Edition #521
Modes of thinking, advertising agent interoperability & Lego’s new programmatic team.
I was at Davos the week before last, great to see some readers there too! A few friends asked what Davos was really about, so I put together A spirit of dialogue from Davos.
A lot of recent pieces have been very forward looking, 2x, Humans in the loop, The Machines. And that is because we are facing a lot of change and writing them out, helps cement my own thinking but also tries to explain the trends.
Sometimes a piece doesn’t land, till I’ve written it out a few times!
But in the here and now, the change is meaning we are all having to find new ways to improve our capabilities and remain competitive. Advertising and media has always been the first industry to be disrupted by new innovations. So we must keep an eye to the future.
Gladwell once did a piece on running, and how the best runners, need to be able to push themselves and the envelope in the race. But in training, find that cadence of getting repetition in but not killing themselves on each run. The great runners, have to good at both of those modes of thinking & operating. Even thought they are juxtaposed.
So whilst we do look to the future, keep in mind, the work does need to get done today.
Notable stories this week
- Substack entrapment theory.
- Anthropic joins the AI rush into Formula 1.
- Nikhil Kolar, vp Microsoft AI scales its ‘click-to-sign’ publisher AI content marketplace.
- Atlas Obscura turns first annual profit in 16-year history.
- Spotify is partnering with Bookshop.org to see physical books.
- Hearst rethinks brand safety to unlock news ad yield.
- Chalice AI and PubMatic Advance Agentic Interoperability Across the Open Internet.
- The Female Quotient launches new video podcast as it expands into media biz.
- OpenAI is building an ‘integrity team’ to prevent ChatGPT ads from going off the rails.
- Lego is building out an in-house programmatic team.
- OpenAI Confirms $200,000 Minimum Commitment for ChatGPT Ad.
- Time Studios partners with Primordial Soup to distribute ‘ON this Day… 1776’.
- AI Bots are now a significant source of web traffic.
- Autotrader enlists Conan O’Brien for branded content.
- WaPo wipeout. 🙁
- Amazon launches MCP server for agent-driven advertising.
- Why Perplexity is investing in targeted, organic growth.
- Microsoft says it’s building an App Store for AI content licensing.
- Gale agency study on emerging media encourages marketers to tap more deeply into communities.
- Machines are your content’s new audience.
- Humans are infiltrating the social network for AI bots.
- The $1m article contest winners on X.
Deals/M&A
- Will Publicis Groupe keep exploring M&A or does it need to focus on what it’s already got?
- Datalinx AI gets $4.2m to automate marketing data readiness.
Campaign of the week
- Anthropic Super Bowl Ads. Ads are coming to AI, but not to Claude.
- Intuit credit karma with Amazon / Fallout. Integrated natively into the Amazon app.
Smartest commentary
- “Our marketing is not a bullshit machine” –Jesse Dwyer, Comms, Perplexity.
Datapoints of note
- Nearly half of marketers encounter AI errors weekly.
- Five years ago, Recurrent’s experiential revenue was “essentially zero,” Andrew said. Now, it’s 12% of the business and growing.
Events
- Next breakfast is coming up, let me know if you’d like to join.
That’s it for this week.
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