The Handshake That Feeds
WPP CEO Cindy Rose recently criticized the rise of “CEO handshake” account wins, which is when an agency skips the pitch but still lands the account through an apparent CEO-to-CEO deal that bypasses the CMO.
“I do not think we do ourselves any favor as an industry of professionals by encouraging clients to bypass proper due diligence,” she told investors last week.
Rose didn’t specifically name Publicis in her references to CEO handshakes, though the holdco’s recent account wins fit the pattern. Publicis landed PepsiCo without pitching, following similar wins for Microsoft in April and LVMH’s APAC account in September.
Publicis, for its part, rejected the characterization in an open letter to Rose, published by Adweek. It begins, “Dear Cindy,” and continues: “Claiming we win on a ‘CEO handshake’ is an insult to clients’ intelligence.”
The letter goes on to note that clients “would never have entrusted us with a task of this magnitude on a wink and a handshake.”
Well, whatever the label, Publicis now owns these accounts and will be accountable if the work falls short.
SpringServe Forward, Fall Back
Happy Daylight Savings and quarterly earnings season.
Magnite, which reported earlier this week, saw a 20% year-over-year revenue increase to $200.6 million in Q3. Connected TV was a highlight (no surprises there), with CTV revenue jumping 39% YOY. CTV has steadily grown as a share of Magnite’s business and now accounts for 53% of the total.
What’s new this quarter, however, is the role of agentic AI. Agentic workflows are infiltrating modern media buying, including for CTV. Agentic media buys can include formats that aren’t yet standardized for programmatic. Think home-screen ads, pause ads and smart TV tiles.
Which is why, during its earnings call, Magnite execs touted how the company is using agentic workflows to sell LG TV home screen inventory.
Magnite is also optimistic about SpringServe, which is not just an ad server, thank you very much. SpringServe is being pitched as a programmatic and mediation platform, a role that helps position Magnite as “the operating system for CTV monetization,” CEO Michael Barrett told investors.
That strategy could pay off as more ad decisioning shifts over to the sell side.
Underperformance Channels
ChatGPT ads are generating less revenue per session than Google Search ads, early data suggests.
Digiday reports that the average is $0.89 for ChatGPT, compared with $2.45 for Google, citing a paper by Maximilian Kaiser and Christian Schulze that is still under review.
One possible reason is limited ad reach. Similarweb and Graphite data show that even in the UK, the market with the highest rate, ads reach just under 46% of eligible ChatGPT users.
And even among users who have seen ads, there’s no set frequency. According to OpenAI, ads appear only when they’re considered additive and relevant to the conversation and never in conversations about sensitive topics.
Yet even with those guardrails, some ads appear to be missing the mark. Paid ChatGPT traffic has a 0.37% conversion rate, compared with 1.17% for Google.
But Wait! There’s More!
TikTok launches its own standalone Shop app. [TechCrunch]
AI agents still aren’t great at actually making purchases, research from Visa suggests. [Fortune]
Salon, which first began publishing online in 1995, has been suddenly and unceremoniously shut down. [Salon]
The former VP of marketing at Good Good Golf is suing the company for defamation after its former CEO blamed him for a controversial ad that cost Good Good its sponsorship deal with Callaway. [The Athletic]
Through a partnership with Attain, Amazon advertisers can now target shoppers at Walmart, Target and other retail chains. [Adweek]
Agentic commerce platform Firmly raises $15 million in Series A funding. [release]
Taboola is making a “headless” agentic pitch to agency ad buyers. [tipsheet.ai]
You’re Hired!
LG Ad Solutions hires Abhijit Pol as its SVP of product and engineering. [release]
