Blog
Bridging commentary on the art & science of content; content marketing, branded content, native advertising and the analytics, attribution and intelligence that powers it.
Edition #544 Big week for big tech in ads, an influencer figures out swear words stop ads and CINT goes private. Big news for big tech, and on the same day! The DOJ seems to be endorsing AI usage of content for training as fair use. And Google won’t be forced to break up its tech. And Amazon has been accused of using a soft reserve, to lift bids! And that’s kind of the crux of tech’s antitrust arguments,… Continue reading
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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