Edition #504
Guillermo del Toro, Snapchat & moar AI (and new LLM advertising options.
I dug Guillermo del Toro’s quote in Variety, calling for more craftsmanship on sets rather than leaning on CGI.
Guillermo del Toro refused to make Frankenstein with too much visual effects and green screens: “I want real sets.”
“I don’t want digital. I don’t want AI. I don’t want simulation. I want old-fashioned craftsmanship. I want people painting, building, hammering, plastering.”
With the onslaught of AI generation, maybe this will become a sub category itself, or a way to define the highest budget films, real world aesthetics.
You kind of imagine that the ad world would follow suit too.
Notable stories this week
- Typepad is shutting down.
- Magnite is making pause ads available programmatically.
- How advertising became Spotify’s achilles heel.
- Agentic ad tech explained.
- Ex Twitter CEO Parag Agrawals new AI company.
- Google AI will include more links, woven into results.
- Why AI ad networks are popping up, even on ChatGPT.
- Wired and Business Insider remove ‘AI-written’ freelance articles.
- Yahoo Sports joins the FAST channel rush.
- Fiverr’s AI-generated Mascot is built to be the ‘internets punching bag’.
- AI is reducing open web inventory.
- Publisher traffic sources: Google steady but social and direct referrals are down.
- Bluesky goes dark in Mississippi over age verification law.
- Inside Amazon’s plan to clobber rivals The Trade Desk and Google in a key area of advertising.
- Perplexity introduced Comet Plus, a new tier to share revenue with publishers. WSJ also covers it.
- Pirate Wires returns to Substack.
- OpenAI Is Challenging Google—While Using Its Search Data.
- Now anyone can pay for a Substack subscription in iOS.
- Walmart backing away from Trade Desk, an Amazon Ad Tech rival.
- Example of ad in Copilot for local search.
Deals/M&A
- Honey cofounder launches Zeroclick.
Campaign of the week
- Snapchat partnered with Adweek to knock down its paywall for a day. Neat.
Smartest commentary
- “I don’t want digital. I don’t want AI. I don’t want simulation. I want old-fashioned craftsmanship. I want people painting, building, hammering, plastering.” –Guillermo del Toro.
Datapoints of note
- U.S. retail media arm Walmart Connect grew 31% last quarter and is an increasingly important profit driver.
- By 2029, Google, Meta, and Amazon are projected to capture 71% of global ad spend.
- Meta’s AI bots alone generate 52% of AI crawler traffic, more than double that of Google (23%) or OpenAI (20%).
- Nativo inventory delivers 40% higher AU scores than industry benchmarks.
Events
- What should I host next? Any requests?
That’s it for this week.
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