Edition #545
Yahoo’s TBPN? Advertising as the infrastructure for serving AI agents and Entourage is back.
If you’ve been on X at all the past week, what a week of AI it has been?! But on the topic of agents, Antonio raised an interesting question, Ads as the infrastructure for allocating resources to agents?
You can imagine companies like Kevel tackling this.
In new show news. Friend of the newsletter Ian Schafer has his own show coming to Bloomberg TV called Post Credits. Check it out.
And CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa, who announced she was going out on her own, this week shared she’ll do a show on Yahoo Finance. The gem in Yahoo’s portfolio. With more than 100mm readers!
I mean, what a slam dunk. Launching a TBPN type show, but with built in distribution. Then layer in, I would assume, distribution to YouTube, X, Instagram. And for Yahoo, a great premium segment to be selling into their advertisers. Super smart.
Also, coming up in October, I’m hosting an Advertising CMO breakfast, for marketing leaders, at ad companies. if that’s you (or someone on your team) please let me know, would love to have you.
Notable stories this week
- Amazon Ads brings advertisers to ChatGPT.
- Elon Musk’s X is the AI community group chat.
- YouTube updates branded content sourcing and disclosures.
- Deirde Bosa partners with Yahoo Finance on new AI live show.
- Historic NYT v OpenAI copyright battle heats up.
- Firefox for iOS now has a native ad blocker.
- Google divestiture is dead and publishers are fine with that.
- Snap names Ronan Harris Chief Commercial Officer.
- Instagram boss says users will be ‘overwhelmed’ with brand content in an algorithm free world.
- Publishers are spending hundreds of millions a month buying traffic.
- Brands are pushing influencers to hide their paid deals.
- Threads updates profile analytics display.
- Media agencies build audit tools to prevent AI agents from overcharging.
- Good bots, bad bots.
Deals/M&A
- Meta acquires Swedish AI startup Stilla.ai.
- Justice department to take a closer look at Fox’s $22b Roku deal.
Campaign of the week
- Betr with Jeremy Piven & Adrian Grenier.
Smartest commentary
- “At its core, digital advertising rests on a simple abstraction: traffic is treated as a proxy for attention, and attention is treated as a proxy for demand. For much of the internet’s commercial history, this assumption held. Human users generated the majority of measurable activity, and advertising systems optimized for reaching people at scale. As automated traffic has expanded, this premise has weakened.” –Andres Lauer.
Datapoints of note
- DeeperDive is reaching about 10m users, with 10% engagement.
- Publishers’ paid search budgets have risen 274% in the last three years, part of an industrywide response to traffic declines.
- AI investment is driving double digit global ad growth.
Events
- The Advertising CMO breakfast in early October..
That’s it for this week.
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