John Phelan out as US Navy secretary, replaced by Cao

This is less about the headline policy mechanics and more about the monetization of compliance friction. Any tightening of consent or device-level opt-out behavior tends to disproportionately help large platforms with logged-in identity graphs and first-party data, while hurting ad tech intermediaries whose value proposition depends on cross-site targeting and measurement. The second-order effect is that privacy regulation becomes a margin wedge: more spend migrates to “walled gardens” and retail media, while open-web CPMs and attribution quality deteriorate.

The biggest underappreciated beneficiary is retail media and commerce-linked advertising, which can preserve targeting through transaction data rather than cookies. That shift should support names with owned traffic and purchase intent, while forcing smaller publishers and ad-tech vendors to compete on lower-yield contextual inventory. Over 6-18 months, this can also accelerate M&A as weaker independent demand-side and measurement players lose scale economics and become takeout candidates.

For consumers, the near-term effect is usually opt-out inertia: default settings and friction preserve much of the existing ad ecosystem, so the damage is gradual rather than abrupt. The real catalyst would be a wave of state enforcement or class-action litigation that raises the cost of noncompliance, or a browser/platform change that reduces tracking at the source. If that happens, the repricing would hit ad-tech multiples before it shows up in reported revenue.

The contrarian read is that privacy headlines often overstate the speed of decay for targeted advertising. Marketers reallocate budgets, they do not disappear, and in a constrained measurement environment they often end up spending more on channels with clearer ROI, which can paradoxically reinforce the largest players. So the best short is not “digital ads” broadly, but the weakest links in the measurement stack with the least first-party data and the highest dependence on third-party signals.