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 #549 Muse, personal AI agents, investment in commerce media and Stratchery goes with Stripe. Two weeks missed in a row! My schedule has been a bit unforgiving, or, more accurately, I got squished for time. It’s often on a Thursday night, I’m getting this ready, but even that buffer wasn’t enough. But we’re here now. Back to Advertising Week, Rob thought it was quieter this year, and he touched on a point, that there wasn’t really anything to… Continue reading
Edition #548 Toyota drops a caravan on their latest model, McDonalds & Delta fly the same route and CostCo feels the benefit of AI. Back in 2003, Top Gear tried to kill a Hilux by running it into trees, dropping caravans on it and even putting it atop a building as it underwent explosive demolition. Toyota, to hero their electric Hilux, decided to re-enact it this week. Well, they caravan dropping part. And I think it was great. Simple. Continue reading
Edition #547 Will your agent do your underwear shopping for you? Loads of M&A and Katzenberg on creativity & AI. Would you get an AI to do your underwear shopping for you? Or how about, your partners birthday is coming up, underwear shopping for your partner? Lets lower the stakes, what about, a new top, for casual Fridays in the office? Ben Thompson (ala Statchery) had a spot on TBPN this week and he dug into this a bit. Continue reading
Edition #546 On how speed solves ads problems, in more ways than you think, 20 years of the feed and Barbour has two stars in tartan. A business I started was the 8th fastest growing business in New Zealand. Our philosophy was speed solves a lot of problems. By just getting stuff done, you move everything forward faster. And get the results all want, faster. And you only need to look at OpenAI and their ads product to see this… Continue reading
Edition #545 Yahoo’s TBPN? Advertising as the infrastructure for serving AI agents and Entourage is back. If you’ve been on X at all the past week, what a week of AI it has been?! But on the topic of agents, Antonio raised an interesting question, Ads as the infrastructure for allocating resources to agents? You can imagine companies like Kevel tackling this. In new show news. Friend of the newsletter Ian Schafer has his own show coming to Bloomberg… Continue reading
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