Edition #513
Nativo is acquired by Life360, no ads for Apple TV (as yet) and new AI agents.
We’re three, maybe four more editions left in the year! That is creeping around quickly. And as it’s that time of year, please do pass along any holiday campaigns you’ve liked/enjoyed.
I liked the Apple TV riff on being ‘hand made’ with their new intro logo. It just feels on point, for the whole vibe at Apple TV. They’ve just continued to create this space for creators to do their thing. But doing it at the right size, they haven’t tried to flood the zone, it’s almost like early HBO, having 2-3 shows that you’re in to. But not promising to have endless viewing.
As promised last week, here is the NotebookLM of the newsletter. It doesn’t include all editions yet, but the last few hundred. Think of it as a private LLM that uses all the stories linked, as its sources.
For those who aren’t familiar, it’s a neat tool. You drop in sources, typically for say a work project, and then you can query those sources, have it write documents, or create mind maps or even podcasts to explain the contents. In this particular case, I have dropped all the newsletter editions in. Meaning you can use it to find sources, trends across editions, track down those ‘oh I remember reading this but can’t find the source’ – or even, to inform strategies.
Have a play, would love to hear if it is useful, what you used it for, and/or any requests.
And a well done to the team at Nativo on their acquisition this week. Over the years we’ve had many of the team as readers on the newsletter :). Great to see!
Notable stories this week
- Time launches new AI agent.
- Ad Tech Innovation, or the Cat and the Laser Pointer.
- BDG Pens Partnership With Music Festival Firm Breakaway With $10 Million Projected Revenue.
- StackAdapt integrates iHeartMedia into programmatic platform.
- Mozilla Ads partners with Equativ for privacy-first programmatic.
- Google launches Gemini-powered AI agents for advertising and analytics.
- Google Faces EU Competition Probe on News Rankings, FT Reports.
- Meta’s Generative Ads Recommendation model.
- Netflix might make its own video podcasts.
- Inside Reuter’s agentic AI video experiment.
- We analyzed 47,000 ChatGPT conversations. Here’s what people really use it for.
- Reddit launches new interactive ads that let users play, participate, and explore.
- A24 is making its first reality competition series.
- Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads.
- No ad tier for Apple TV ‘at this time’ according to Eddy Cue.
- Why the NYT won.
- Amazon Ads Agent is here, alongside a new ads interface.
- Google is introducing its own version of Apple’s private AI cloud compute.
- Visa is diving deeper in to the creator economy with new AI-powered financial tools.
- Being human is the ultimate differentiation strategy.
- AI is tanking traffic to news sites — but it might just save their ad revenue.
- X appears to be sending fake traffic across the web.
- ElevenLabs launches marketplace for AI-generated celebrity voices.
- Puck alumni are building a food media startup.
Deals/M&A
- Life360 acquires Nativo for $120m to expand its advertising ambitions. Congrats to the team over there! Love to see it.
- CloudX raises $30m to automate mobile ads for publishers.
- Parallel raises $100m Seria A to build web infrastructure for agents.
- Salesforce acquires Spindle AI.
Campaign of the week
- How David Perell uses Sublime to write things people love.
- Apple TV new intro – Made by hand.
Smartest commentary
- ‘”AI isn’t the enemy. It’s a mirror, reflecting how well (or poorly) we understand the people we’re trying to reach…As technology takes over more of the doing, leaders must focus on the meaning…Because the future won’t belong to the brands that automate the fastest. It will belong to the ones that understand the human heart best.” –Jody Daniels.
Datapoints of note
- Buzzfeed revenues sinks 17% to $43.6m.
- Scammy Ads Generated an Estimated 10% of Meta’s Revenue in 2024.
- Only half the homes in America have cable TV anymore.
- AI referral traffic accounts for 1.08% of all website traffic in this study.
- Brave has 100m active users and surpassed $100m in annualized revenue in Q1.
- Netflix claims 190m ad-tier viewers worldwide under new metric.
- Viant reported 46% of advertiser spend came from connected television in third quarter.
Events
- Final of the year – coming up December. Open to any newsletter readers.
That’s it for this week.
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