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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.
Edition #479 Internet brain, Meridian is now available and let’s enjoy a glass of scotch with Harrison Ford. Internet brain seems to be a topic bubbling up, I caught this piece via Ben Dietz note, could creativity by the antidote to internet brain? And gives some ideas on giving us all a bit of a reset. It’s a good reminder, do make sure you give yourself time to play, to explore, to learn, to just tinker with new stuff. Continue reading
Edition #478 How AI overviews are democratising search, TikTok is back but is Vine? AI Overviews is democraticising search results. Readers from last week might have caught the datapoint that 63% of sources cited in AI overviews are not found in the traditional top 10 results. Which is super interesting, that information was there before, but it wasn’t in a nice and tidy bundle to be a top 10 result. Which in over optimized keywords was always the… Continue reading
Edition #477 What will we do with all that extra attention? TTD makes an acquisition & LLMs drive influx of traffic. So will TikTok be up by the end of the weekend or not? Who knows. It seems unlikely at time of writing. It’s worth mentioning that India cut TikTok back in 2020. So who benefits? eMarketer suggests that Meta and YouTube could capture about half of the reallocated TIkTok ad dollars. Let’s say, US Ad spend on TikTok… Continue reading
Edition #476 On advertising to agents, CES & programmatic on planes. Welcome to 2025, with CES in full swing, it is a little quieter in the start to the year. Did you go? Thoughts? I hope you all had a good break. ICYMI here was my 2024 recap. This was an interesting take from Perplexity’s CEO, serving ads to agents. “Aravind explains, Instead of showing ads to humans directly, advertisements would be targeted at AI agents that work… Continue reading
Edition #475 The last note of the year, themes of note from the year that’s been. The final note of the year, and a little earlier than normal due to how Christmas falls in the calendar. Where to start on the year that was. It feels like the direction of the industry changed quite a bit through the year. We started with the death of cookies! Then with the ambiguity, it’s kind of gone away. The election provided a… Continue reading
Edition #474 Perplexity ads in the wild, things that make you go MMM and deals galore. The second to last edition of the year! There will be a final note next week, with my schedule a bit jammed these last few weeks. Feels like a world of events have happened since the last note, which was just two weeks ago. I was fortunate enough to spend Thanksgiving upstate, awaking to a day of snow, so naturally we made a snow… Continue reading
Edition #473 Batman’s riff on AI, TTD doing CTV operating system & is AI infallible? The Trade Desk announced that they are working on a smart TV operating system. I spent a bit of time a couple of years back exploring the tv operating system space, more to understand the data collection. And it’s an interesting industry, because it’s fragmented but also, the age of devices. Yes, newer tv’s have software updates. But that’s a recent phenomena. Many folks… Continue reading
Edition #472 I’ve heard my first Christmas tune, the business of attention and something new. Adelaide hosted The Business of Attention earlier this week, with a full field of speakers sharing their learnings throughout the day. A good dipstick of what it takes to bring a whole industry into a new world of metrics. Jonah Goodhart opened with a compelling talk on attention. But thanks to the March, Zach & the team over there. Also, I am testing a… Continue reading
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… Continue reading
Edition #470 What an earnings week, there’s a new search engine in town & PAAPI. Halloween edition! This week, we saw YouTube surprise, surpassing $50b in revenue in the last twelve months! Imagine that as a standalone business. Snap, hit new highs on subscribers (12m) and Reddit feels the Google traffic bump with a 68% year on year growth in revenue. What’s driving YouTube? In their words “YouTube Ads revenues grew 12% year-on-year, driven by brand, closely followed… Continue reading