Edition #519
The vernacular switch to machines, Instagram authenticity and agentic ads.
I saw a tweet this week about how you can ask an AI agent to make a media recommendation and it won’t include TV. Because none of the training data included tv in a meaningful way.
“The television industry faces an invisible crisis. The AI systems that will soon make billions in media-planning decisions don’t seem to favour TV.
Not because the data says so, but because the data is biased. If we don’t fix that fast, we’ll watch autonomous agents systematically defund premium media in favour of performance marketing – not because it’s more effective, but because the data structure favours digital.”
It turns out, there is a lot more data about performance advertising on the open web, than there is TV.
You can only be as good as your training data! Any good robot knows that.
But the title of the piece, ’teaching the machines about TV’ caught my eye. Mainly because we’ve had a vernacular switch, and it’s hard to pinpoint the moment, but maybe when Mira Murati left OpenAI and started ‘Thinking Machines’. The switch is that we’ve stopped saying bots or AI agents but swapped to machines. I’ve even noticed it first hand in my own language ‘advertising to machines’.
AI agents is more of a one to one relationship, but machines is a category. Or maybe it’s a social way of grounding the ephemeral into an easy to understand category. After all the pace of change in AI is so high, some grounding would be reassuring. The Machines vs The Agents.
Anyway a little observation, expect more decks to be titled machines in 2026. That’s a bold prediction.
On that, seeking humans over machines, Digg has relaunched, with a user trust, if you wanted to be in early, now’s a good time to join.
Loads of stories this week, a pick up post CES.
If any readers are in Switzerland next week, let me know! Love to grab coffee.
Notable stories this week
- Why social content drives branded search.
- How generative AI is reshaping brand content.
- A Google VP explains why ads make sense in AI search but not Gemini – yet.
- Why brands are playing with unconventional ad lengths.
- Globe introduces AI-led contextual ad tool.
- Agentic advertising is coming (sometime).
- Would you use Google Gemini if it fills with ads?
- Two content models emerging in the AI-driven web economy.
- Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon are paying up for ‘enterprise’ access to Wikipedia.
- How Howie Mandel’s Clean Eating Ties To Agentic Measurement.
- Where AI slop fits into algorithmic visibility.
- Beyond the hype: Teaching the machines about TV.
- Observer growth ‘on plan’ says co-CEO nine months after Tortoise takeover.
- Introducing the Advocacy Engineer.
- Infillion unveils agent-native platform at CES, built for AI-driven media buying.
- Digg launches its new Reddit rival to the public.
- Google AdSense Earnings Dropping Again eCPM/RPM – Complaints.
- Marketing is in its ‘outcomes era’ – and it’s a reckoning, not a revolution.
- ^ Related: Advertising shifts from impressions to business outcomes in 2026.
- UK advertisers brace for AI content chaos as brand safety concerns surge.
- TikTok blocks Thai politicians from paying for ads before poll.
- How Influencer Marketing is changing in 2026.
- Instagram is betting on the momentum, not the reaction.
- Why brands are spending more on A-list celebrities than ever before.
- Why the ad industry isn’t ready to let AI agents spend ad dollars.
- Publishers prepare to be “squeezed” by AI and creators in 2026.
- The YouTube Vibecession.
- Future starts to sharpen its AI search visibility playbook.
- The Atlantic adds new friends & family subscription plan.
- Media eyes betting as next big engagement hack.
Deals/M&A
- Blackstone invests $100m in elite marketing tech firm.
- Holywater raises $22m for microdramas.
- Noise raises $7m, a prediction markets for relevance.
- CloudFlare acquires Human Native.
Campaign of the week
- Air France with CNN, highlighting a new era of luxury travel.
- Golden Globes partners with Polymarket through the awards ceremony.
Smartest commentary
- “If Mosseri were being honest with himself on how to keep Instagram “authentic”, he would have used his essay to advocate for AI regulation, creator protections, and industry standards. To introduce a program that shields creators from AI copycats trained off their likeness and their posts. To take his own advice and lean into “unflattering” content. Being truthful about the problem AI poses to Instagram creators won’t always make you look good, but at least it will be “authentic”.” –Rachel Karten.
Datapoints of note
- Streamer Spend To Top $100BN For First Time In 2026.
- Databricks says 80%+ of new databases are now created by AI agents, not humans.
- Publishers expect Search Traffic to fall over 40%.
- Global publisher Google traffic dropped by a third in 2025.
Events
- Next breakfast is coming up, let me know if you’d like to join.
That’s it for this week.
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