The Trade Desk posts its first revenue decline

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This is Marketing Is Calling. The audio edition of Landline, the daily newsletter from PPC Land, is Tuesday, November 10th, 2026 This episode is read by an AI voice. Today, the Trade Desk's revenue falls for the first time since it went public. Meta explains why it needs to raise hundreds of billions of dollars. Google quietly lets AI agents make changes inside Google Ads accounts, and Disney, Xfinity, and Quince roll out their holiday campaigns.

We start with a company that, for a decade, simply didn't shrink. On Monday, November 9th, the Trade Desk reported third-quarter revenue of $736 million. That's half a percent below a year earlier, and it's the first year-on-year decline since the company listed in 2016

Now, there's a twist. It actually beat its own forecast by $86 million, and chief executive Jeff Green called this its biggest political cycle yet. But profit fell 67 percent to $38 million, partly because of the cost of cutting around 575 jobs in September. The guidance for the last quarter of the year sits about 11 percent below last year.

Green told analysts something worth hearing. The people who decide where the money goes are changing. It's less and less the hands-on traders and more and more senior agency leaders, procurement teams and chief executives. And on acquisitions, he was unusually candid. He said the company is looking more now than it historically has.

A smaller rival already went shopping. Viant bought Waymark, an AI tool that turns a brand's inputs into a finished TV ad in minutes for $20 million. Its pitch is simple. TV, says chief executive Tim Vanderhoek, is no longer reserved only for the world's largest brands. And the data backs him up. The Video Advertising Bureau counted 160 brands who bought national TV for the first time in the first half of 2026 Between them, they spent $355.6 million and AI and pharma brands took 43% of it. In audio, Sirius XM named Tubi's chief executive, Anjali Sood as its next CEO starting January 1 Jennifer Witts steps down after nearly 25 years at the company. Now to the price of artificial intelligence. Meta is creating a new class of shares with no voting rights. Why? Because its own forecasts say it may need to raise hundreds of billions of dollars starting as early as this fall. Its advisors estimated Meta could raise about $700 billion in equity before Mark Zuckerberg's share of the vote dropped below half. A committee of independent directors wrote that timing matters to secure capital before competitors saturate the funding options. Analyst Benedict Evans summed it up. This, he wrote, is quite the paragraph from Meta.

Google showed where that kind of money goes. Its AI chip business now has nearly 100 customers, and it introduced two more chip systems, making four in a single year. It also opened Pathways, the system that trains Gemini, to cloud customers. OpenAI is now selling ChatGPT enterprise through Amazon's cloud marketplace, and at an industry event, OpenAI's head of monetization, Benji Schmeier, told ad partners there are things they'd like OpenAI to do that it just can't because of user trust. He declined to own a reported target of $100 billion in ad revenue by 2030 There's a human cost. Vodafone Germany is cutting 2,300 jobs over two years while using AI to create and steer its advertising campaigns. Which brings us to the agents. A Washington think tank, the Open Markets Institute, published a 71-page report warning that Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta could come to dominate AI agents. Its key line is this, an agent doesn't present options, it selects them. Whoever owns the agent gets enormous influence over what people buy. Spain's data protection authority came at the same problem from the user side with a 10-point guide. The principle is that the agent prepares and the person approves, and it warns that every email and web page and agent reads could carry hidden instructions. Here's a story Google advertises should notice. Google's open-source Google Ads MCP server, the bridge that lets AI agents talk to an ad account, quietly gained four write tools. Agents can now create assets, upload videos and manage labels, and those tools are switched on by default. They still can't touch budgets or bids, but the server can't check whether a human actually approved a change, and Google's own guide still calls it read-only.

In search, Glenn Gabe found that after AI overviews launched in France in July, one French site's daily clicks fell from about 750 to about 400 with impressions unchanged. Three of the five sites he studied lost between 45 and 70 percent.

Google is also testing AI-generated summaries above and inside search ads on mobile, naming each advertiser in the block.