Ad-ding Up
The Earth will keep turning on its axis, The Simpsons will keep putting out new episodes and advertisers will keep on spending. These are all immutable truths.
On Thursday, the IAB released an update to its yearly outlook, forecasting 12.3% growth in ad spend this year. Back in January, it predicted only 9.5% growth.
So what changed? In short, a stronger-than-expected first half and a clearer read on the economy have given advertisers permission to open their wallets wider.
The biggest jumps in predicted spend were in social media and CTV, at 1.9% and 1.8% respectively. Commerce media came in third place, up 1.5% thanks in part to AI’s ability to bridge the gap between discovery and purchase.
Indeed, AI is reshaping how buyers spend and what they prioritize, but no one has fully solved, or even properly optimized for, the new AI landscape yet. Right now, nearly half of advertisers (45%) say that their biggest measurement challenge is comparing AI-driven customer journeys to traditional ones.
They’re also still working out where AI adds value to their campaigns and where it doesn’t.
Seventy-six percent of buyers cite optimizing content for AI discovery as an area of “increased focus,” the IAB reports, while only 69% say they’re focused on using generative AI in campaigns – a 9% drop from January.
MMM Bop
Stop the presses: Google’s Meridian MMM tool is adding a chatbot interface. You know, like seemingly every other mar tech tool.
Marketers can now query Meridian for suggestions on how to build their marketing mix models, Search Engine Land reports. The chatbot can also audit their data quality and troubleshoot errors in MMM setups.
In addition, Meridian’s GeoX geotesting feature is exiting beta. GeoX lets marketers segment campaigns by geography, measure performance in those regions and push the findings into their models – the kind of MMM functionality that’s become table stakes for incrementality testing.
On top of that, Meridian is also now allowing marketers to inject upper-funnel signals, like Branded Google Query Volume, into their models alongside lower-funnel conversion signals. The idea is to get a better handle on how harder-to-attribute channels like TV and DOOH end up impacting conversions.
And moving along to non-Meridian news, Google is integrating its Data Manager into Google Analytics and DV360. It’s also adopting the IAB Tech Lab’s ECAPI standard to make its Data Manager API more interoperable with other platforms.
The Meridian updates are noteworthy because Google continues to develop its open-source MMM whereas its rival for ad budgets, Meta, seems to be stepping back from its own open-source MMM tool. In July, several sources at ad agencies and measurement vendors told AdExchanger that Meta is no longer aggressively pushing its Robyn MMM solution.
Party Foul?
Invitation app Partiful has officially broken through from funky little startup to household name, as evidenced by the shoutout it got during Season 2 of “The Pitt” earlier this year. But the company hasn’t quite figured out how to monetize yet, save for the small fee it gets from people who use the platform to sell tickets or buy premium designs.
Which means it’s probably only a matter of time before the big social platforms do what they do best, as in, rip off the newcomer’s core business model by absorbing it into their own offerings.
Enter Snapchat, which is getting in on the party-planning boom. On Thursday, Snap announced a new suite of event-planning features designed to schedule gatherings, send invitations and collect responses, Bloomberg reports.
Does that mean the party’s over for Partiful?
Not necessarily. Snap can copy features, but Partiful’s real advantage is its brand and the community it’s built. And the fastest way to monetize these things is with advertising, of course.
As Marketing Brew noted back in March, Partiful has already experimented with ads. But rolling out ads too aggressively could alienate its core Gen Z and millennial audiences, the same people who abandoned Facebook Events years ago.(That is, if Partiful’s connections to Palantir haven’t done that already.)
But Wait! There’s More!
Omnicom’s CFO weighs in on the “disappointing” loss of PepsiCo to Publicis. [Digiday]
Advertisers can now buy ads in ChatGPT through Amazon’s ad tech platform. [The Information]
Jimmy Kimmel says his interview with Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico will be broadcast on YouTube instead of ABC because the FCC “threatened” the TV network. It’s the second time this year that a late night host has had to move an interview with Talarico to YouTube after claiming to have been threatened by the FCC. [The Guardian]
You’re Hired!
AI marketing ops startup Gradial appoints Lynn Girotto as CMO. [release]
Robert DeSalvo returns to Perion as managing director of the Americas, a role he previously held in 2025. [Linkedin]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
