Suffering From Success
Perhaps you’ve heard of NeeDoh, a squishy stress relief cube toy that’s apparently been a months-long hit on TikTok.
Regardless, it’s currently enjoying the “curse of virality,” Paul Weingard, CEO of Schylling (maker of NeeDoh), tells The Wall Street Journal.
At first glance, that curse is about whether NeeDoh can maintain its pre-viral-moment sales and growth rates. Before going viral, NeeDoh was steadily profitable and sold more than 100 million cubes since 2017. But the aftermath of a viral moment can sometimes snuff out the success of a product. It’s like putting out a campfire with a blast of pure oxygen.
But it gets more sinister still.
NeeDoh flew under the radar of systematic e-commerce copycats. Now, “NeeDoh” is the noun for its category on Amazon. Soon, NeeDoh will confront clones everywhere – but they’ll be clones trained for algorithmic feeds and online platforms. The new competitors increase demand for raw material, slowing NeeDoh’s capacity to restock, and bring tactical pricing strategies that chip away at margins.
“We may not be able to put this genie back into the bottle,” Weingard says. “We just might have to adapt to this new state of viral dynamics.”
SMH GEO
AI search visibility is a marketer’s latest nightmare.
Pew Research Center determined that Google users are less likely to click on a link when an AI summary appears in their search results – so marketers are now struggling to figure out how to make sure they appear directly in AI results.
Great news: There’s no shortage of tools claiming to understand brand visibility in AI, agency execs tell Digiday. The challenge is attracting both startups, like Profound, Peec AI and Ahrefs Brand Radar, as well as big players like Adobe and Microsoft.
The bad news? These generative engine optimization (GEO) tools leave a lot to be desired, and marketers are getting “inconsistent results,” per Digiday.
Indeed, AdExchanger has spoken to a number of GEO startups over the past year, and one of the main consistencies among them is the fact that they don’t know why different AI engines skew toward different types of content.
Right now, the only thing that “seems to be consistent and genuinely useful,” according to Joseph Levi, CEO at Noise Media Group, “is seeing how often your brand appears within different types of queries,” rather than providing ways to increase brand awareness across channels.
These companies – some of which charge marketers up to $1,000 per month – are too new and too uncertain “to be charging what they’re charging,” Levi adds.
Me, Myself And ITube
Across CTV, competitive platforms are learning to play nice with each other.
Disney sells ads through Amazon and Google (which have rival video inventory) as well as The Trade Desk. Amazon audiences are available on Roku and Netflix.
So what would happen if Google went back to opening up YouTube’s ad inventory to third parties, like it used to back in 2015?
It could become reality depending on how the remedies in Google’s ad tech antitrust trial shake out, writes Mike Shields at Next in Media.
At POSSIBLE 2026 in Miami last week, Shields asked industry experts for their takes on a more open YouTube ad ecosystem.
Increased interoperability would be a boon for measurement, frequency capping and attribution, says Rachel Dillon, EVP of sales at Strategus, a CTV buyer. And if YouTube was sold by outside DSPs, it would be easier for marketers to compare the impact of YouTube ads directly alongside those placed on other platforms, rather than having to stitch in Google attribution data “after the fact,” she says.
But marketers being able to compare YouTube directly to other platforms is just one of the many reasons why Google might want to avoid it, writes Shields.
Besides, YouTube pulled in $9.88 billion in Q1 ad revenue, he adds – so going it alone seems to be working.
But Wait! There’s More!
Why Hollywood is turning to gaming platforms to promote new movie releases. [Variety]
OpenAI makes a pixel change that lays the foundation for launching ChatGPT ads in the EU. [Digiday]
Paramount+ subscribers in the Northern District of California filed a lawsuit to block the Paramount Skydance-Warner Bros. Discovery merger. [Forbes]
The Onion’s takeover of Infowars hits another snag, causing the latter website to go dark. [Variety]
One weird side effect of the YouTube algo: It might suppress indigenous language content. [Wired]
