Means To A Vend
A big issue for ad tech is that marketers and agency execs often don’t understand the differences between vendors, and the glut of websites, industry reports (Forrester Wave, anyone?) and press releases can be downright counterproductive.
This knowledge gap has led to a coterie of new companies that provide ostensibly neutral vendor reviews.
The latest example is CartographAI, a startup co-founded by Jay Friedman, former CEO of Goodway Group, and Danilo Tauro, a longtime programmatic industry vet who will lead the new venture.
“We get bombarded every single day, every single week, with new tools, old tools or old tools being rebranded as new,” Bastien Parizot, SVP of global business services and AI transformation at CPG giant Reckitt, a pilot customer of Cartograph’s, tells Adweek.
The idea is that brands or agency buyers can use the service for free, and while vendors can’t pay to influence the results, they can pay for certain visual elements or to include their own content marketing, such as videos and case studies.
A similar startup founded by ad tech vets, called Blurbs, launched last year with a comparable goal and business model. Marketecture likewise started as a library of reviews and interviews to help buyers with the vendor selection process.
Which is to say, at least for some, confusion isn’t a bug in the system; it’s become a business opportunity.
FoxFront
Upfront pitches aren’t pausing just because half the ad industry will soon be on a plane headed to POSSIBLE in Miami.
On Thursday, Fox unveiled a new AI-based ad platform called Fox AdStudio designed to give brands content and viewership insights in real time, Adweek reports. One of the main selling points is outcomes-based measurement (because it’s not a TV ad announcement if it doesn’t reference the words AI and/or outcomes).
The ad platform is a key part of Fox’s upfront pitch, which centers on the two things marketers appear to care about most: scale and performance. Fox is touting its wide portfolio of news, sports and its free ad-supported TV platform Tubi.
But, perhaps more importantly, Fox says its audiences are largely complementary, with minimal overlap. Meaning that advertisers who spend more with Fox aren’t just hitting the same viewers again and again, but rather reaching new viewers who might convert.
Throughout the year, Fox will add agentic media planning and buying to its ad platform and is currently in talks with agencies about what those features might look like.
Does Not Compute
AI models are getting too costly to maintain, leaving companies to wonder whether the AI revolution will be a cost savings or a drain.
According to revenue forecasts, OpenAI is unlikely to reach even a 7% return on invested capital, which is considered the minimum threshold before “unmitigated disaster,” according to Gartner analyst and senior director Will Sommer.
LLMs generate revenue by developing tokens, or small units of data – roughly four English characters – that AI models can “understand and process,” per The Verge. But the cost of compute and training models is cost prohibitive, says Sommer. LLMs simply cannot generate enough tokens to satisfy the revenue expectations of investors.
Instead, AI companies are looking for other ways to make the economics work, like OpenAI’s introduction of ads and Anthropic’s restriction of third-party tools like OpenClaw that soak up computing power. Salesforce, meanwhile, devised a metric called Agentic Work Units in an apparent attempt to identify fruitful versus wasteful token consumption.
Ironically, several AI startups, including Swan (for coding) and General Intelligence Company (for business automation), now spend more on AI compute than it would cost them to hire human workers, 404 Media reports.
But Wait! There’s More!
Why Google has changed and who’s really paying for it. [Search Engine Journal]
Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders overwhelmingly approved the Paramount deal, but not the generous compensation packages for CEO David Zaslav and other WBD execs. [Variety]
Meta will now allow parents to see the topics that their children discuss with the company’s AI tools. [TechCrunch]
Vox Media bought lots of online publications in the 2010s. Now it’s hoping to sell as many as it can. [Adweek]
Marketers face a new challenge: AI-obsessed bosses. [Link in Bio]
You’re Hired!
Contextual advertising company Channel Factory names three new C-suite execs. [release]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
