On a recent episode of MAC’s Reality Check, Omar Oakes — journalist, editor, columnist, and founding editor-in-chief of The Media Leader — is brought on to do something the industry doesn’t do enough of: say the quiet part out loud.
Oakes currently writes the Substack Adverse Reactions. His recent piece, “If You Make $5 Billion a Year from Scam Ads, Is That a Feature or a Bug?”, landed with a jolt in advertising circles. The conversation — with MAC council members Moni Oloyede , Jay Mandel , and Jessica Smiley — covers platform economics, the collapse of advertiser confidence, and what it actually means to hold a system accountable when the system is working exactly as designed.
Scam ads aren’t a bug. They’re an output.
The episode opens with the piece’s central provocation, and Oakes doesn’t soften it.
“Scam ads aren’t a bug in Meta’s system. They’re an output of it,” he says. “A stat like $5 billion in scam revenue should be shocking. It’s actually the logical result of these platforms where they’ve been built on loose verification, monopoly power, and very low corporate governance.”
The answer to his own headline: it is a feature, not a bug.
The argument isn’t that bad actors are slipping through imperfect systems. It’s that the systems were never built to keep them out. These platforms started free, ad-free, frictionless — optimized for scale and network effects above everything else. Users weren’t verified. The algorithm was tuned to reward urgency, outrage, engagement. Then, at some point, advertising was switched on to an enormous, largely unvetted user base. The conditions for fraud weren’t an accident. They were the architecture.
Oakes points to the clearest proof: “The simplest proof that platforms endorse fraud ads is the fact that they never refund the money.”
The implication for every legitimate advertiser in the system is direct. “Every pound that a legitimate advertiser spends on a platform… they have to realize the fact that they’re partly funding a system that defrauds the consumers they’re trying to reach.”
The industry is celebrating the wrong number.
In his article, Oakes shared a graphic from a recent Credos poll, showing that public trust in advertising has been growing, but he thinks we’re celebrating on the wrong end of the number line.
“Its not high. That’s the thing. If you compare it to other industries… advertising is one of the least trusted professional industries there are.”
The figure in question — roughly 40% of people saying they trust advertising — is up on five years ago. The industry has treated this as progress. Oakes sees it differently. “If a majority of people still aren’t trusting your product, you think that’d be a cause for embarrassment, but actually they seem quite happy about it.”
The trust deficit, he argues, wasn’t built overnight. It was built incrementally, by volume.
“These online ads incrementally have brought an avalanche of new advertising into our lives in all sorts of ways. And think about it, if at least 5% of it is scammy — and that’s being generous — plus all the legitimate stuff, which is increasingly all this slop, this AI slop drowning out all the rest.”
The result is a signal-to-noise problem that no amount of award-winning creative can solve from the top down. “You can give out all the Cannes Lions you want. You can lord all the creative directors, modern day John Drapers all you want. That high-end stuff is being drowned out by all this sludge at the bottom.”
Moni presses on a related tension: the role marketers themselves play in keeping the machine running. The analytics deliver a dopamine hit. The numbers signal performance. The immediate result — the click, the conversion — becomes a proxy for confidence.
Oakes doesn’t dismiss this. He names what he sees underneath it: “This incredible lack of confidence in the principles of advertising… I think it’s fundamentally due to this mass financialization of corporations.”
The pressure to make numbers work in the short term hasn’t just changed how marketers measure. It’s changed what they believe. “For a lot of marketers, the advertising part isn’t such a big part of their day job… they just want the numbers to work. It’s just the whole vibe of everything.”
Brand building takes time. That has always been true. But the financial pressure, the quarterly lens, the CFO in the room — has made patience feel like a risk rather than a strategy.
Two different marketers. Two different problems.
The practical question gets put to Oakes directly: what are marketers supposed to do with this? He is precise.
“My advice would change depending on who Joe and Jane the marketers are.”
For the large advertiser — spending millions, working with agencies or managing in-house media teams — Oakes has little patience for learned helplessness. “If you’re working with an agency, don’t just, when you have an audit and you look at your media spend, just say, ‘oh, we can get a great deal on Instagram and Facebook advertising next year.’ Don’t just say, ‘oh yeah, that’s great, that’s great,’ because your CFO would like to hear that. What am I actually getting for this money? How am I measuring effectiveness? What value am I getting?”
The accountability is already within reach for these advertisers. The question is whether they’re actually using it.
But the conversation shifts entirely for the other marketer — the startup founder, the regional business, the small operator buying ads on Google or YouTube without an agency, without an audit, without access to any of this discourse. “She doesn’t know about all this stuff. She’s not involved in the conversation.”
This is where Oakes sharpens the critique. The accountability conversation in advertising reaches the people who already have the tools to act on it. It doesn’t reach the people who are most exposed. “The problem is we don’t talk enough to the people who are actually funding this system. And these are the small businesses who make up the majority of Meta and Google’s advertising.”
Jay notes that even a full boycott by the world’s biggest advertisers wouldn’t be fatal to Meta — they’d lose roughly 20% of revenue. The small business advertiser is the base that makes the economics work.
And they’re the furthest from this conversation.
Ask better questions.
Oakes is asked whether the journalistic instinct — the discipline of not accepting the first answer — helps him stay clear-headed in an environment designed to overwhelm.
“Of course I’m overwhelmed,” he says. Then: “The great thing about journalism… it’s all about the art and the science of asking questions.”
He describes it not as a professional habit but as a method. If you want to find out what’s actually happening, you need different tactics for asking questions than if you’re trying to confirm what you already believe. “My job here is to add value by asking questions that uncover something that nobody knew before. Or to put it in a way that makes people think about something a little bit differently.”
For MAC’s audience, this is not a point about journalism. It is a point about how practitioners should be interrogating their own media investments — not accepting the agency’s rate card, not nodding along to the platform’s pitch, not letting the dashboard tell the whole story. The question is the tool.
Advertising was part of culture. Now it’s in the dark corners.
The conversation closes on something larger than platform mechanics. Oakes draws a line between what advertising used to be and what it has become — not as nostalgia, but as diagnosis.
“In the before times… we celebrated great advertising. We recognized that advertising was part of culture.”
He uses Red Bull as the example — an ad that doesn’t make a literally true claim, that runs on TV in front of millions, that gets talked about, that lives in culture and becomes a thing. Then he places it next to what he actually sees now: “These nasty generated crypto bro things which seem to be targeted to me… only I see it in the privacy of my own phone, and it’s all kind of scurrilous.”
The contrast isn’t about production quality or creative ambition. It’s about visibility and accountability. Shared, public advertising can be scrutinized. It lives in the open. Private, algorithmically targeted advertising lives in the dark — seen only by its intended recipient, accountable to no one.
And the platforms that host it, Oakes argues, have never had any real reverence for what advertising makes possible. “They don’t think advertising is so important to media by subsidizing it and making sure that good media is accessible to all, not just the rich — they don’t think like that.”
He puts it plainly: “Elon Musk thinks advertising is for losers. He’s on record as telling advertisers to go fuck themselves if they don’t agree with his policies. There’s no sense of community. It’s my way or the highway.”
The tension the conversation surfaces — and leaves sitting — is the one that doesn’t resolve neatly: these platforms hate advertisers, and they cannot survive without them. That relationship — dependency dressed up as disdain — is the environment marketing practitioners are operating in.
Understanding it clearly is the first step toward not being defined by it.
This recap is drawn from the MAC Reality Check podcast. Follow Omar Oakes s and his Substack, Ad-Verse Reactions , at omaroaks.substack.com.
