Sir Funds-A-Lot
On Wednesday, TV ad decisioning platform Olyzon announced a $10 million Series A investment led by S4S Ventures, the early stage investment group co-founded by Sir Martin Sorrell and Sanja Partalo.
TV remains one of the most powerful media channels, but today’s infrastructure lacks a “coherent decisioning layer,” Sorrell tells AdExchanger.
Olyzon’s goal is to become that layer.
Its agentic technology is already available to ad buyers as a managed service. Next, the company plans to turn it into a centralized platform for planning, activation and measurement, says Co-Founder and CEO Jules Minvielle.
“Decisioning” is a big challenge in TV advertising, particularly when it comes to managing reach and fragmented inventory, he says.
Olyzon’s decisioning layer sits on existing tech stacks. From there, it qualifies content on the screen and closes measurement loops “in a way that makes every subsequent decision smarter than the last,” says Sorrell, adding that those features are “what convinced us.”
With the new funding, Olyzon plans to build out its US presence, put a bigger focus on marketing and develop deeper supply integrations and partnerships. But a portion of the funding will also go toward creating better feedback loops so that its agents are constantly retrained on the most recent campaigns, Minvielle says.
Conflicts Of Disinterest
Conflicts of interest used to be a dealbreaker in advertising. Now they’re often tolerated if the performance is good enough.
That wasn’t always the case. Once upon a time, ad agencies and vendors were held strictly to in-category client conflicts, and it was widely seen as problematic for media owners to grade their own campaign reach and value.
Those types of enforced conflict concerns are less common nowadays.
And other types of conflicts are less conflicting nowadays.
For instance, Cadent President Doug Rozen tells Digiday that the market should reset its notion of “neutrality.”
“Neutrality is table stakes,” he says. “You promise neutrality when transparency doesn’t exist.”
Rozen is nodding toward vendors like The Trade Desk and LiveRamp, which have always boasted of their “independence” and “neutrality,” an argument that held weight. (At least until recently, in LiveRamp’s case.)
Marketers and holdco leaders are increasingly willing to trust – and spend with – conflicted platforms like Google’s DV360 and Amazon Ads as long as they improve on transparency. In other words, a conflict of interest isn’t disqualifying – opacity is.
SMB GPT
OpenAI is taking its ChatGPT ads business downmarket.
After launching with large brand advertisers like Adobe, Ford and Target, which can stomach high spend minimums, the AI search engine is now expanding to smaller and local businesses.
The move suggests that OpenAI wants to become a more scalable marketing platform by expanding into SMB advertising – which makes sense, since a lot of ChatGPT queries revolve around finding nearby services.
The update also introduces more performance-oriented tools, including CPC bidding and conversion-based ads, alongside the beta program for SMBs. On top of that, advertisers can now use OpenAI’s ad pixel and Conversions API to track purchases, sign-ups and leads.
The ad platform upgrades come as OpenAI is reportedly targeting $102 billion in ad revenue by 2030 and exploring an IPO as early as September. But scaling won’t be easy. Digiday reports that time spent per ChatGPT user fell 18.3% between March and May.
Growing its ads business won’t mean much if a large enough number of consumers stop engaging with the chatbot. Advertisers are already struggling to spend their ad budgets in ChatGPT.
But Wait! There’s More!
The Trade Desk’s market cap is down 70% since late 2024, and its ad tech golden child status is fading on Wall Street. [WSJ]
What marketers think about Google’s pivot from search to AI Overviews. [Business Insider]
Meta is officially launching its paid subscription tier for WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram. [TechCrunch]
YouTube is beefing up automatic AI detection for videos on its platform. [Variety]
Users of Character.ai are in open revolt over the company’s new LLM model, which they claim has “lobotomized” their chatbot conversations. [404 Media]
OpenAI Foundation, the nonprofit entity that governs OpenAI’s commercial arm, will grant $250 million in funding to promote research into AI’s impact on jobs and the economy. [The Information]
You’re Hired!
Yieldmo appoints Anthony Flaccavento as CRO. [release]
