Edition #531
How long do you spend what to watch? Paid benefactors and Miami.
Do you ever spend half an hour discussing with your spouse on what to watch next? It turns out Nielsen has estimated that exact average at about 10 and a half minutes. It seems my wife and I are an outlier!
But Nexxen this week announced inventory TV Home Screen, in this exact window, that 10 minutes of discovery whilst you’re figuring out what’s next.
Great inventory for takeovers but also a natural fit for all this branded entertainment brands are producing. If you were Coinbase launching Finding Satoshi this week, that’s exactly what you should have bought.
Earlier in the week I caught this tweet and loved the idea.
Loved this idea shared on Twitter, Substack (and publishers) should have a button that lets a benefactor, buy access to the post for everyone.
Recall Adweek do this with brand partners, lift the paywall for a short duration. Great for awareness and good vibes. This is the model of streamers, where fans contribute or unlock new content/activities/levels of engagement, and some of them are making serious bank. Why not embrace these principles, and bring it back to regular digital publishing.
Thank you to Stine & Jesper for hosting Branded Content Days last week, it’s neat to see some familiar faces. And congrats to all the winners and to Fortune for being named studio of the year. Watch out for this upcoming state of branded content report. For those across the pond, I believe you’re up next on their event calendar.
Finally, will you or some of the team be in Miami next week? Love to grab coffee and chat. Hit me up and we’ll play schedule jig saw and find a spot.
Notable stories this week
- Undisclosed campaigns are a continual issue on X.
- What Dove, Netflix, and Nike didn’t do on Reddit is why they’re winning.
- Why structured content alone is not enough in an AI-powered documentation world.
- OpenAI turns on cost per click ads inside ChatGPT.
- Why OpenAI is running at light speed to build an ad business.
- Win across all three eras of the web.
- Microsoft wants to build the infrastructure behind the AI internet.
- In Article About Horrific Shooting That Killed Eight Children, Forbes Lets Readers Place Bets About Gun Control.
- Index Exchange welcomes DSPS into new cloud infrastructure.
- X erupts over Smart TV Ad tracking claims.
- Adobe unveils agents for businesses amid thread of AI disruption.
- ^ Related, Adobe expands agency partnership as part of agentic AI platform debut.
- Taboola launches Realize+, an agentic AI system.
- WhatsApp is testing its Snapchat+ style paid plan.
- Jessica Yellin built news not noise on Instagram. Now YouTube is the next frontier.
- Edo strikes back against iSpot by offering tv intelligence data for free.
- StackAdapt’s playbook for ChatGPT ads.
- The Trade Desk is quietly phasing out its signature periodic table.
- The Agentic Web Playbook. The Agentic Web Playbook. The Agentic Web Playbook.
- Seedtag Revolutionises Media Planning & Activation with the Launch of NeuroX.
- Google Maps is starting to look more like social media.
- Jellyfish wants you to use its large language models to plan your ad buys.
- AI companies lean into advertising as infrastructure costs rise.
- Commodity vs Non Commodity content.
- Crooked Media pushes further into TV with new FAST channel.
- Bauer unveils major digital restructure hitting jobs in Germany and UK.
- AI slop is killing social content quality: Here’s how to rise above it.
- The Trade Desk launches first AI agents with Stagwell as client.
- Substack launches translations.
- Silicon Valley is building its own news-industrial complex.
- Comping after TBPN MTS launches. And related, Livestream audience size doesn’t matter – clipping does.
- AI answer engine drives more effective advertising at Reach and Independent.
- The Power of Creator and Brand Collaboration put to the test.
- L’Oreal film claims ‘Because I’m Worth it’ and raises bar for branded content.
- Anthropic debuts Claude Design for building marketing assets, decks, and UIs.
- The Guardian launching first US podcast amid reader revenue growth.
- Inside Time’s rollout of its TimeAI interactive agent.
- R/GA and G42’s generative interface offers a glimpse of the internet’s agentic future.
- Netflix plans to add a vertical video feed, use AI for recommendations.
- The next disruption of media and what to do about it.
- Apple’s next CEO inherits a brand at is peak. Now comes the hard part.
Deals/M&A
- a16 backs MTS Live.
Campaign of the week
- Coinbase gave its users an early preview of the Finding Satoshi documentary.
- Why live streaming is the borderless $4 billion global opportunity publishers can’t ignore.
Smartest commentary
- “Unlike human customers, agents don’t browse, scroll, or respond to advertising. They evaluate, select, and act. And if the data isn’t trusted by them, they move on. The sale is lost.” –Tim Frank, Microsoft.
Datapoints of note
- SemiAnalysis will generate $100m in revenue this year, and the newsletter only account for a very small portion of that.
- Substack now hosts 100,000 paid revenue generating newsletters. Up from 50,000 at the start of 2025. 30% outside the US.
- 1 in 3 consumers trust brands that are working with creators. Over 50% of Gen Z and millennials trust creator recommendations because they believe them to be authentic.
- Netflix programmatic revenue approaching 50% of ad revenue.
- At the same time, the amount of traffic AI platforms are driving has grown steadily. According to Clarity data, AI-referred traffic has increased by 22% over the past six months.
- Nexxen TV Home Screen reaches viewers at the precise moment they are deciding what to watch – a window that Nielsen estimates lasts an average of 10.5 minutes. H/L is leveraging this inventory to create early exposure that primes audiences so that when the later :30 or :15 spots play, they recall the message and listen.
Events
- Come say hi at Possible if you’re joining.
That’s it for this week.
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