The Other Empty Chair

The company that invented the empty chair has been accused of taking twenty billion dollars from the person who never got one.

In Amazon's early days, Jeff Bezos would put an empty chair in meetings to stand for the customer. Someone who couldn't argue their own case needed representing in every decision, so the chair sat there and argued for them. I wrote about it eighteen months ago, when I suggested that AI might finally give the chair a voice.

Last week, the Federal Trade Commission and twenty-two US states sued Amazon on behalf of a different person who never had a chair. More than a million advertisers, the complaint alleges, were told for years that they were bidding in one kind of auction while Amazon quietly ran another, and the difference cost them tens of billions.

That's the latest case in a string. Look at the fortnight that preceded it: three filings, one payer.

On 26 August, Meta settled with fifty-one attorneys general for a sum Meta itself puts at roughly $18 billion, paid over ten years, after losing two youth-harm cases outright earlier this year: a New Mexico verdict of close to a billion dollars, and a Los Angeles jury that found against Meta and YouTube in the case of a teenager known as K.G.M. Meta admits nothing in the settlement. It doesn't need to. It lost twice, then paid.

Let's be clear: with a few product exceptions, Meta makes money from one source. Advertising. The budgets of brands and businesses. This is their money being paid out now. The eighteen billion is advertiser money by arithmetic, not accusation.

In New York, the wrongful-termination suit brought by Richard Foster, the former Motion Content Group chief executive, against WPP has taken a turn. His amended complaint cites an investigation by Sony Pictures which, he says, found that in China in 2023 GroupM returned around $110 million in rebates to clients and kept around $350 million that wasn't its to keep. WPP has moved to seal the material, sanction Foster and remove his lawyers. It is contesting how he got the Sony report. It has not, so far, contested what the report says. All of this is allegation, and I'll return to why that matters.

And now on 31 August, Amazon. The complaint's language is the story: an executive in charge of Amazon Ads describing the price advertisers paid as a "proxy 2nd price that we calculate", internal documents describing an "invented auction participant", and by 2024 roughly 80% of Sponsored Products winners paying their own full bid in an auction they had been told was second-price. Amazon says nobody paid more than their bid, that winning bids fell 50% and that 92% of placements don't go to the top bidder and it may be right about all three.

Three cases in fourteen days. Now read the captions on the filings. A former employee versus his employer. Fifty-one states versus a platform. A regulator versus a platform. Not one advertiser. Not one agency. Not one of the bodies that exist to represent them.

I wrote in July, about the Chinese court case that preceded Foster's, that "Not one of those claims belongs to the advertisers whose budgets generated every yuan of it." I called the clients the missing plaintiff. That was one courtroom. It is now three, on two continents, and the plaintiff is still missing.

Here's what I can say from having sat on both sides of this table.

The holding companies and the platforms are pointing at each other constantly. Publicis audited The Trade Desk in March and told clients it found hidden fees. Jeff Green answered on his own earnings call that some agencies are "waving the flag of transparency publicly, but running from it in practice as they arbitrage in the inefficiencies of programmatic." Every holding-company pitch deck has a slide about walled gardens. Every platform sales deck has a slide about agency mark-ups. (Green announced last week that he was cutting 15% of his own staff. The most transparent platform in the chain is the one bleeding. Draw your own conclusion about what the market pays for.)

What has never happened, in twenty-five years of me watching, is a shot. No holding company has sued a platform. No platform has sued a holding company. And the client whose budget pays both of them has sued neither.

I don't know whether that's an agreement or a convenience. It doesn't matter. Both sides are paid from the same budget, and a light shone on one end of the pipe illuminates the whole pipe. The effect of an agreed truce and a convenient one is identical: the person paying is the only person who never gets to see the bill.

There are three things wrong with the version of this story I'd like to tell, and they're all on the buy side.

First, advertisers do sue. But it is small fry, so far.

They sued Meta over inflated video-view metrics and settled for about $40 million. They sued Meta again over inflated "potential reach" numbers. Nine days after the Amazon filing there is no advertiser action yet, but there is already a website called adauctionlitigation.com waiting for one. So the honest sentence is worse than "advertisers have no voice." It's that the only advertiser voice in any of these fights is a contingency-fee lawyer who takes a third, settles under seal, and changes nothing.

Second, the trade bodies did the work.

The ANA commissioned the K2 report in 2016. ISBA commissioned PwC's programmatic supply-chain study in 2020. The ANA followed with its own supply-chain study in 2023 and a principal-media report in 2024. A decade of receipts. Not one filing. Not one intervention. Not one demand for standing in a case where the money was demonstrably their members'. More effort goes into the conference than the courtroom. That is a harder thing to say about an organisation than "toothless," and it's the true one.

Third, the buy side is a co-author.

Meta's "addictive design" and our "engagement" are the same metric wearing two name badges. We bought it. We optimised to it. We congratulated each other on it at award shows. Ten years after K2, most media contracts still don't say what auction the client is in, and the agency executives Digiday spoke to last week reported that not a single client had called about Amazon. Business as usual.

And me. I have attended these bodies' conferences, filled in their surveys and read every report they've published. I believe in coalitions of common interest; I've watched them work in every other part of business. Not once, in twenty-five years, have I asked one of ours to file. The chair isn't empty because nobody offered it. It's empty because the people who could fill it, including me, kept buying.

Think of a fuel pump that counts a little more than it pours. You got the gas and the car ran fine. You just paid for gallons that never left the nozzle. The weights-and-measures inspector catches it, the gas station pays a fine, and the fine goes to the state. Not a cent goes back to the drivers who overpaid. And they keep filling up there, because it's the only station on the road.

That is this industry, with the numbers changed. Follow the money out the other side.

Meta's eighteen billion goes to the states, for youth mental-health programmes, crisis services, after-school provision. Good uses. Not one dollar returns to the advertisers whose spend funded the harm and now funds the remedy.

The FTC's Amazon complaint seeks monetary relief. If any advertiser ever sees a refund from the invented auction participant, it will have arrived by way of a federal regulator and twenty-two state attorneys general. Not the ANA. Not their agency. Not their contract.

Sony is the exception that proves the rule. They appear to be the one driver who checked the pump. They actually investigated, and it did so privately, under confidentiality, and its findings reached daylight only because a sacked executive put them in a wrongful-termination suit that WPP is now trying to seal. The single client that sat in the chair did it in the dark, and the industry's response has been an argument about whether the light was switched on legally. Meanwhile the advertiser reads about it in Digiday and increases next quarter's budget.

Trust has become a differentiator in this market, and it shouldn't be. Verification should be. Trust only does the work of verification when verification has been outsourced, and the buy side outsourced it to the two parties paid by the other side of the transaction.

Three things would fill the chair: a trade body that intervenes in FTC v. Amazon rather than publishing about it; a contract clause that names the auction, the reserve and the audit right (the MRC's transparency standards already ask the questions); and a pooled litigation fund so the plaintiff bar stops being the only lawyer in the room.

Bezos's chair worked because he believed the customer couldn't speak for themselves. The advertiser can. It has a legal department, a procurement function, a trade body and a CFO who signs the check.

What it has never had is the will.

I'm not the person to build that coalition, and this isn't a recruitment drive. It's a light. The people spending the money have less voice in these rooms than a sacked executive, and less leverage than a state attorney general and they are the only party in the whole chain who could change that by Monday.

More of these are coming. Meta's settlement ratchets upward if YouTube and TikTok sign similar terms. Foster's case has a hearing. Amazon's docket is a week old. Every one of them will be paid, in the end, out of the same budget line.

The next settlement will be settled with your money too. Which body should be sitting in that chair when it lands, and would you fund it?

Brandflow is written by Justin Billingsley, who has spent his career on all three sides of the industry's table: senior client, global agency leader, technology founder. First published 10 September 2026 in the Brandflow newsletter on LinkedIn.