Edition #499
Huge edit post the Fourth of July, F1 movie sold real sponsorships to the tune of $40m and influencers, do we need them?
Huge edition this week after a one week hiatus. I reviewed over 200 stories on the shortlist, so it took a bit. Fill up a cup of coffee and enjoy.
There was a bunch of measurement stories this week, one featuring data from Kochava, talking about how MMM’s are uncovering drastic opportunities for brands.
With an MMM they’re “measuring influence, not just what happened last,” Danks explained. “The question to ask yourself is: do you want to be investing in influence, or do you want to be investing in the final touchpoint?”
It goes on, “nearly half of marketing budgets generating only 7% of actual value. The analysis also shows Apple Search Ads receiving up to 75% more credit than it deserves while other channels are systematically undervalued by billions of dollars.”
This, this is great. MMM’s using the power of machine learning, to help uncover fresh new opportunities that marketers can act on. Love it, I only wish it were my own case study.
From the break I’ve got some loose ponderings on Super Juniors, AI Factories, the Substack economy and YouTube economy, which will pop up over the next few weeks.
Was there anything fresh in your mind coming back from the break?
Also we’re one edition away from 500!
Notable stories this week
- Expensify banking on ‘F1’ movie title deal to boost revenue, build global awareness.
- Perplexity AI’s plan for search ads looks nothing like Google.
- Best Buy, Lowe’s chief marketing officers explain why they launched new influencer programs.
- Google tries to win over publishers amid AI search tensions.
- Attention isn’t all you need.
- Punchbowl News expands to video.
- 𝕏 is moving to charging for ads based on vertical size, so an ad that takes up the whole screen would cost more than an ad that takes up 1/4 of the screen.
- AI Mode is going on the homepage.
- Substack brings new updates to livestreaming as it increases video push.
- YouTube Pirates Are Cashing In on Hollywood’s Summer Blockbusters.
- TikTok Building New Version of App for U.S. Users.
- Influencing with the influencers.
- Trust is the new oil.
- B2B marketing and the 95/5 rule.
- LinkedIn enables third-party analytics access with new Member Post API. And YouTube lets channels share more performance data with brands.
- LinkedIn CEO says AI writing assistant is not as popular as expected.
- Substack’s video bet could be a growth hack for small creators.
- Spotify expands podcast ads to self-serve and programmatic buyers.
- Netflix & Spotify are having conversations to partner on live music award shows and concert series.
- Why Advertisers Can’t Figure Out If They’re Monetizing Illicit Content On YouTube.
- Threads is nearing X’s daily app users, new data shows.
- Napster is back—and it’s betting big on holographic avatars.
- Google Chrome will soon be bundling a mini llm in the browser.
- Generative AI, not ad tech, is the new antitrust battleground for Google.
- How Google AI Overviews is fuelling zero-click searches for top publishers.
- Agentic AI Is Fast Approaching. Here’s How to Get It Right.
- OpenAI to release web browser in challenge to Google Chrome.
- G/O Media Winds Down by Selling Kotaku, One of Its Last Sites.
- AI Chatbots Can Now Write Community Notes on X.
- Microsoft’s Existing OpenAI Deal May Be Undercutting Ad Agency Partnerships.
- Could AI Wipe Out a $200 Billion Ad Category?
- Cloudflare to block AI crawlers by default with new Pay Per Crawl initiative.
- Google unveils Offerwall to expand publisher monetization options.
- BBC.com launches dynamic paywall for US users.
- The new Washington Post annotations are here.
- Reddit vows to stay human to emerge a winner from artificial intelligence.
- Google wipes 350 Android apps tied to ad fraud driving 1.5b daily bid requests.
- Rockerbox’s Attribution Journey.
- Alaska Airlines sees promise in Google Meridian.
- StackAdapt Launches AI-Powered Assistant Ivy for Faster Data-Driven Decisions.
- Google Search Console adds Discussion forums search appearance filter.
- Linda Yaccarino’s Departure Deepens Uncertainty for X’s Ad Business.
- Consensus on Wall Street seems to be Google is undervalued.
- [Long read] The Agentic Web and Original Sin.
Deals/M&A
- Alliant Acquires AnalyticsIQ To Scale Up Its Audience Graph.
- Amplitude acquires Jun Analytics.
- Moveable Ink announces definitive agreement to be acquired by STG.
Campaign of the week
- Italian Beer Ice. In this heat, who wouldn’t give it a try.
View all best campaigns on Marca.
Smartest commentary
- “A web economy built on earned trust would look very different from what exists today. Among the implications: the value of human curation would rise as algorithms struggle to manage the noise; discovery would shift back from algorithmically-curated feeds to trusted follows; similarly, consumers would lean more on institutions with trusted brands; it would be harder for new creators and brands to establish trust; and advertisers would shift from paying for attention to paying for outcomes.” –Doug Shapiro.
- “In 2025, your brand voice isn’t what you say…It’s who you trust to speak for you.” –Monica Khan.
Datapoints of note
- Gemini was drawing 350 million monthly users as of March.
- 60% find AI Mode to be more helpful than ChatGPT. 75% of paid ChatGPT subs prefer using Google AI Mode over that product. 53% are clicking on AI Mode links “often or very often.”
- On average, users value [social media platforms] at $80 – $100/month. for free-to-use platforms, that’s multiples more than most streaming services.
- 61% of US adults have used AI in the past 6 months. 19% use it daily.
- Nearly half of marketing budgets generating only 7% of actual value. The analysis also shows Apple Search Ads receiving up to 75% more credit than it deserves while other channels are systematically undervalued by billions of dollars.
- Historically, only ~20% of Google searches were monetizable. With Al-driven personalization and intent inference, this funnel is expanding.
- Between January 2024 and May 2025, news-related prompts in ChatGPT rose by 212%, while Google searches declined by 5%.
- Apple and Bruckheimer Films sold more than $40M in sponsor product placement to over a dozen companies who appear in the film.
- Raptive shares AI traffic by vertical.
- Initial data on Nexxen Discovery, 38% more actions per impression, 45% lower cost per action.
- Reddit now has more than 100,000 communities based around topic and interest. Reddit’s commercial pitch is that many of these conversations — about 40 per cent — are about a service or a product, and within this a quarter relate to some sort of recommendation.
- Quitting Facebook was 15% as effective as therapy. Quitting Instagram: 22% as effective. Both eliminated over half of this election-related stress.
- Our data shows nearly two-thirds of US marketers begin their holiday retail media planning between May and July, demonstrating that “Christmas in July” has evolved from retail cliche into an actual observed practice,”
Events
- Drinks in London coming up in August, let me know if you want to join.
That’s it for this week.
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