Edition #513
Coca Cola hits repeat on its AI generated holiday ads, Obey your thirst Puck <> Air Mail merge.
Coca Cola dropped their latest Christmas ad this week. Again AI generated.
The same day of the launch, their head of Generative AI Pratik Thaker spoke at Brandweek. I’ll try find a link of the full chat, but it was super good.
He spoke on how they produced the ad, from sketches/concepts, that were then brought to life with AI tools. They planned to do it in June/July but left time August, in case there was a new model, and they had to re-run anything.
But his chat, compared AI to CGI, it wasn’t about replacing humans, it’s a different vehicle for bring the concepts to life.
So in one chat, he just levelest the fear around AI. Highlighting how it was generated from human-led concepts.
Another nugget was they trained it, off all the Coca Cola ad references they’ve done in the past. People did notice a few inconsistencies in the different shots. Which you would kind of think are manageable details.
Related, Google’s first AI Ad avoids the uncanny valley by casting a turkey.
The other stand out at Brandweek was the Obey the thirst, with Sprite. And the relationship between the agency and the client, both aligned, on pushing for the best work. And that was needed to pave the way for that work.
This has been a common thread the last few months, Craig at American Eagle highlighted it, Coca Cola expressed it through their actions. Kat Cole at AG1 saying how they pulled all marketing spend to throw it into more research into the products efficacy, which as a process in itself takes 2 years to get results. Bold.
In this time of change, relying on, building and nurturing the strong relationships between partners, and keeping focused on the mutually shared goals, to push through to the best work. Love to see it.
I’ve also (finally) created a private LLM with all the Nudge Note editions in it. Click here, in short, you can query/search the 10 years of the archive. Love to hear what you think? And any suggestions you might have? I’m still fine tuning/playing with it.
Notable stories this week
- Google Is Helping WPP Build Websites That Show Up on All AI Search Engines.
- Snap signs a $400m deal with Perplexity.
- Disney is fighting an uphill battle against Google’s YouTube TV — but has its own advantages.
- Reddit is already in early testing with its own AI campaign tool.
- News Corp explores multi-LLM licensing playbook.
- How Axios segments its audience.
- Reddit shares rise on earnings beat, strong forecast.
- LG Ad Solutions introduces Agentiv, an AI-powered advertising technology platform.
- Traffic is no longer a reliable growth metric.
- How Tiktok inspired the New York Times vertical video strategy.
- Ari’s delayed thoughts on AdCP.
- Advertisers react to holiday creep by pushing TV spend earlier.
- How publishers like USA Today are testing ads in their AI chatbot experiment.
- Making the case for agentic AI media buying.
- Google Discover tests infinite endless scroll.
- Apple brings its App Store to the web.
- The New Google Search Ad Layout Is Causing Accidental Clicks.
- The future of advertising is AI generated ads that are directly personalized to you.
- OpenAI wants brands to allow their mascots to appear in Gen AI videos.
- Amazon sues to stop Perplexity form using AI tool to buy stuff.
- Google Maps is getting more hands-free for the you’re driving.
- Google’s first AI Ad avoids the uncanny valley by casting a turkey.
- Spotify reports higher revenue despite ad decline.
- Pinterest revenue grows as it fends of threats from AI, tariffs.
- Netflix is in talks to license video podcasts from iHeartMedia.
- Amazon inks iHeartMedia deal for programmatic ads.
- OpenAI in danger after authors suing it gain access to its internal slack messages.
- Inside the ‘grand bargain’ to reconcile ad tech’s warring middlement.
- People Inc strikes Microsoft AI licensing deal as Google’s AI Overviews hit programmatic ad revenue.
- Medium Rare signals the end of ‘rented attention’ as brand content becomes the new growth engine.
- The fuel for the AI boom driving the markets is advertising. It is also an existential risk..
- The Company Quietly Funneling Paywalled Articles to AI Developers.
- OpenAI’s Commerce and Apps Efforts Divide Consumer Firms.
- DoubleVerify Rolls Out New Offering to Measure AI Agents and Avoid AI Slop.
- Why so many publishers are launching brand marketing campaigns right now.
- Scalable launches to cover creator economy.
- How brands are using Social Media DMs.
Deals/M&A
- Puck buys Air Mail in cash and stock deal.
- HubSpot boosts marketing with XFunnel acquisition to enhance AI visibility.
- Clickhouse acquires LibreChat to democratize AI-derive analytics through the open-source agentic data stack.
- Yahoo acquired Vetted, an AI-powered shopping platform.
- Vox Media has discussed spinning out podcast network.
Campaign of the week
- Coca Cola returns with their AI-led Christmas Ad. Also this years Wallace + Gromit with Barbour.
- AG1’s Good Morning Parents everywhere.
Smartest commentary
- ‘Common Crawl’s executive director, Rich Skrenta, has publicly made the case that AI models should be able to access anything on the internet. “The robots are people too,” he told me, and should therefore be allowed to “read the books” for free.’ –TheAtlantic.
Datapoints of note
- Snap has reached 943m monthly active users.
- NYT added 460,000 net digital subscribers.
- New content generated 16% higher engagement during Q2.
- 10% of Webflow’s signups come from AI discovery, growing 4x year-on-year. (This is actual LLM-referred traffic, which likely understates the full impact.
- ^ 91% of LLM referrals come from ChatGPT alone.
- ^ ChatGPT traffic converts at 24% (!), 6x higher than Google.
- ^ For conversions referred by an LLM, two-in-three convert within 7 days.
- Customers who engage with Rufus during their shopping journey are 60% more likely to complete a purchase compared to those who don’t use the assistant.
- Amazon Ads business jumps 24% from prior year to $17.7b.
- Internet Archive stores its 1 trillionth webpage.
Events
- Next breakfast coming up later in November. Ping me to join.
That’s it for this week.
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