Edition #512
BYO but it’s not a restaurant, Google cracks $100b and we enter Run City by Bandit.
BYO, bring your own wine, beer. What a delight. There’s an Indian restaurant in the East Village which does this, I don’t go often but it is nice and everyone brings their own bottle. Fun.
What about BYOLLM though? That’s what Oreo decided to do, they invested $40m in their own image generation model. WHAT.
“Mondelez expects that the tool will be capable of making short TV ads that would be ready to air as soon as next year’s holiday season, and potentially for the 2027 Super Bowl.”
What is the useful life of a piece of tech like this? Well forever. It will require investment/upkeep but it will continue to be relevant.
At the very least, knowing what it takes, will enable them to be better purchasers or partners of this tech in the future.
From the earnings this week, Google had its first $100b quarter! AI Mode has 75m users in the US, and ads are still in the works. Gemini surpassed 650m monthly actives. With OpenAi’s loss of users from Meta (not till January) this puts Gemini on a trajectory of beating them by Q1.
In response to queries about AI Overviews and whether the amount of monetizable queries was going up – “as you will see in the 10-Q, paid clicks were up 7% year on year, and CPCs were up 7% year on year.”…“AI overviews, even at our current baseline of ads, below and within the AI’s response, overall, we see the monetization at approximately the same rate.“
If you’ll be in Atlanta next week or at Brandweek, let me know, love to grab coffee say hi.
Happy Halloween. 🎃🎃
Notable stories this week
- Brands rush to Reddit, boosting ad spend and gaming AI search.
- The Athletic and Amazon Partner to Launch “The Athletic Show” on Fire TV.
- Criteo And The Programmatic Plug-In Problem.
- AWS’ RTB Fabric marks a new front in the battle between Amazon and Google.
- News Corp-owned UK tabloid The Sun is building an AI agent for its programmatic business.
- Meta’s AI tools are going rogue and churning out some very strange ads.
- Yahoo Just Inked 4 Deals That Show Where Commerce Media Is Headed.
- Ryff makes virtual product placement programmatic.
- A Novel Approach To AI Search: Pay Publishers For Their Content.
- Ad tech’s economy depends on float – and it’s getting pricier to keep it moving.
- Apple Reportedly Moving Ahead With Ads in Maps App.
- Oreo-maker Mondelez to use new generative AI tool to slash marketing costs.
- Alphabet tops $100B in quarterly revenue amid cloud, YouTube growth.
- The future of insights & analytics is AI-native.
- Small boats, big ocean.
Deals/M&A
- Wonder Studios, backed by OpenAI, DeepMind execs, raised $12M to bring AI content to Hollywood.
- Bending Spoons acquires AOL for $1.5b and gets valued at $11.7b.
Campaign of the week
Smartest commentary
- “You are a small boat on a big ocean,” he told me. “When you’re really big, you can fool yourself for a long time and with a lot of money to burn into thinking you are going to buck the trends. But when you’re small, you know you are not going to buck the trends.” –Josh Marshall.
Datapoints of note
- Native TV Placements Capture 11 Minutes of Daily Decision Time.
- Programmatic advertising in Sweden reaches 5 billion kronor in 2025.
- Adobe Analytics Expects Christmas Season Online Sales In US To Increase 5.3% To $253.4 Billion.
- Instagram Reels advertising on track to be larger than the entire US television ad industry.
- AI Mode has 75m daily active users in the US .
- Gemini has 650m monthly active users.
- 20% to 30% of Sora users created AI-generated videos through the app but a majority of those people then shared the videos privately with friends or family rather than sharing them publicly in the app’s main feed.
- 28% of ChatGPT’s most-cited pages have ZERO organic visibility in Google.
- Meta daily active people was 3.54 billion on average for September 2025, an increase of 8% year-over-year.
- Threads surpassed 150m users.
- The average price per ad on Meta increased 10% year-over-year, benefiting from increased advertiser demand, largely driven by improved ad performance.
Events
- Next breakfast coming up in November. Ping me to join.
That’s it for this week.
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