Event week

Edition #465

Cloudflare comes to the creators rescue, conversational podcast on demand & Spotify giving out big deals.

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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 new/different? What do you think?

Mark Cuban secured a patent, for the owner of a profile on a social network, to sell ads on it themselves. Neat huh. I think the difference as to say how an influencer sells branded content, is that you are selling some of the ‘real estate’ on your profile, like the background or ad slots. As least from the image shared.

Last week I used NotebookLM to turn the newsletter into an audio discussion. Can preview it here. This is a neat feature of Google’s LLM powered notebook, it can index links in your notes, then let you prompt your own notebook. The option they launched is to then turn it into a conversational podcast. I’ve been long meaning to try it so this was a fun exercise.

Thanks to all who joined the events this week, great to catch up. If you’re in town for Advertising Week let me know, and vice versa if you’re hosting something love to come along. Thanks to the good folks at Inuvo & Nativo this week.

A thread, which I think is a macro and a micro trend, is complexity. New metrics needed for the media complexity, but also sorting through the complexity to find new opportunities. I heard from numerous folks (especially in programmatic) how money is being left on the table, just with things being misconfigured. It’s creating a bit of work for specialists to come in, to help fight, simplify & manage that complexity and unlock that extra spend. Conversations also had some optimism, of a big Q4, with political spend starting to roll out as well as seasonal campaigns.

And it turns out not all of these Meta AI ad changes have been going smoothly! This is tough, as that is real money. But also, this must happen all the time, usually the platforms are good at fixing up/refunding these types of things. But frustrating nonetheless for those where paid ads are crucial to hitting the numbers.

Notable stories this week

• Cloudflare helps Content Creators regain control of their content from AI bots.
• How Front Office Sports took a prosumer approach to $10m in revenue.
• NYT to sell audio subscriptions through Apple and Spotify.
• Putting email data to work across the open web.
• Nativo launches Brand Rank to help optimize mid-funnel campaigns.
• Spotify is looking to pay video creators up to seven figures to put their shows on the platform. Full story here.
• Yahoo Finance bringing influencers into the fold.
• Runway inks deal with Lionsgate.
• ^ Interesting to see a studio partnering with a GenAI video platform.
• Lionel Messi launches content studio 525 Rosario.
• MrBeast’s Media Business Secrets.
• CreativeIDs are coming – here’s what to expect.
• It can crush our business: ad buyers estimate major losses from Meta ad platform bugs.
• WaPo lays off 54 people at publishing tech arm Arc XP.
• Google, as well as advertisers, benefit from independent adtech.
• AI was everywhere at DMEXCO.
• Measurement is becoming everyone’s problem.
• Feedback on the latest Privacy Sandbox developments.
• Patreon launches features to automate away creators administrative workload.
• How programmatic platforms can capitalize on the open internet.
• The New Generation of online culture curators.
• [From me] How brand studios can leverage ML & AI.

Deals/M&A

• Air Mail is said to be exploring a sale.
• Koch eyes Forbes deal.
• International Fund for Public Interest Media looks to raise $150m.
• Publicis Group to acquire retail media agency Mars.

Campaign of the week 

• Google Chrome with Bloomberg. 

View all 2024 best campaigns.

Smartest commentary

• “I don’t think attention metrics will be the industry’s core metric we use to gauge sales/roi’. It will continue to be a proxy at best.” –Jen Dorre, Hearst
• ^ Love the discourse.

Datapoints of note

• 51% of creators have already commenced holiday content. 47% of brands prefer flat-fee with performance bonuses.
• 1m advertisers using GenAI ad creative production tools. 15m ads created using GenAI production tools last month.
• Esbconnect analyzed over 100m emails sent by over 100 brands and found offers where the discount stated was greater than 40% saw lower CTRs and lower Conversion Rate – simply consumers didn’t believe the offer. Whereas offers for 20% off everything worked better.
• Arc XP has 2,500 customers.
• 70% of marketers use GenAI weekly.
• 80% of publishers in this report expect profitability to grow next year.
• Every month, 400,000 free members upgrade to paid memberships, the company says. According to Patreon, Autopilot improved the rate of free-to-paid membership upgrades by an average of 19% in testing.

Events

• Watch this space!

View all 2024 datapoints of note.

That’s it for this week.