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Edition #471
On the agent’ifying of everything (or will it), playful ads and programmatic audio can be problematic?
AI Agents are suddenly all the rage, Salesforceis leading the charge with Agentforce. Yet Ari Paparo commented a while back that adtech world has been a bit slower to ‘AI’, so I thought I’d touch on the topic.
Here’s what I shared with a colleague downunder earlier this week:
Seeing a few clients very early thinking about ‘AI Agents’ – Sequoia piece on it is worth a read.
The steps that seem to be coming about are:
- Develop own chatbot/LLM using RAG (so built on your own data/content).
- Build own predictive models.
- Get these in the market
- Then working towards agents to deliver on tasks.
- Then maybe multi-agents, where agents pass work to each other, i.e. create content, promote it, etc.
Analytics agents will help take the tedious work out of analytics. Which I think in a lot of cases, won’t be replacing work, it’ll just be doing the work that needs to get done that just falls off the hours in a day.
And each of the agents will need to work with each other. You can envisage your ad optimization agent, needs to check the data, or adjusts a headline.
A technical question is, why all the ‘agents’ over just one service that bundles it? It’s kind of a repeat of the whole micro services trend in development. Where each process was broken into its own service. I suspect that’s just a market timing thing, each can specialize and do each component well. Over time the market will decide what combination of agents are needed.
For each of us, it is worth thinking about, how will AI agents be used in our business? How could I use it my role? Or vice versa, what do we need to do to prepare our clients for this. I think it’s still early days, but useful to get early exposure on it so you can be prepared.
Changing tacks, I enjoyed Lindsey Dorne’s piece too on the case for playful advertising, antipodean brands are very good at this and feels refreshing when you see it done well. And do see the notes on Spotify and the white noise app fraud uncovered. It seems audio is having its teething pains as it scales.
With the election over, the industry quickly gets into its holiday mode, with Etsy dropping their Waldo video, see it below in our campaign of the week.
Notable stories this week
- 404 Media is partnering with Wired.
- Unboring: the case for playful ads.
- OpenAI has hired the co-founder of Twitter challenger Pebble.
- AppLovin officially became the most valuable publicly traded ad tech company this week.
- Creators weigh content decisions and costs of election-driven marketing blackout.
- Ziff Davis study says AI firms rely on publisher data to train models.
- Two sides of marketing effectiveness. Love this, get smart with what you’ve already got.
- United’s ad network if flying high.
- Google is getting in on the latest ad tech craze: Curation.
- The kids aren’t playing in the privacy sandbox.
- NY Times owned The Athletic reports profit for the first time.
- Sky faces bill for hundreds of millions after advertising blunder.
- White noise apps exploited in major audio ad fraud.
- Spotify’s programmatic ad revenue soars for 2024. And programmatic audio is a tough market so SoundCloud is leading with Display and Video.
- Perplexity CEO offers AI company’s services to replace striking NYT staff.
- Trump’s media playbook.
- Why Roblox’s Clip It is using its billion-view moment to launch an ad product.
- Can attention really drive campaign success?
- The media/cost quality disconnect.
Deals/M&A
- Private equity giant KKR is in talks to acquire the adtech company Integral Ad Science.
- Scope3 acquires Adloox.
Campaign of the week
- Etsy’s Where’s Waldo.
- ^ I went to the Etsy Pop Up in the village, great to see them trying to get back to their roots of supporting craft.
View all 2024 best campaigns.
Smartest commentary
- “It’s simple… more attention equals more business outcomes” –Max Kalehoff, Realeyes.
Datapoints of note
- DV won 70% of Oracle advertiser RFPs across Q2, Q3 & Q4 to date.
- NYTimes passes 11m subscribers.
- 42m tune into election night coverage.
- Warner Bros Discovery adds 7.2m subscribers.
Events
- Watch this space!
View all 2024 datapoints of note.
That’s it for this week.
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