Starting Points
What’s that magical channel that will save your business?
“This is the most common question I get,” writes Ivan Sparrow, a mobile marketer and app developer, in a blog post. “And the one I constantly see on X.”
Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer. Every brand and business has its own go‑to‑market style, and that determines which ad platforms work best.
Apple Ads, for instance, are expensive. But a small developer can still buy a handful of keywords and run them low and slow. Their app might not grow much, but the budget stays manageable. You can learn a lot on just a few hundred or a couple of thousand dollars over a few weeks – money that would mostly be wasted on Meta, which needs far more data to optimize.
A solid piece of advice is to pick a channel or two and get really good at them, rather than spreading yourself thin across Google, Meta, Apple and TikTok.
Sparrow’s post drives home how tough it is to break into the major ad platforms. He argues that brands should hold off on Snapchat, Reddit and X until they’re already spending millions on the big channels and influencer marketing – and he doesn’t even mention Amazon or AppLovin.
AI Ad-versaries
Have you seen Anthropic’s Super Bowl ads assuring users that Claude will remain ad-free?
(An ad promising no ads – the irony wasn’t lost on us, either.)
But whether that’s the flex Anthropic thinks it is remains a point of contention.
Consumer feedback was largely positive, calling the ads a “hilarious” tactic that will lead to “impressive” ROI. But others pushed back, arguing that good ads can enhance UX and that Claude lacks “understanding of the commercial consumer.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who can take a joke – the ads “are funny,” he wrote in a post on X, “and I laughed” – contends that Anthropic is an “expensive product” for “rich people.” According to Altman, ads will help make AI available to those who can’t pay for subscriptions.
Still, some ad evangelists didn’t see the humor. “This Anthropic ad is simply obnoxious,” Eric Seufert wrote on X.
Altman also claims in his post that Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, has built an “authoritarian” company that “wants to control what people do with AI” (alluding to Amodei’s support for implementing federal AI regulation and Anthropic’s strict rules about who can use Claude and for what).
The Super Bowl ad won’t matter in the long run, but it must be fun for the Anthropic crew to be living rent free in Altman’s head for a week or two.
Such is the power of targeted, relevant advertising.
The Vibes Are Bad
Vibe Coding – using large language models to generate working code via natural language prompts – may fuel the end of open-source software, 404 Media reports.
According to a study funded by the European Research Council, AI-generated code often relies on open source frameworks without offering anything back to the community in return. But these frameworks need money, bug fixes and other forms of maintenance from willing volunteers. Otherwise, they could collapse and take down all the applications that run on them in the process.
The collapse of open-source software would be a pretty major problem across the entire tech industry, which, naturally, includes ad tech. Many basic, foundational tools like the Index Exchange’s wrapper, Prebid, RTBkit and UID2.0 all operate in an open-source capacity.
Miklós Koren, a professor of economics at Central European University and one of the study’s authors, suggested to 404 Media that a usage-based revenue sharing model between open-source software and major AI firms, like Anthropic and OpenAI (those two again!), might be able to right the ship.
But, as of now, we’re still heading for an iceberg.
But Wait! There’s More!
OpenAI appears to be courting brands – not agencies – for its new ads business. [Digiday]
OpenAI is also building an “integrity team” to prevent ChatGPT ads from going off the rails. [Business Insider]
Meta is testing a standalone app for its AI-generated videos to compete with OpenAI’s (sorry, last one!) Sora app. [TechCrunch]
Scope3 reduces its headcount again for the second time in five months. [Adweek]
Hollywood is losing audiences to AI fatigue. [Wired]
Former presidential candidate Kamala Harris is … starting a Gen Z content hub? [The Verge]
You’re Hired!
OpenX appoints Matt Sattel as CEO. [release]
Uber hires its third CFO in three years, Balaji Krishnamurthy. [Fortune]
AI health care marketing platform Doceree elevates Kamya Elawadhi to co-founder and president. [release]
Shopsense AI brings on Lisa Rowley as head of sales. [release]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
