Edition #487
On CHIPS not Cookies, AI driving content quality & new Spotify ad announcements.
CHIPS not cookies, CHIPS stands for: Cookies Having Independent Partitioned State. I mean who is in charge of naming these things ha. And it is an interesting novel concept, it enables a ‘third party’ cookie to be set, but partitioned within the site it is shown in. Thus retaining the privacy benefits. This rolled out to Safari 18.4 this week. Even simple examples like, hey you want a ‘log in with Google’ – you need tech like this.
Noah’s note or thought on why AI will improve content quality not degrade it was great this week. If you’re deep in AI, his newsletter is worth a follow.
The thought follows that AI will need increasingly better content to feed the models, and this will push brands to produce ever higher quality content. Seems sharp to me.
There’s also a bit of chat, around not using clicks to measure advertising performance. And I understand why (we do measurement!) there are holistic measures & models, which help tell the whole story. But I think if you’re an ad vendor saying, trust us, ALL the data EXCEPT when consumers who see your ad, like it, and decide to click through, that data is bad. I think you’ve put yourself in a tough spot on the trust side. The one tangible data point, just ignore that. Yeah that renewal is going to be tough.
Notable stories this week
- Inside Dirt’s creative approach to advertising.
- Spotify debuts Gen AI ads and inks new programmatic partnerships.
- Is the collapse of SEO about to cause CPM inflation?
- Omnicom clients can get $200k value boost for advertising on X, leaked docs show.
- Facebook rolls out Friends tab.
- Newsmax valuation soars in MAGA media boom.
- The newspaper flourishing without a paywall.
- More on Perplexity’s ad plans.
- Gen Z’s safe space.
- The ad industry’s herd mentality risks an unnecessarily severe slowdown.
- Roblox launches rewards ad format with Google.
- Instagram Chief says Edits App coming soon, will be available for free.
- Webkit for Safari 18.4 will support partitioned cookies.
- Meta lands multiyear sponsorship deal with UFC.
- Semantic slide of programmatic’s power word: ‘curation’.
- Facebook to stop targeting ads at a specific person after legal flight.
- Efforts to weed out fake users for online advertisers fall short.
- How Comcast is convincing digital native brands to spend on TV.
Deals/M&A
- WPP acquires InfoSum.
- LTV.ai raises a $5.2 million Series A.
- Dan Abrams raising money for new media startup.
Campaign of the week
- All Blacks & Black Ferns with Wired for Bupa. Rugby Legends and Rising Stars Want To Break Stigmas Around Health.
View all 2024 best campaigns.
Smartest commentary
- [On AI slop] “My thesis is straightforward:If you have a strong incentive to influence people (which every brand does—along with many other groups and organizations). And if more people continue to make decisions based on AI outputs. Then producing high-quality content becomes essential. These models aren’t dumb. You can argue where they fall on the intelligence spectrum, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say they have, at minimum, an average IQ. Moreover, they’re only getting better. If brands want to influence what AI tells consumers, they will need to create content that models recognize as authoritative and valuable.” –Noah Brier.
Datapoints of note
- The Guardian US expects to hit $44 million in voluntary reader donations in the U.S. and Canada this year, up 33 percent over last year.
- Independent studies suggest that over 11% of Google searches now feature AI-generated summaries. Newer AI answer engines like Perplexity—which tops 20 million queries daily for its paid enterprise product.
- ChatGPT added 1million users in an hour after releasing their new image generator.
Events
- Media breakfast on next week, this one is full but let me know if you’re about and want to join the next one.
View all 2024 datapoints of note.
That’s it for this week.
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