Affle agrees to buy Perion as FTC sues Toast over fees

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This is Marketing Is Calling, the audio edition of Landline, the daily newsletter from PPC Land. It's Monday, November 2, 2026 This episode is read by an AI voice.

The ad tech industry has been shrinking into fewer, bigger hands for years. On Sunday, another independent company agreed to sell. Affle, the Indian mobile advertising group, is buying Perion Network for $11.70 a share in cash. That values Perion at about $420 million, a premium of about a third over its last closing price. Here's the striking part. Perion had about $228 million of cash and securities at the end of September. That's more than half the price. So once you set the cash aside, Affle is paying less than $200 million for the actual business. It's a reminder of how little the stock market has been willing to pay for smaller ad tech companies, even ones with plenty of cash in the bank.

Perion can still look for a better offer until December 11th. If nobody beats it, the deal should close early next year after a shareholder vote and a US antitrust review.

Now to Washington, where the Federal Trade Commission went after deceptive marketing on two fronts. First, the FTC and eight states sued Toast, the company that sells software and card payments to restaurants. The complaint says Toast advertised zero dollar hardware that restaurants ended up paying for, promised support around the clock that customers couldn't reach, billed for extras nobody ordered, and made canceling slow and expensive. It also says Toast added a 99 cent fee to online orders over $10 for almost two years, kept the money, and didn't make clear the fee was its own. Toast says it strongly disagrees and will fight. Its argument is that a law meant to protect online shoppers doesn't cover contracts negotiated between businesses. That's the interesting part of this case. Toast sells to restaurant owners, not the public, and the FTC is using consumer protection rules anyway. Second, as health insurance open enrollment began on Sunday, the FTC sent warning letters to 25 companies that sell health plans or generate sales leads for them. The letters don't accuse anyone of breaking the law, and the companies weren't named, but they spell out what the agency sees as likely deceptive claims about benefits, coverage and costs, and they remind companies about the rules on robocalls and the do not call list. The penalty can reach about $53,000 per violation, and every illegal call can count as a separate violation. For an industry built on volume, that adds up fast. A court in California also kept a case alive about fake looking discounts. A shopper bought a Brooks Brothers polo shirt for $39.99, shown next to a crossed out price of $89.50.

He says that higher price was never really charged in the months before, which California law requires. The judge refused to throw the case out and refused to send it to private arbitration, because the shopper never agreed to the store's terms by simply checking out as a guest.

Next, AI shoppers. Microsoft Clarity studied more than 5 million website visits it classified as AI agents. A quarter of those agent sessions reached checkout. For people on the same sites, it was about one in seven. People, on the other hand, were far more likely to click away to another site. The takeaway? AI agents don't browse. They arrive with a job to do, and often the job is to buy. There are caveats. Microsoft didn't say how it spots agents, and a person may have finished what an agent started, but it's one of the first large looks at what agents actually do once they land. Spotting agents that hide is harder. A company called Resemble AI says six well-known bot detection tools caught only between 3 and 15% of AI agents built to look human. Its own tool, it says, caught almost all of them. That's the company's own test, though, with no independent check.

And here's a nice twist. Microsoft used an AI coding agent to shrink the clarity tracking script itself. It ran more than 50 experiments, each taking about half a minute, and cut the file by 4.5%.

As one engineer put it, tiny savings aren't worth a human's time, but they're worth a machine's. Publishers, meanwhile, are counting what AI has cost them. Digital Content Next, a trade group whose members include the New York Times, filed a brief in the copyright case against OpenAI and Microsoft. It says its members lost 26% of their unique visitors between 2023 and 2025, and that search referrals fell by a median 22% this year. Advertising is 84% of their digital revenue. The brief leans on a phrase from an internal Microsoft document, which warned that its AI content strategy had started a doom loop. Another company, Bluefish, says ChatGPT and Google recommend a different top brand and about a third of buying questions, so a brand that wins in one AI answer can lose in the other. Google added a feature to keep people inside Gemini. You can now edit documents, PDF, slides and spreadsheets that Gemini creates without leaving the chat. Gemini now has more than a billion monthly users. But a lawsuit over Gemini and Gmail isn't going away. The plaintiffs say Google quietly switched on Gemini features for Gmail users last October. A judge threw out their first complaint because they hadn't shown real harm. They've refiled and Google has asked the court to dismiss it again. In streaming, the boss of a company called In The Game argues that ad breaks could be shorter if some ads move to the pause screen, the menu or a squeezed frame beside the show. OpenX says most connected TV deals on its marketplace now use targeting from the seller side rather than third-party audience data. Amazon has put all 25 official James Bond films on Prime Video. And on YouTube, Lisa's new song, Tarantino, knocked Shakira off the top of the global chart for the second time in seven weeks.