WPP US’s Trading Practices Story Has Got Me Thinking

By now you've probably seen the WPP transparency story breaking out of the US.

This is far from new news. Any client who didn't understand that their agency was trading off their media spend and earning rebates has been, frankly, a little naive. The winners from this will be the media auditing industry.  

But that's not what I want to talk about.  It’s my experience of reading about this story.

I read about it here:  https://nypost.com/2026/02/24/business/top-advertising-agency-wpp-releases-trove-of-confidential-client-data-while-fighting-suit-from-ex-employee-report/

I don't normally read the New York Post. But it’s an American story, so I went looking for American coverage. I tried to read their piece on it this morning.

I had to give up.

Not because it was behind a paywall. Not because the article was poorly written. Not because the story wasn't important.   No, because the page was unreadable.

Autoplaying Candy Crush overlay ads. Multiple Saxo Bank banner ads. Jobstreet chasing me down the screen. A graveyard of Outbrain clickbait at the bottom. Two video players running simultaneously. I estimate I generated maybe 50 impressions just trying to read one article. The actual editorial content? Maybe 15% of the page.

And then it hit me. This is my story for this week. Not about transparency. About something we don't talk about enough: how utterly degraded the advertising environment on the open internet has become.

Publishers carpet-bomb every page with inventory.  They have no choice. Behind that New York Post article is a newsroom. Journalists. Editors. An expensive (and important) operation that needs to be paid for and that’s not easy.  Even Jeff Bezos can’t afford to prop up the newsroom of the Washington Post.

News organisations are doing what they have to do. They’re selling every pixel. And the experience has become what I experienced this morning.

But here's the question nobody is asking: why are advertisers accepting these environments?

Saxo Bank advertising on a news site makes complete sense. Financially engaged readers, relevant context, right audience. But does Saxo know their ad is one of 15 to 20 impressions crammed onto a single page? That it's sandwiched between auto-playing Candy Crush ads?

Meanwhile a full-page ad in the Straits Times print edition - where there's very limited advertising nowadays - sits alone on a page, held in someone's hands. No competition. No noise. No impressions data to populate a client dashboard though… but does that really matter? Just attention.