it’s very hard for me to believe, just because they’re so extraordinarily popular with people of all ages.”
One major media consultant, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said the judgments rendered against Meta and YouTube are “wrong in the first place,” the consultant told Digiday, adding that all the advertisers they had spoken with are not adjusting budgets away from the platforms. “What’s happened here is not social media’s fault.”
The consultant condended that the legal term “attractive nuisance” applies here. According to a search in Anthropic’s Claude, the term means “a legal doctrine holding that a property owner may be liable for injuries to trespassing children if the property contains a dangerous condition likely to attract them. The doctrine modifies the general rule that property owners owe minimal duty to trespassers.” To the consultant’s thinking, the lawsuits do not remotely meet the criteria for it.
A Meta spokesperson replied to a request for comment, noting that the California plaintiff’s counsel sought more than $1 billion in damages, but only was awarded the $6 million (70% of the responsibility was laid on Meta’s shoulders, and 30% on YouTube’s). The spokesperson did not address the New Mexico damages.
“We respectfully disagree with these verdicts and will appeal,” said the Meta rep. “Reducing something as complex as teen mental health to a single cause risks leaving the many, broader issues teens face today unaddressed and overlooks the fact that many teens rely on digital communities to connect and find belonging. We remain committed to building safe, supportive environments for young people and will defend our record vigorously.”
YouTube did not respond to a request for comment by Digiday’s deadline.
Allison Fitzpatrick, a partner at New York-based advertising & marketing law firm Davis+Gilbert, was a little less sure of the platforms’ chances of success should a flood of lawsuits follow in these two cases’ footsteps. To her, the “addictive” argument offers an entry point for plaintiffs in the future to make headway.
The platforms “have got to really take a look at addictive feeds. Between the statutes and the lawsuits, it’s the word addictive,” said Fitzpatrick. “Until these plaintiffs picked up on this ‘addictive’ model of what they’re going to go after, a lot of these social media platforms won their lawsuits. But focusing on these addictive feeds — the way that the platforms are designed, as opposed to content — has become what appears to be a winning strategy.”
She does think that if the cases against Meta and YouTube, or even other social platforms, keep winning, changes will be implemented. “I think the social media platforms are finally being held liable for what some would say is their negligence, or turning a blind eye for several years,” said Fitzpatrick. “We’ve hit an inflection point where we are likely going to see similar cases and similar rulings, and I think it’s going to cause these platforms to make changes … If they don’t make these changes, they’re going to continue to be sued. I think they’re going to make these changes because they don’t want any more verdicts like this.”
What makes all this feel much more complicated is that the “hundreds” of cases waiting to be tried against the platforms are all state by state, which will create as much confusion as state-by-state privacy regulations have wrought on companies gathering data. “Now that there’s a roadmap to how to win these cases there, there’s a good chance they’re going to lose more cases down the road,” said Fitzpatrick.
What’s unlikely to happen, said all sources reached for this story, is a scenario like what’s happened in Australia, where social platforms have been banned from having users aged 16 and under. It’s a move that Austria just followed, although that country set the ban at age 14 and under.
“I don’t think we’re going to go there,” said Fitzpatrick. “I think that is too extreme.”
Comvergence’s agency winners and losers
Industry scorecard keeper Comvergence issued its final tally of client wins and losses among the agency community in 2025. And while there’s no shocking turnaround, the numbers do offer some insight as to where the industry is heading.
The figures are both a 10,000ft view of the agency sector and an X-ray-like revealing of its current state of health. Although traditional media agency brands Starcom, Initiative and Spark Foundry led the pack, 13% of the available billings went to bespoke agency units built for the task. Another 13% went to indie players, while Accenture bagged its first sizable media account, the $45 million Optus brief in Australia.
Meanwhile, Omnicom Media saw $2.9 billion in billings leave, retaining just $593 million, Mediabrands (then-IPG) successfully defended more than double that, $1.26 billion – a stat that serves to remind us why Omincom’s leadership has been so bullish on the potential of their combined endeavor.
Most of all, Publicis Groupe emerges as the clear leader in the figures. The Paris-headquartered group brought in over $10 billion in new client billings – fully one-third of the media spend up for grabs last year.
In a week otherwise dominated by his firm’s spat with independent DSP The Trade Desk, chairman and CEO Arthur Sadoun used the results to celebrate Publicis’ fortune and throw shade at rivals.
“At a moment when the industry is dominated by wide-ranging cost-cutting due restructuring and consolidation, Publicis is once again demonstrating its relentless focus on innovating for our clients and the strength of our growth model,” he said in an emailed statement.
“Despite Omnicom taking over IPG to become the largest player in 2026, the outstanding efforts of our teams and the scale of our growth in 2025 mean that this year we are maintaining and increasing our leadership position as the number one media buyer in the U.S. and China, the two most important markets for global clients, where scale still matters,” he added.
Publicis can credit a selective pitching strategy, investments in staff and technology for that success. The holding company hired roughly 8,000 staff last year, according to its public earnings releases, and has continued acquiring adtech and agency businesses while its American competitors have been distracted.
Its success could also be due to being in the right place at the right time, however. The overall retention rate – just 21% – was the lowest in eight years, according to Comvergence’s numbers. And almost half of the billings gained by Publicis were from clients departing WPP; WPP Media only retained 16% of the client billings it held at the beginning of the year. Perhaps the Groupe’s relative stability has provided its own differentiator amid the chaos enveloping its peer group. —Sam Bradley
Color by numbers
A recent WPP Media study suggested that advertiser demand for women’s sports has reached escape velocity — and that spending isn’t just happening around major cultural moments or tournament tentpoles. “The amount of demand around it has been proven out,” said Martin Blich, executive director and U.S. head of sports partnerships & investment, WPP Media. “Do women’s tentpoles continue to drive and keep momentum within the sport? Absolutely. But do I think that it’s the only reason? Not at all.” The study, conducted with EDO, Adverteyes and VideoAmp, found:
- 20% higher engagement for women’s sports vs. average broadcast/cable ads
- 30%: the year-on-year increase in ad airings in the last year (to 29,600)
- $127 million: the amount spent on women’s sports in the last year, a year-on-year increase of 69%
Takeoff & landing
- Dentsu’s Merkle unit’s partnership with Adobe is rolling out its first new product: a retail-media-focused industry-specific customer experience (CX) solution called Experience Concierge for Retail. It combines Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe Creative Cloud applications with Merkle’s CX transformation, technology, and data science capabilities, with a goal to adapt retail shopping from static browsing to intelligent agentic execution.
- Fortae Co. is a new full-service political agency based in Washington D.C., launched by Carolyn “Carrie” Xu, who’s held strategic roles in the Biden-Harris 2024 and Harris-Walz 2024 campaigns.
- Account moves: Independent PMG was named commerce agency of record for Glanbia Performance Nutrition across Europe and the UK … Influencer agency SAMY will run global influencer strategy for multiple Unilever brands includingHellmann’s and Knorr … Croud won pizza maker Ooni’s global media AOR assignment, which moved from in-house.
- Personnel moves: UM in the U.K. tapped Sarah Nugent to be its new CEO, moving over from a managing director role at PHD … Horizon Media named Bhavana Smith to be its COO, a new role … Novus named Krithika Rosenthal its managing director of strategy & integrated outcomes, a new role at the agency, and coming over from a strategy role at Wavemaker … Dept hired Roy Armale to be its chief product officer, coming over from WPP Open where he was chief product and growth officer … Mediaplus in Germany hired Thomas Le Thierry to a new role for the agency group, global chief growth officer, after running his own consultancy … RP3 appointed Laura Thomas as its chief strategy officer, and promoted Maja Husar to CMO.
Direct quote
“We will mostly keep humans in the loop in most of the major decisions we have in marketing, [but] we’re going to let the system run. There’s going to be a human finger on a button to say, go do that. It’s not just that AI might be right or wrong — that’s certainly part of it. But I think you do need for at least these next several cycles, however long that takes, to make sure that the decisions that the system chooses to make actually still fit strategically with the context you didn’t give it. There’s still a lot going on in the world that the AI engine is not going to know.”
— Matt Spiegel, evp of the TruAudience growth strategy at Transunion, on the degree to which AI will make decisions for marketers and agencies in the future.