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
Edition #469 On my surprise in finding which industry this vernacular has gone into, branded content announcements & dark traffic. I spent some time looking at food ads this week, that is DoorDash & Uber Eats and co-incidentally was able to speak with a restauranteur about it. One thing that surprised me was about this space is, the vernacular! As long as your CAC is below your LTV, you’re gravy! Wait, what. Restaurants now think about customer acquisition cost… Continue reading
Edition #468 Digg, gamification of leisure and audiobook growth at Spotify, will it lead to branded audio? I enjoyed this bit of internet history with TheVerge‘s interview of Digg founder Kevin Rose, they even made the story Digg themed. This was like the last year of university when Digg was at its prime, the whole Web 2.0 era was upon us! I remember using rails to build my own ‘Web 2.0’ app fun. Which gets me to a conversation… Continue reading
Edition #467 On the problem with game metrics, Adweek AI and loads of deals this week. Thoroughly enjoyed the AI in Marketing panel that Chalice AI hosted, turning the tables and having the journalists as the panelists, Sara Fischer, Lara O’Reilly, Allison Schiff and Kendra Barnett. Thanks for hosting. I haven’t had a chance to read through the latest in Google / DOJ but there’s no rush, any outcome is going to be years in the making with appeals… Continue reading
Edition #466 On what LLM ads could look like, Outbrain brings Moments to their publishers and who makes $1m/year on Substack? As promised I put some thoughts down on what LLM advertising could look like. I think the big variables in whether there is a whole net new ecosystem/platform does still come down to two variables, 1) how big each of them get with sustained usage. Alphabet, Meta & Microsoft are all exhausting the potential use cases and growth… Continue reading
Edition #465 Cloudflare comes to the creators rescue, conversational podcast on demand & Spotify giving out big deals. A huge week in stories, bare with us, and do take your time, there’s some goodies in there. One thread I picked up on Twitter was talking about how LLMs ads might look/work. So I think I’ll put together a piece on that, would love your thoughts/feedback. A question I am lingering on is, how is this an opportunity to do something… Continue reading
