Edition #547
Will your agent do your underwear shopping for you? Loads of M&A and Katzenberg on creativity & AI.
Would you get an AI to do your underwear shopping for you? Or how about, your partners birthday is coming up, underwear shopping for your partner?
Lets lower the stakes, what about, a new top, for casual Fridays in the office?
Ben Thompson (ala Statchery) had a spot on TBPN this week and he dug into this a bit. His take is that there’s a bit of disillusionment around what consumers want from AI.
He goes on that consumers aren’t going around looking for productivity from AI, they want to be entertained, they like art of window shopping online. And he’s bang on.
The fact that an agent, can go and do all this stuff for you, is great. But you want to check out the t-shirt, compare it, save it for later and then come back. You want to take action.
The undercurrent of this is, within the hype, you have to keep the customer front and center. What is the mass market behavior, that you want to help? Because, for products like Muse, it is about the masses.
Extrapolate this thought to agents in advertising, big deals, probably negotiated by people, little deals, probably within tight operating bounds.
But one thing that Instinct and Muse have done, is drowned out, what might have otherwise been peoples focus on Siri. Which might reflect how the masses will use AI.
I suspect, we’ll see a resurgence of Siri back into culture, as Apple pushes it more around the holidays.
A tangential takeaway from the Muse hype is, as far as I can see, there haven’t been any publishers going, hey over here, please use Muse on us, if you’re a developer, please build on top of our content! Here’s our licensing agreement, or where you can buy us etc. This feels like a bit of a miss and a good opportunity.
Because behind the LLMs are millions of developers, who are paying to vibe code, so they have budget, and when they use the LLMs, they’re not only buying intelligence, they are consuming publishers content.
If you want your content to be monetized in new and exciting aways, including by agents, you need to be out there doing this. Or, at least in the position where this could be possible. I suspect for many, they don’t yet have the internals lined up for this to be a possibility.
My hope though is we’ll see this soon! Who is going to be the pioneer, that captures their unfair share of this new market?
Notable stories this week
- Publishers’ scorecard on Google’s ad tech remedies: they’re progress, but far from a clean win.
- Apple’s ChatGPT tools ‘dramatically underperformed’, OpenAI claims.
- Can adland realistically reduce its reliance on Google’s vertically integrated ad stack?
- Deepfakes drive state AI laws.
- Quality is what wins in the AI era.
- That creator video went viral, the booking came later: how brands measure impact.
- How brands can keep up with the speed of culture.
- LLMs keep citing YouTube in search results. LLMs keep citing YouTube in search results.
- A retail expert explains the threat AI agents like Instinct and Meta’s Muse pose to Amazon.
- Jake Paul betting app slams HBO for Entourage cease and desist letter.
- Link economy breaks as AI reshapes web traffic.
- Axios highlights select deals and lawsuits between AI and media companies.
- Amazon blocks Meta’s Muse AI assistant in new standoff over agentic shopping.
- ChatGPT’s newest ad form is itself an agent. More here on Sponsored Agents.
- What The New York Times looks for in AI licensing partnerships.
- From brand deals to equity deals: creators want a stake, not just a fee.
- Yahoo: quality of native ads must improve.
- India gets hooked on ‘stackable’ micro dramas.
- Getting value out of agentic AI means knowing when not to use it.
- Best Buy is selling Amazon Fire streaming ads.
- LinkedIn tests Network tab.
- Facebook Pages get charged for link posts.
- Mag giant Hearst UK returns to revenue growth after three years of decline.
- Time is all in on agents.
- Why ChatGPT Ads will move beyond Free and Go.
- Sponsored prompts showing up in Alexa.
- Scope3 rebrands to Apostra, solidifies shift to AI.
- The case for and against retail media networks as brand building channels.
- Paywall violation ‘eviscerates’ fair use defense: What OpenAI-NYT twist means for publishers.
- Why better show level data still can’t buy you show level control.
- Economist video strategy: ‘We did 50 pilot shows before launching Insider’
- Zynga Ads+ brings 100 mobile games to advertising offering.
- Strategy was never in short supply. Courage was.
- [Long form] The World is Changing: AI for Creativity by Katzenberg.
Deals/M&A
- Paramount weighs tapping Musk for equity investment.
- Redbird Capital signs a deal to acquire majority stake in Puck.
- Martin Sorrell’s venture fund back AI video startup Higgsfield.
- Letterboxd has multiple bidders at the table.
- Infillion acquires Foursquare, adding more location data to its ever-growing adtech stack.
- Taboola to acquire Dianomi.
Campaign of the week
- The Liberty Calendar launch video.
- Notable mention, Lidl parking up outside the $50 rye loaf bakery, promoting their $0.49 croissants.
Smartest commentary
- “When the bot generates a piece of art, it is not trying to communicate anything. It is statistics, not soul; it is emulating things that have been done. By contrast, human creativity isn’t about repeating patterns of zeros and ones; it is about doing something new.” –Jeffrey Katzenberg.
Datapoints of note
- 58% of ad execs expect agentic buying to hit scale within a year, according to IAB Europe research.
- The Boston Globe story going viral, generated 1,000+ subscriptions.
- OpenAds testing 20m impressions on chat agents ads in AI chat. Engagement rate was about 7%.
- Muse got 2.8m downloads in the first 12 days of launch.
- Across more than 21,000 evaluations of AI-enabled brand experiences, only 9% achieved the highest Valuable AI Experience Score. Yet the reward for getting it right is significant: high-scoring AI experiences were associated with 4.4x higher engagement, 1.6x stronger brand desire, and 1.5x greater growth potential than low-scoring experiences.
Events
- The Advertising CMO breakfast in early October.
That’s it for this week.
|
|---|