THE BRIEFING

WHO GETS A SAY IN THE PLATFORMS?

AMAZON’ S US $ 19.8BN QUARTER OF SPORT

Amazon’ s advertising arm reached US $ 19.8bn in second-quarter revenue, with live sport doing the selling as NBA coverage joins Thursday Night Football on Prime Video. Advertising now grows faster than Amazon’ s retail business, and its expanding sports rights have become the wedge prising premium video budgets away from the linear television schedules that once owned them.

WHAT ATTENTION COSTS NOW

Disney’ s opening ask for 30 seconds of Super Bowl LXI airtime

the minimum tracked queries the IAB says produce decision-grade AI visibility data

Marketers now route the bulk of their budgets through Amazon, Meta and Google, which makes platform governance a marketing question, and a new paper from the University of Auckland offers some of the most constructive thinking yet on how it might evolve. In‘ Reining in Big Tech Corporations’, written for a recently published Cambridge University Press collection, Professor Susan Watson argues the platforms have grown into essential digital infrastructure, and that the people who depend on them most, from users to employees, deserve a formal voice in how they are run. Her proposals include licensing major platforms and sharing governance rights with affected communities. Susan, whose paper pairs real admiration for capitalism with a reformer ' s to-do list, argues its newest giants can be reshaped to serve everyone holding a stake in them, which for the brands funding those platforms would mean steadier ground to build on.

Professor Susan Watson University of Auckland

16 October 2026