Newsletter · · Ashutosh Agarwal

eMarketer Projects Meta Passes Google in Ad Revenue and Hightouch Raises 150 Million to Challenge LiveRamp - Digital Ads & Retail Media - Week of May 31, 2026

Digital advertising and retail media weekly for May 24–31, 2026. eMarketer projects Meta passes Google in global ad revenue in 2026, Hightouch raises $150M to attack LiveRamp, and ChatGPT ads look incremental rather than cannibalistic to Search.

Digital Ads & Retail Media

Week of May 31, 2026: eMarketer Projects Meta Passes Google in Ad Revenue and Hightouch Raises 150 Million to Challenge LiveRamp

TL;DR

  • eMarketer is calling the crossover. Per numbers cited on Daily Tech News Show, Meta's 2026 global digital ad revenue lands at $243.5B (+24.1%) vs. Google's $239.5B (+11.9%), the first year Meta overtakes Google. Treat as a directional read on the tape, not gospel; it's a third-party forecast that hosts surfaced, not company-disclosed.
  • The Publicis-LiveRamp deal is already attracting predators. Hightouch's co-CEO went on Marketecture to position the company as a "plug-and-play replacement for the core LiveRamp technology," timed to a fresh $150M Series D at a $2.75B valuation led by Goldman Sachs and Bain Capital Ventures. Madison and Wall's Brian Wieser has reportedly named Hightouch as the leading substitute. RAMP holders should care.
  • Quiet on everyone else. Across 753 episodes scanned, AMZN, TTD, ROKU, DIS, NFLX, WBD, WMT, CART, PINS, SNAP, DV, IAS, CRTO, MGNI, and PUBM all drew zero substantive coverage. Thin tape week.

What's new

1. Meta's projected ad-revenue crossover with Google, and why Advantage+ is doing the work. On Daily Tech News Show, host Jason Howell anchored the week's biggest narrative on eMarketer's 2026 forecast (Meta $243.5B, Google $239.5B) with Advantage+ as the explicit growth engine and over a million advertisers using it monthly. Inventory tailwinds: WhatsApp and Threads ramping. Subscription tiers (Facebook/Instagram Plus at $3.99/mo, WhatsApp Plus at $2.99/mo, Meta AI at $7.99–$19.99/mo) were framed as supplemental, not a pivot away from ads. Why it matters: if the eMarketer math holds, it validates the bull thesis that AI-bid auctions are pulling more SMB and mid-market spend toward Meta faster than Google can re-architect Search around Gemini. Daily Tech News Show, "Meta Risks Subscription Fatigue With New Plans," May 28.

2. An ex-Meta insider names the optimization stack, and starts a stopwatch. On the bossbabe podcast, Brooke Shelton (ex-Meta ad policy and AI enforcement, ex-Meta VC ads incubator) walked through what she described as Meta's internal optimization models: "Lattice," "Andromeda," and "Gem," running on what she called a "two-tower neural network" audience-matching architecture. Her practitioner take: kill all interest targeting, run one campaign per offer, and max out creative volume. The line worth screenshotting: "Creative is your bid. Nothing else." And the implicit catalyst: "There's this nine, maybe 12-month period of this arbitrage opportunity… Meta will generate everything for you. You just push a button and say, I want to spend $100." In other words, by roughly Q1 2027 on her view, Meta closes the loop on end-to-end ad creation. Product names are unverified, but the timing claim is investor-relevant: it implies another year of advertiser ROAS gains before commoditization. the bossbabe podcast, "491: An Ex-Meta Insider's Guide To Scaling Ads With AI," May 26.

3. ChatGPT advertising looks more incremental than cannibalistic, for now. On Marketecture, co-hosts Ari Paparo and Eric Franchi unpacked SimilarWeb CEO data points: 46% of ChatGPT ad exposures begin with no commercial intent; 83% of ChatGPT ad queries wouldn't have triggered a Google Shopping ad; 73% of users continue the conversation after seeing an ad; average CTR ~0.68%, with best-campaign CTR at 5.4%. The hosts' framing is the punchline: conversational intent is a new ad surface that sits adjacent to Google's declared-intent monopoly, not on top of it. Why it matters: this is the cleanest counter to the bear case that GOOGL Search is being structurally hollowed out. Worth caveating, SimilarWeb is the source, not OpenAI. Marketecture, "Episode 175: Tejas Manohar, Hightouch," May 29.

4. Hightouch raises $150M to hunt LiveRamp's onboarding business. Same Marketecture episode: Tejas Manohar, co-CEO of Hightouch, used the platform to position his company directly against LiveRamp's core onboarding workflow ("a plug-and-play replacement for the core LiveRamp technology") and to disclose a $150M Series D at $2.75B, led by Goldman Sachs and Bain Capital Ventures. The hosts flagged that LiveRamp's pending acquisition by Publicis is the catalyst (agencies and brands don't love the idea of routing first-party data through a holding-company-owned identity layer) and that Brian Wieser at Madison and Wall has publicly named Hightouch as the leading substitute. Manohar's claims are competitor talk and should be discounted; the funding and the analyst nod are the actual signal. Marketecture, May 29.

5. AppLovin launches a social app called "Gist." Paparo and Franchi caught it in the same episode: Gist appears designed to generate "exclusive monetizable traffic," i.e., first-party data and inventory that feeds AXON, rather than to build a durable consumer franchise. AppLovin has historically divested owned apps; the hosts read this as a flywheel play, not a TikTok competitor. Marketecture, May 29.

The debate

Bull case: AI tools and retail media are growing the pie and tightening the walled gardens. Meta's projected ad-revenue crossover with Google is, if you believe the eMarketer forecast, the cleanest possible scoreboard for the bull. Advantage+ is pulling spend; WhatsApp and Threads add inventory; AXON keeps minting performance dollars at AppLovin. ChatGPT ads, on the SimilarWeb read, are creating a new conversational-intent surface, incremental rather than extractive. Meanwhile the LiveRamp story is positive for the walled gardens: the more identity gets contested in the open web, the more advertisers default to Meta, Google, and Amazon's closed loops.

Bear case: saturation, cannibalization, and an open-web identity crisis. The ex-Meta insider's nine-to-twelve-month "arbitrage window" cuts both ways. Once Meta automates end-to-end ad creation, advertiser ROAS gains compress and the next dollar of incremental spend gets harder to win. Retail media at ~$129B is real but mature in the US, and we got zero coverage of WMT, CART, AMZN ads, or the CTV ad-tier names this week, a tape silence that aligns with the "deceleration" thesis, even though we should be careful not to over-read absence of news. And the Hightouch raise is a tell on RAMP: when a private $2.75B competitor can plausibly pitch itself as the post-Publicis replacement, RAMP's terminal multiple gets harder to defend.

Stocks in play

META. Bull: eMarketer crossover + Advantage+ as engine + WhatsApp/Threads inventory ramp. Bear: the 9–12 month creative-automation clock starts now per the ex-Meta insider, and once Meta makes the creative, the advertiser's incremental ROAS gain compresses. Next number: Q2 2026 ad pricing vs. impression growth split, and whether Advantage+ advertiser count remains above the 1M monthly threshold cited this week.

GOOGL. Bull: SimilarWeb's 83%-non-overlap data point, ChatGPT ads are incremental, not cannibalistic to Search. Bear: eMarketer's projected 11.9% growth vs. Meta's 24.1% is the slowest-growing scoreboard line in big-cap ads. Next number: Search RPM / paid-click trend in Q2; any sell-side check on Performance Max share gains.

APP. Bull: "Gist" launch implies AppLovin is actively investing in first-party data flywheels for AXON. Bear: social app launches with no organic distribution have historically not worked for ad-tech companies. Next number: DAU/MAU disclosure for Gist (if any) and AXON e-commerce revenue line in the next quarterly.

RAMP. Bull: the Publicis deal closes and the combined entity defends RampID via agency leverage. Bear: $2.75B Hightouch + Wieser endorsement = the substitute is already named. Next number: customer retention disclosure post-deal, and whether any major holdco brand defects publicly.

OpenAI (not listed). Daily Tech News Show cited an OpenAI 2026 ad revenue expectation of $2.5B (source unspecified, host-asserted). Worth flagging as a tape datapoint, not a fact.

Read-throughs

  • Emerging-platform ad players (RDDT, PINS, SNAP): Reddit got named only as a destination platform in Hightouch's agentic stack. Pinterest and Snap drew zero coverage this week.
  • Retail media (WMT, CART, AMZN): Zero coverage. No Walmart Connect commentary, no Instacart ad attach-rate updates, no Amazon DSP / Prime Video ad-tier signal. For a category that's supposedly the fastest-growing line in digital, the podcast silence is notable.
  • CTV and streaming (ROKU, DIS, NFLX, WBD): Zero coverage. No upfront/scatter commentary, no ad-tier subscriber updates, no TTD Kokai or UID2 discussion.
  • Ad measurement & SSPs (DV, IAS, CRTO, MGNI, PUBM): Zero coverage. The only adjacent commentary was the Hightouch-vs-LiveRamp identity dispute.

What changed vs last week

Thin tape. Three relevant episodes across 753 scanned, the lowest signal week we've had in a while. The week was dominated by Meta (all three episodes touched it, two centrally), with secondary read-throughs to Google (forecast crossover + ChatGPT ad incrementality), LiveRamp (Hightouch's competitive attack), and AppLovin (the Gist launch). No movement on retail media, CTV, or measurement, categories that usually carry at least one podcast hit per week. Memorial Day weekend likely explains some of the editorial gap; expect the volume to normalize next week as we move into June and the run-up to Q2 prints.

Forecasts cited from eMarketer and SimilarWeb were surfaced by podcast hosts; treat as directional reads, not as primary disclosures. Hightouch's competitive claims against LiveRamp are first-party assertions from a competitor, so discount accordingly.