Meta 22%

Edition #458

What drove Meta’s 22% growth, Outbrain makes a huge acquisition and Ilona Maher 🏉.

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What’s the potential impact on AI for ads? 22% YOY growth if Meta is any example. With a stonkers quarter, it has everyone else going, alright that’s the benchmark, where/how soon/can we get that sort of improvement?

Whether you’re on the brand side, or the tech side, both have opportunities for this type of improvement. A strength Facebook has is its closed eco-system, they own it end to end, so can deploy tech right across that mix pretty quickly.

For companies outside that, AI can also help simulate that eco-system, even if you don’t have it. For example, Meta tracks how well people engage with advertising destination pages. If they can’t track, they can use ML to bridge that gap.

(Not long after my first draft, Outbrain announced their acquisition with this exact strategy, an end to end open internet platform, to drive these types of performance through the funnel.)

This is an area we’ve been playing in at Nudge, using our attention model to help bridge these gaps and drive performance. We’re pretty slack in keeping the web page up to date, but more here. In essence, the model can take in a url of a page and predict how much attention it gets, and also give insights in to how to improve the attention. This can be used to link to performance data, understand ad environments, ad destination pages, own content, competitor content. Quite a mix. Many are using this to build their own models on top of the data.

Would love any readers thoughts or feedback, and happy to give a walk through. But that Meta news was just the perfect timing to discuss.

Also a congrats to USA Women’s Rugby for their bronze this week, epic performance 🏉.

Notable stories this week

• Perplexity launches ad revenue sharing program for publishers. Ads to launch in coming months.
• We get SearchGPT. Has anyone tried it?
• Meta’s advertising growth is proof that hefty AI spending is already paying off.
• W3C chimes in, third-party cookies have got to go.
• Inuvo’s reaction to Google? Cookies are still crumbling.
• Nike: An epic sage of value destruction. And the cautionary tale of Nike.
• The peril of analytics that are orientated to answering business questions.
• How blogging builds trust and brand loyalty in the age of AI.
• Brand loyalty ain’t want it used to be.
• [Smart take] Should web browsers be regulated?

Deals/M&A

• Outbrain acquires Teads for $1b.
• MIQ to acquire Pathlabs.
• Video ad tech firms Connatix and JW Player are holding merger talks.
• Publicis acquires influencer marketing giant Influential.
• Brandrank.AI secures $1.2m in seed and angel funding to revolutionize AI-Driven brand search analytics.
• Analytics Partners acquires marketing firm Magic Numbers.

Campaign of the week 

• Ilona Maher with Women’s Health. “I don’t like this idea that you have to drop your femininity to play a sport like rugby or any sport”.

View all 2024 best campaigns.

Smartest commentary

• “In the end, greed will get you. Last year, top-flight consumer goods companies were boasting about their ability to push rising costs through to customers and grow their profit margins amid rapid inflation….their world-famous brand-name products, they said, were so popular, that shoppers would skimp elsewhere to keep on buying. “Irresistible superiority,” said Procter & Gamble, maker of Pampers diapers and Ariel detergent. Snack food group Mondelez argued that “the enduring strength of our iconic beloved brands gives us substantial pricing power… these days, they aren’t so cocky. Weary consumers, particularly at the lower end of the financial spectrum, are looking for ways to cut back spending on everything from fast food to household appliances. More than three-quarter of Americans surveyed by McKinsey reported delaying purchases or trading down in some way.” –Brooke Masters.

Datapoints of note

• NBCUniversal tops Olympics record as ad sales surpass $1.2b. Revenue from first time sponsors is $500m.
• NBC Sports said brands advertising during the opening ceremony generated +320% greater search volume than brands during the Tokyo opening ceremony.
• Paris Olympics opening ceremony watched by nearly 29m.
• 88% of CMOs believe that is is increasingly important for brands to be integrated into culture.

Events

• Attention Happy Hour, next one coming up in September. .

View all 2024 datapoints of note.

That’s it for this week.