Edition #548
Toyota drops a caravan on their latest model, McDonalds & Delta fly the same route and CostCo feels the benefit of AI.
Back in 2003, Top Gear tried to kill a Hilux by running it into trees, dropping caravans on it and even putting it atop a building as it underwent explosive demolition.
Toyota, to hero their electric Hilux, decided to re-enact it this week. Well, they caravan dropping part. And I think it was great. Simple. But delivered a lot of messages.
For me, it kind of tackled some unsaid (and unfound) assumptions I had made about modern cars.
One, I don’t think they’re tough, whether that’s right or wrong, the impression is that the modern cars aren’t as tough and more likely to get dents etc. Two, that electric vehicles aren’t tough or durable. And three Utes can be fast.
Now these aren’t or weren’t informed conclusions, just assumptions built up over time, that I hadn’t realised I had made, till I watched the video.
And this is what makes this a good piece of content, in the delivery of the story, it dispells these. And the final shot, the electric ute, peeling off. Oh, it’s fast too.
Good ads connect with audiences, and impart an impression and leave them changed. And this does that.
We also saw this week McDonalds & Delta announce their retail media networks
In the same vein, Liquid Death is going to help others make their ads. This is the same idea.
For a glimpse of what mainstream usage of AI might look like, check out David Pogues, A Day in the Life of Siri AI.
Notable stories this week
- Apple’s latest Operating System blocks The Trade Desk from seeing ads on Safari.
- Beverage brand Liquid Death will make others ads.
- Amazon rebuilds its ad platform around AI Agents.
- Why New York City is paradise for creators.
- Netflix to bring Pause Ads to programmatic buying.
- Insurers are building Ad Tech’s AI Accountability layer.
- OpenAI says sponsored chats are the future. The future of publisher monetization isn’t so clear.
- Delta Air Lines follows United in building an ads business. And McDonalds announces theirs.
- Every DSP will containerize.
- Google launches Vertical Video Unification.
- Fast Company launches private WhatsApp for working moms.
- Publishers are turning GEO from an experiment into a business.
- Why is an ad served to a bot worth a human dollar?
- AI is changing programmatic being faster than who controls it.
- On how WSJ is using Audience Personas.
- Why this marketing measurement company just open sourced its forecasting engine.
- Adsense for agents traction?
- Reddit is killing RSS feeds and ending public API access because of AI bots.
- Mobile ad giants AppLovin and Unity locked in legal dispute over data collection.
- Google is paying about 100 Digital Publishers for AI Overviews. And SERoundtable discusses it further.
- Marketers are rebranding as ‘Engineer’s to survive the AI era.
- As AI slop spreads, Pixability offers a way to root it out on YouTube.
- Muse is supposed to make money when you use it to shop. What happens if you just don’t shop that much?
- What happens when advertising becomes part of the discovery experience?
- Advertisers can directly influence Amazon’s Alexa responses.
- The 21 Press Stops Most in Demand by Founders.
- The Recipe Site that Ate Itself.
- Netflix hiring podast boss. Netflix hiring podast boss.
- How Three Brothers Built an AI Slop Empire by Buying Legitimate News Sites and Turning Them Into Zombie Content Farms That They Say Get 50 Million Page Views per Month
- Horizon’s Bob Lord takes aim at hold’s FTE pricing models: “It’s the old system”.
- Who will stand up for the Open Web?
- Blocking AI bots is not an AI strategy.
- OpenWeb launches forums for publishers.
Deals/M&A
- Michael Kassan invests in $80m startup OptimizeGEO.
Campaign of the week
- Toyota drops a caravan on the latest Hilux.
Smartest commentary
- “People have been assuming the internet’s smaller than it is. The internet also performs a lot better if we allow these mechanics to actually get solved. There are good deals and good performance on the internet. But if you don’t actually look at the whole thing, you’re potentially foregoing the best-performing pockets.” –Andrew Casale, Index Exchange.
Datapoints of note
- Liquid Death will do $5m in merch sales this year.
- Traffic to Costco from AI search grow triple digits for the second consecutive quarte rand continues to show the highest conversion rate of all site traffic.
Events
- Our Advertising CMO breakfast is next week, and speaking at a cocktail event on Tuesday night about where media is going, if readers are about.
That’s it for this week.
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