Future of Marketing Briefing: Memes used to be a joke. Now they’re a strategy

Last month, a U.S. Special Forces soldier was indicted for insider trading — not on stocks, but on a prediction market. He had detailed knowledge of a military operation. He bet on it. The platform where he placed those bets responded to the indictment with something close to a shrug.

That shrug tells you everything about the world marketers are only beginning to understand. It’s one where a meme can move a market, and a market can become a meme. Where the internet’s lingua franca — irony, virality, the shared joke — now has real stakes attached.

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The Trade Desks’ $689m revenue beat is blunted by the departure of CSO Jacobson to OpenAI

The Trade Desk’s Q1 revenues of $689 million may suggest holding-company spats are a mere bump in the road, but confirming the exit of CSO Samantha Jacobson hours before its market disclosure shows complications can come from all directions.

The demand-side platform’s earnings release came as supply-side platform PubMatic reported revenue of $62.6 million for the period and forecast Q2 revenue of “at least $750 million.” This capped off a seven-day window when most of the leading publicly traded entities in the space likewise issued their Q1 results (see table below).

The company reported momentum in its CTV, retail media, and data-driven buying offerings, citing integration with Dollar General, LinkedIn, Netflix, PacVue, and Skaai, as well as the recently launched agentic planning tools within its Koa platform.

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