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Bridging commentary on the art & science of content; content marketing, branded content, native advertising and the analytics, attribution and intelligence that powers it.

Commentary

View change

Edition #544 What constitutes a view changes all over again, Meta settles and Netflix / GTA 6 partner for an exclusive drop for subscribers.  Meta settled with multiple stage AGs on limiting teen usage of the platform. Teens will be limited to just two hours a day on Instagram and Facebook, unless their parents give permission otherwise. And restricted from using the apps between midnight and 6am. And notifications silenced during school hours. Autoplay can be turned off. And… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
August 27, 2026
Commentary

Elevating YouTube

Edition #543 YouTube mixing it up, OpenAI expands to SMB advertisers and 1,741 consent partners.  YouTube renewed their distribution deal with Peacock There’s lots brewing over at YouTube, FastCompany has how they’re on a decluttering mission, making the app more design-led. Versus the older approach of every layout change, optimized to a specific metric. The effect is improving the overall aesthetic. They also renewed their Peacock deal, helping in the battle for the CTV Home Screen. They removed… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
August 14, 2026
Commentary

BMW

Edition #542 On Spiderman & BMW, AI slop is getting removed everywhere (or is it?) & World Cup lifts ad market. Last week we had Genesis, with their film they concepted and got Maggie Gyllenhaal to bring to life. This week, BMW caught flak on Twitter for pushing their brand partnership with the latest Spiderman film through their in car console. Apparently, it was served as a notification (amongst others that users receive) and you had to tap into… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
August 6, 2026
Commentary

Bots vs Agents

Edition #541 Ads to AI Agents, bots vs agents and principal media.  Recently Cloudflare proclaimed bots had overtaken humans. The leap that many made, is that AI agents had taken over the internet. But the story is a little more nuanced. Yes, the growth in bots, has been driven by AI agents. But to say half the internet is now AI agents, isn’t correct. Lets draw a distinction A crawler bot, that fetches your website to appear in a… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
July 31, 2026
Commentary

Buzz

Edition #540 Buzz in the group chats, measurement stories and audience networks are in vogue for AI?  Amongst the group texts, were a couple of things this week, Buzz from Jack Dorsey, an open source workspace, think Slack + AI. See a video here. Think of Buzz like a digital deskpad, you have your work in there, and bring in your agents where they’re needed. Animated profile pic is kind of fun. The… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
July 24, 2026
Commentary

Big short

Edition #539 Measurement, The Big Short & Ask the News.  I gave a shout out a while back to Ask the Post, the Washington Post’s AI driven feature to interact with the site but also to dig deeper around articles. Recall they have a subsidiary, Arc, which provides their own CMS/tech stack for publishers to run on. Now Arc has rolled out Ask the News, for any publisher using Arc to leverage. Smart. Next step, monetise those queries! Now, have… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
July 16, 2026
Commentary

Retour

Edition #538 – Cannes, creators and a huge step up in AI substance. Cannes was super productive this year, with an expansion of brand cafes, and as an attendee you can’t complain, with a dearth of choices. And the quality of panels, at least from my corner, were a lot better. It’s like the AI chat took a 5x step up from last year. There was a heat wave, but it didn’t seem as hot as last year? I guess… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
July 9, 2026
Commentary

Early late

Edition #537 One of my fav beers has a stellar (but not Stella!) World Cup ad, Roku acquired & Albertsons does Microdramas. Peter Buckley had some nice framing on early vs late when thinking about brand vs performance. I liked it. In his words, late is deterministic, someone has taken action, it feels efficient but can be dangerous. “The closer an ad is to a sale, the less likely it caused it”. And the more likely it is over… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
June 18, 2026
Commentary

Siri

Edition #537 On Siri and how it changes the LLM landscape, Substack is keeping media fun and Ritz Carlton floats some boats.  I had to double check that I hadn’t done a newsletter titled Siri before. And really, what could I have said? We’ve always been disappointed by Siri. However, way back, when Google Home launched, I did note. If you turned on the privacy settings on Google Home, to match that of Siri. Google Home was just as useless. Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
June 11, 2026
Commentary

AI Monetization

Edition #536 On how the new LLM monetization model is being calculated, Google has a new adblocker & what Pinterest says we’re wearing this summer. Last week Parallel, announced Index, a way to help content owners, monetize their content for LLMs. At the moment, the monetization, is only for developers who also use Parallels Deep Research API. However, there are 100,000 developers using it. This is the first (transparent) stab at how should content creators be paid for their… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
May 28, 2026