The AdExchanger office will be closed tomorrow for Independence Day, so we’ll see you back here bright and early Monday morning.
Enjoy the weekend and holiday!
Inquire Within
OpenAI’s ads business has been live for several months now. And its hiring priorities hint at the nascent ad platform’s future direction, according to Digiday.
OpenAI’s open job listings currently include three engineering roles focused on “ad formats,” indicating that the company plans to expand into new styles of ads in the coming months. Up until now, ads within ChatGPT have looked mostly like standard search ads – sponsored banners with a link showing up underneath the chatbot’s initial response.
But in order for new ad formats to perform well, they need to adhere to the same levels of privacy and trust that ChatGPT’s users have come to expect. OpenAI has been adamant that it wants to ensure advertising doesn’t impact user confidence in the chatbot’s advice. To that end, the job descriptions note that the roles will include upholding “OpenAI’s highest standards for safety, privacy, fairness and policy compliance.”
But, of course, OpenAI has to balance optimizing for user trust and advertiser value, says Gartner’s Andrew Frank.
“Those objectives are often incompatible,” Frank says. “Solving that problem – if it’s solvable at all – will take more than innovation around ad formats.”
Model Building
A year ago, Cloudflare introduced a way for publishers to block AI crawlers unless the LLM had a licensing deal with the site.
Now, Cloudflare is expanding that repertoire with fine-grained tools that can determine if the crawler is a search bot (like the traditional Google Search scraper), an agent bot (as in, someone is currently prompting an AI search engine and it’s browsing the web to assemble its response) or a training bot (which collects data to fine-tune an LLM overall).
In addition, Cloudflare is moving away from its initial “pay per crawl” model of charging AI bots for access. Instead, it’s adopting the “pay per query” model evangelized by the IAB Tech Lab that compensates publishers whenever an AI uses their data in a response. Cloudflare is testing the “pay per query” model alongside AI search startup Ceramic.ai.
Cloudflare is also working with another AI search startup, You.com, on a payment model that charges bots to access only the web pages they need for a given query response.
In the new world of agentic search, “the unit that matters isn’t the crawl or the click. It’s the outcome,” writes Cloudflare’s Matthew Conroy in a blog post on the news. “Pricing the outcome, and paying the people who made it possible, is how the web continues to thrive.”
Blimey! Wot’s All This Then?
The Paramount-WBD merger may have skated through the DOJ’s review process a few weeks ago, but that doesn’t mean it’s a foregone conclusion.
On Wednesday, the European Commission confirmed a concession-filled filing that Paramount Skydance submitted in an attempt to smooth over the remaining antitrust hurdles for EU approval. The deadline for approval has also been extended from July 7 to July 22.
Although the full list of concessions has not been made available, Variety reports that Paramount will exit United International Pictures, a joint venture the company entered with Universal in 1981 to distribute films across European territories.
But British approval may pose an even tougher challenge than in the EU.
On Tuesday, UK culture secretary Lisa Nandy released a written statement that she is “minded to intervene” on the deal. She also suggested she might direct Ofcom, Britain’s regulatory and competition authority, to investigate the merger’s effect on streaming services.
The UK already hammered a nail in the coffin of one merger this week: Getty called off its plans to acquire Shutterstock for $3.7 billion rather than sell off the latter company’s editorial business, as required by UK regulators. That deal had already received the DOJ seal of approval, too – so anything’s possible.
But Wait! There’s More!
Spoiler alert: Apple’s “hide my email” feature might not actually be hiding your email. [404 Media]
Google must pay $2 billion to Klarna as the result of a Swedish antitrust case, on the grounds that it gave its own price-comparison service preferential treatment in its search results. [WSJ]
It seems like everybody is selling white-label GLP-1s online – including a company that launched last year as an AI search engine. [Wired]
Major tech companies like Amazon, Meta and Microsoft are spending billions of dollars to lay people off. [Business Insider]
The FDA will allow Zyn to market its nicotine pouches as less harmful than cigarettes. [CNBC]
You’re Hired!
Meta CMO Alex Schultz becomes the company’s first chief data officer. Denise Moreno, global SVP of consumer marketing and growth, now fills the CMO seat. [Adweek]
WPP Production, WPP’s production company, appointed Mat Mildenhall as its North America managing director of clients and growth. [MediaPost]
AI-based ad platform Audion hires Liora Fox as director of sales for EMEA. [release]
