As AI changes how people discover products online, marketers are rethinking the traditional digital advertising playbook. With AI-generated answers reducing clicks on search results and display ads, brands are looking for new ways to reach customers.

Seattle startup MediaPact wants to capitalize on that shift.

Founded in 2026 by online marketing veteran Lacie Thompson, MediaPact makes finding and signing ad deals quicker, painless, and accountable for both publishers and companies. It has raised $200,000 in a small friends and family round, and recently added companies like BroBible, Gadget Review and Penske Media to the platform.

We caught up with Thompson for GeekWire’s Startup Spotlight to learn more about her one-person startup, how AI helped her build the business despite having no coding experience and what surprised her most about launching in a market she thought she already knew.

In 50 words or less, give us your startup’s elevator pitch?

MediaPact is a marketplace and workflow for flat-fee direct media. Buyers discover publishers, newsletters, and creators, then negotiate terms, sign the IO (insertion order), and pay, all in one place. Seller inventory is standardized to list inventory in a searchable format. It is the direct media buy without the 40-email thread.

What problem are you obsessed with solving?

Flat-fee media is a massive market that still runs on emails, PDFs, calls, bespoke IOs and a Google Sheet named “final_FINAL_v3.”

Nine out of ten publishers I have interviewed described their flat-fee workflow as exactly that: manual email threads, hand-built IOs, invoices they chase for 60 days. Meanwhile, the buyer on the other side of that thread is sitting on budget and cannot find them.

Programmatic solved this for banner ads 15 years ago. Nobody has ever solved it for this type of media: sponsored articles, newsletters, or podcast reads. I am obsessed with making a direct media buy as easy as booking a flight.

What surprised you after talking to customers?

Two things:

Supply is not the problem. I have spent 15 years in this industry, so I can sign publishers all day. Demand is the hard part. Every marketplace founder reads The Cold Start Problem and still thinks they are the exception. I was not the exception.

The buyers are much more broad than I thought. I come from affiliate and performance. Those teams live and die on click-based measurement. While they often purchase flat-fee media, they sometimes avoid the risk of guaranteed placement because of over-scrutinized click-based attribution (especially on a last click).

One hyper-performance-based agency told me flatly that this was not for them. Brand marketers who understand top of funnel growth get it. They are typically at a mid-stage consumer brand that has plateaued on Meta and Google and needs somewhere else to go. Shopper marketers are also very focused on working with partners that can reach their audience, even if they are influencing in-store behavior in ways that are difficult to measure. Said another way, MediaPact is for the marketer who uses art, the marketer who uses science and the marketer who uses both. 

How has AI changed the way you build your company?

Two ways, and the second is a strategic angle for the platform, not just an operational efficiency.

The obvious one: I built and shipped (and am continuing to do so) the entire platform with Claude Code. React, TypeScript, Supabase, Stripe Connect, the whole thing. I have zero experience writing code, managing dev teams, or product management. And now I can ship features to production within less than a day. I don’t say this to boast, but rather to show that this is a structural change in who gets to start what kinds of companies.

AI is eating the click. When ChatGPT answers the question, nobody clicks. And the content is so trusted that conversion happens at 4.4 times the rate. So brands stop competing for rankings and start competing to be inside the source material that the models cite, which is high-authority editorial. That is not just SEO anymore. It is Answer Engine Optimization, and the only way in is to be in the content. MediaPact allows buyers to do this.

What’s one thing people misunderstand about your startup?

That it is for affiliate marketers. My résumé makes people assume rev-share, cookies, and last-click attribution.

It is the opposite. Flat fee, guaranteed placement, signed IO, and automated payment. Sellers get paid for their audience and their authority, not for whatever the attribution model felt like giving them that month. Publishers have been shortchanged by last-click for decades and everyone in our industry knows it.

What’s the toughest decision you’ve made in the past year?

Launching the company and determining the real TAM. 

My network is affiliate. Those are warm calls, fast meetings, and lots of enthusiastic nodding. It would have been very comfortable to build for them. But the customer discovery data pointed toward brand marketers, shopper marketers, and media planning and buying teams—audiences who don’t know me. 

Even though I know this challenge, I’m tackling it by figuring things out as I go, in the same way I did before: by building partnerships and relationships that grant me access to the right opportunities. 

What’s the one piece of advice you give to other entrepreneurs?

Ask for help. The key, though, is that you have to give help, you must be someone people want to help and that isn’t just granted—it’s earned over years. I naturally think of asking my network for help: my friends, my family, and my advisors. But now you can also ask Claude (or your preferred AI) for help. While it’s definitely not the same, knowing when to ask whom or what for help is probably the most powerful needle-mover. 

We’ll know our company has made it when… 

I’m the most proud when I know the platform has benefited someone. Usually when that’s the case, they want to tell their friends about it. That part of the growth cycle is always the most fun for me because I have the luxury of getting out of hustle mode and into innovation mode, pushing beyond the beta, dreaming big and taking things beyond my current scope. 

When sellers tell brands “just send it through MediaPact” without me anywhere in the conversation, that will be a milestone. The day the marketplace works without the founder in the middle is the day it is actually a marketplace.

[Note: Armon Dadgar, a UW computer science alum, was co-founder and CTO of HashiCorp, a cloud infrastructure automation company that was founded in 2013, went public on the NASDAQ in 2021, and sold to IBM in 2025. In his role, he spoke with thousands of companies adopting cloud across a wide range of industries, giving him a unique perspective on technology adoption.]

Pixar released WALL-E in June 2008, almost two weeks before Apple launched the App Store. The film follows WALL-E, a robot left behind to clean up Earth after it becomes an ecological wasteland no longer suitable for life, stranding humanity out in space. The remaining human population is entirely moribund in hoverchairs and completely immersed in a digital reality.

For many years, I’ve jokingly called it a historical documentary from the future and with each passing year we seem to get closer to its dark prophecy. Today, we live in a “WALL-E economy” with apps and services that cater to convenience and human vice, but with an increasing toll to our mental, physical, and emotional wellbeing, as well as our environment. The growing capabilities and prevalence of AI risks accelerating those trends, and moving us further towards the WALL-E dystopia.

The faustian bargain of WALL-E is that we willingly trade comfort for everything, including our free will. We live a bovine existence, where we are endlessly fed content, told what to wear, what to buy, what to think, and how to vote, and in exchange we are kept safe and warm in the proverbial womb. We get our dopamine, but we never ask at what cost.

Far from being hypothetical, we can see many of these same tradeoffs in the most popular services today. The average American spends around 2.5 hours per day on social media, and for Gen Z it’s even worse, at a stunning 5 hours daily. It feels costless to scroll through memes and share posts with friends, but these services have stolen time from physical activity, connecting with friends, engaging in hobbies, and other activities that foster connection and meaning. We have a crisis of teenage mental health, a loneliness epidemic, rising political extremism, and a “friendship recession.” While correlation is not causation, it’s reasonably safe to admit it’s the phones.

Outside of social media, we have many services of convenience, such as DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Instacart, which are primarily used for food delivery. While you might think they are “luxury services,” data shows that usage is broad across income levels, and in fact disproportionately used by those who can least afford it, even trapping users with “Buy Now, Pay Later” services. The immediate convenience is undeniable, but so is the financial burden to users, damage to restaurant culture as they are forced to adapt to delivery services, and the growing unhappiness that comes with solo dining.

The WALL-E economy often pairs delivering convenience with packaging vice under a shiny application layer. Sports betting services like DraftKings, prediction markets like Kalshi, and retail options trading on Robinhood are prime examples. They are all gambling packaged up and made presentable. Chesterton’s fence reminds us that if we’ve discouraged gambling for millennia, there might be a good reason for it. Unsurprisingly, making these services available 24/7 and putting them in our pockets has led to a rise in addiction, bankruptcy, and suicide.

If the smartphone enabled the WALL-E economy, AI is going to supercharge it. AI is accelerating the ability to collect and analyze data, to highly personalize, and to target algorithmically with precision, with the intent to influence user behavior. This threatens to make the WALL-E economy both smarter and more harmful.

Targeting people who are already lonely and alienated, virtual dating services are one of the most pernicious use cases for AI. Users are willing to believe they’ve found meaningful connection with an AI while getting used to the “frictionless” interaction of chatbots makes the nuanced and ambiguous world of real people that much harder to navigate. It’s clear the cure is worse than the disease, as this only increases social isolation, leading to depression and suicide.

AI will also enable more sophisticated applications of surveillance capitalism and dark patterns that aim to manipulate user behavior. AI-driven customer profiles will determine if you are a price sensitive shopper and use that to inflate prices or apply surge pricing. Betting apps can detect when a frequent gambler hasn’t placed bets recently and give them free credits to lure them back along with a 24/7 AI-bookie that can discuss and encourage bets.

The AI-slop future of social media is clear as Zuckerberg is walking back from the metaverse and pivoting to AI. Social media platforms historically needed users to actually create content, which they could promote based on user interests. The need for content producers vanishes if content can be AI generated, perfectly tailored and personalized, endlessly. This future might increase user engagement, but would likely exacerbate the problems of isolation and alienation that we already face.

We can wax nostalgic for a simpler time, but there is no path back to before smartphones, social media, or AI. We can’t wish it away, and there are staggering amounts of capital being deployed to extend AI to every corner of the economy. While Silicon Valley might argue for “technology inevitability” and the notion that technological progress is inevitable and good, this ignores the fact that people still have agency. Most technology is inseparable from a set of social and political questions, and unfettered use is not inevitable. The recent order banning Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos model is a prime example.

In the movie, WALL-E is given the sisyphean task of cleaning up a ruined Earth. Despite his programming, he imagines a better world and rejects the inevitability of his destiny to fight for something better. Today as we consider the AI-supercharged version of the WALL-E economy, it’s not surprising that most people aren’t enthused. We are suffering from a failure of imagination for what a better future could look like instead.

The rise of “friction-maxxing” as a new trend that rejects convenience as an end to itself is a start. It’s part of the growing recognition that humans need to derive meaning from our lives and work. The growing discourse around the perils of convenience, along with individual behavior changes, help to shift the Overton window. Changing hearts and minds is a crucial step towards new regulations, which are needed to solve the social challenges more broadly. This is a slow process, but we can look to cigarettes as a good historical analogy.

Cigarette companies had a clear incentive to market and sell aggressively, and made a best effort to hide the health impacts of their products, similar to the companies powering the WALL-E economy. Eventually, it became clear that cigarettes pose a major health risk, both to the direct users and the second-hand bystanders, which prompted social changes in how they were viewed and ultimately political changes in how they are regulated. As a result, there has been a dramatic reduction in their usage today.

For the modern WALL-E economy there is no perfect, singular regulation. It requires a democratic process to balance mitigating the harms as we better understand them, with individual rights and autonomy. For digital platforms, countries like Australia and the UK are leading the way in banning the use of social media for children and teenagers, in recognition of the harm they cause. Utah is taking action against “prediction marketplaces” in recognition of them being effectively online gambling. This type of regulatory change is important to solve societal problems but takes time, especially with highly concentrated interests lobbying against a disorganized public.

Beyond just waiting for improved regulation, we can reclaim our individual agency by living with more intentionality. In my personal life, I’ve looked for opportunities to host more regularly, whether a small dinner or a large party to create and foster connections. I’ve worked to reduce the “information noise” by disabling most notifications, limiting time on social media, and spending more time reading on my Kindle distraction free. I consciously avoid eliminating all daily friction to provide a healthy level of resistance. None of these are huge changes, nor will they solve the broader problems, but they help to reshape our environment to avoid depending on willpower alone.

Changing our personal behaviors can help to insulate us from the WALL-E economy, but that isn’t enough. Taxing the profits of AI companies to provide UBI to fund “bread and circuses” couldn’t be more WALL-Esque. We should look to the techno-optimism of the Jetsons, where technology empowered humanity, and build towards a future we are excited about, rather than one we merely accept as inevitable. WALL-E is incredibly dark for a children’s movie, but the struggle of the character ultimately gives hope to a more optimistic future, and brings to mind the old boy scout motto: try to leave this world a little better than you found it.

Special thanks to Josh Kalla, Behzod Sirjani, and Kevin Fishner for their feedback on this post.

Seattle’s Cascade PBS has spun out its streaming app technology into a standalone company called Local Public, which is now building connected-TV and mobile apps for public media stations across the country.

The goal is to provide local PBS stations nationwide their own branded, station-curated streaming apps — plus tools for fundraising and audience data — as an alternative to a one-size-fits-all national app.

Local Public was originally created within Cascade PBS (KCTS-TV channel 9) to build apps for that station, which serves Western Washington and part of British Columbia. Supported by 10 Founding Sponsor partner stations, a Local Streaming Initiative (LSI) was launched to expand the platform to serve stations nationwide.

On July 1, Local Public launched as a public benefit corporation. Cascade PBS owns 100% of Local Public, but it’s expected to take on investment and be co-owned by a coalition of other PBS stations in the near-future.

In a blog post announcing the launch, Local Public CEO Kevin Colligan wrote that the company is aiming to build “a growing coalition of independent public media organizations working together while remaining deeply rooted in their own communities.”

Eighteen stations are currently using Local Public, according to Cascade PBS, including Arizona PBS (Phoenix), Houston Public Media, OPB (Oregon), Rocky Mountain PBS (Denver), Vegas PBS, WETA (Washington, D.C.), WHYY (Philadelphia), WQED (Pittsburgh), and others.

Colligan framed the launch against the backdrop of media consolidation, arguing that a shrinking number of corporations increasingly control what Americans watch and read, while local newsrooms have been gutted and replaced by centralized programming.

He also pointed to the rise of low-effort, AI-generated content as a further threat to authentic local journalism and storytelling — one he said makes trusted, community-rooted public media more valuable, not less.

“We bring a startup mentality to public media’s longstanding tradition of community service,” Colligan wrote. “We are building technology that allows stations to move faster, collaborate more effectively, and reach audiences wherever they are.”

Local Public apps currently run on 10 platforms, including Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, Google TV, Android TV, LG and Samsung smart TVs, iPhone, Android and a web video portal. NPR, radio and podcast integration is in development and expected to launch in fiscal year 2027.

The apps run on a centralized content management system, letting stations publish their own programming, build featured-content carousels and pull real-time viewer analytics. Stations can also message members and prospective donors directly within the app. The platform fully supports PBS Passport, the streaming benefit for recurring donors, and PBS Media Manager, the system stations use to manage and distribute video.

TheDesk.net reported that Sacramento’s KVIE has already relaunched its streaming app through Local Public as KVIE Plus (stylized KVIE+), offering free access to the station’s full lineup of broadcast channels over streaming alongside local programming and acquired shows, movies and documentaries. Denver’s KRMA has relaunched its connected-TV app through the platform as well

Pricing for Local Public is tiered by station size, based on how many Passport-eligible members a station has at signup. Small stations (fewer than 15,000 members), for instance, pay an $8,000 onboarding fee and $60,000 annually.

Sony announced on Wednesday morning that it plans to phase out physical media for future PlayStation games, which is a massive market disruption for an already reeling games industry. It ends trade-ins and lending, raises the overall price of entry for the PlayStation ecosystem, and turns your shelf full of games into licenses that can potentially disappear.

The news came via a post on the official PlayStation blog by senior communications director Sid Shuman. As of January 2028, all games for PlayStation platforms will only be available in digital formats, such as direct downloads.

“This is a natural direction for Sony Interactive Entertainment to adapt to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs,” Shuman writes. “This transition will enable us to align more closely with how most of our community prefers to access and play games today.”

Analysts have expected an announcement like this for some time. As per Circana senior director Mat Piscatella, physical media sales in gaming have been on a steady downward turn since their peak in 2009, hitting an all-time low in 2025. In fact, several companies have sprung up since then that treat physical games as an exclusive collectible, such as Limited Run, Lost in Cult, and Videogames New York.

US new physical video game software spending. 12 months ending May 2007-2026:

— Mat Piscatella (@matpiscatella.bsky.social) 2026-06-25T11:30:56.827Z

It’s not hard to see why Sony would make this move. We’re approaching the point that would usually mark the end of the PlayStation 5’s life cycle. Were it not for the ongoing component shortage, we’d likely have heard more about the PlayStation 6 by now. An all-digital PS6 theoretically uses fewer parts and the games are cheaper to publish, which lowers the per-unit cost for Sony as it develops the new hardware.

However, Sony’s decision to sunset physical media in a year-and-a-half is faster than most analysts’ craziest predictions, most of whom figured it’d take at least another decade to fully phase discs out. Even at its lowest point, per Circana’s math, physical media in video games represents $1.9 billion in consumer sales. That’s not insignificant.

Sony’s competitors have yet to react in any significant way. Microsoft’s next-generation Xbox, currently known under the codename Project Helix, is rumored to be an all-digital system, and Microsoft has famously been trying to get out of the physical media business since at least 2013.

That year, Microsoft announced at E3 that the Xbox One would have significant measures in place to keep players from reselling their physical games, which led to widespread outcry online. The next day, Sony’s president went onstage and proclaimed the PS4 would do none of that — which gave it a big head of steam going into a console generation Sony went on to win.

Thirteen years later, Sony is making Microsoft’s old bet.

The irony is that Sony itself underscored one of the biggest issues with ditching physical media last Sunday. On June 26, Sony sent a number of users in the United Kingdom an email to notify them that due to the end of a license agreement, 551 shows and movies that were previously available on the PlayStation Network would be removed from the service. Consumers who’d previously thought they’d made a purchase were suddenly informed that it had actually been a multi-year rental.

That’s the central problem of the streaming era for end users: you only have anything in your digital library for as long as the library’s owner decides you do. An all-digital future means you own nothing. At best, you have limited viewership rights that can be revoked at short notice.

Most worryingly, however, the shift to an all-digital future effectively raises the cost of entry to the console market, at a point when the price of gaming is already rising. If there are no physical discs for the PlayStation 6, then you can’t swap discs with a buddy or defray a purchase by trading an old game back to a store.

This is a relatively sudden disruption to the console market, and through it, to the games industry as a whole. It’s likely to have a series of knock-on effects for the next few years, and sets an early tone for the upcoming 10th generation of console hardware.

While it’s still possible that consumer outcry could get Sony to reverse course here, or offer some intermediary solution like USB disc drives, the end of physical gaming media has analysts and players alike asking a lot of tough questions about costs, preservation, and consumer convenience. The games industry is changing faster than expected in 2026, and is likely to be nearly unrecognizable by this time next year.