Trading Up
The Trade Desk will join the S&P 500 this week. As in, the stock market index. (Not to be confused with the SP500+, which is TTD’s curated marketplace of top publishers.)
TTD’s stock is up 10% since the news came out on Monday, now trading between $80 and $85. That’s still down from between $120 and $130 earlier this year, before a disastrous earnings miss in February, but not too shabby.
But it’s also interesting who didn’t make the list. Robinhood and AppLovin were both notably “snubbed,” per the Investor’s Business Daily.
To be fair, those are much bigger companies. Robinhood is roughly double and AppLovin more like triple TTD’s size in terms of market cap, despite TTD reclaiming some ground since its stock tanked earlier in the year.
The S&P 500 is widely regarded as a default collection of reliable large-cap stocks, and inclusion adds lots of general retail investor demand.
Funnily enough, though, TTD has actually been more volatile than either AppLovin or Robinhood, but it’s not associated with crazy meme stock growth like those companies are.
And that, my friends, is how the 165-year-old S&P ratings agency landed on its first-ever programmatic pure play.
Influential Marketing
A whole bunch of storied – and rather hoary – consumer brands are all of a sudden getting way into influencer marketing.
The latest example is Estée Lauder. The beauty and skincare giant was a very late adopter of digital and ecommerce, The Wall Street Journal reports. But its preference for traditional, call it non-digital, brand engagement that felt more luxury, perhaps, has caused the brand to get left behind by similarly priced cosmetics first seen on social media.
In March, for example, incoming Unilever CEO Fernando Fernandez said he would hire 20 times more influencers and that social media would quickly grow from 30% to 50% of the company’s overall ad budget.
Social media has become the new TV-caliber reach play and has replaced the water cooler as a forum for cultural conversations.
“Younger consumers are the ones that are driving the trends today,” Stéphane de La Faverie, who took over as CEO of Estée Lauder earlier this year, tells the Journal. “They’re the ones that are influencing the older generations.”
ROAI
CMOs are zeroing in on the metrics they’ll use to determine return on AI investments, Digiday reports.
Jewelry brand Melinda Maria, for example, is keeping its eye on payroll savings and customer service. It’s seen a 60% increase in customer service efficiency by using AI tools, according to CEO Bryan DeMaranville. AI has also saved the brand $1.2 million in payroll costs. Notably, DeMaranville says Melinda Maria hasn’t cut jobs to cut payroll – but it has frozen hiring.
B2B SaaS company Demandbase, meanwhile, is measuring AI’s impact on marketing and sales. By using generative AI tool Jasper to create content, Demandbase claims its employees saved 366 hours over the past 90 days. And improvements in ad efficiency allowed Demandbase to reinvest $250K into its platform.
However, a lack of standardized tools for measuring the impact of AI means buyers and sellers largely remain cautious. According to an IAB report released in April, 70% of brands, agencies and publishers are limiting AI usage due to security concerns, inadequate data infrastructure and a lack of interactivity between tools.
And if marketers can’t measure their return on AI, they might abandon ship. Gartner predicts that, through 2027, advertisers will drop 60% of generative AI projects after the proof-of-concept phase.
But Wait! There’s More
In the hunt for revenue, OpenAI will start taking a cut of all shopping sales made directly through ChatGPT. [Financial Times]
Zuckerberg hopes to eventually deliver a personal super intelligence tool to … every single person in the world. [The Information]
The vast majority of teens in the US are using AI chatbots for companionship. [Axios]
The economy seems healthy. Were concerns about tariffs overblown – or is the effect yet to be truly felt? [NYT]
Use of generative AI is becoming the norm in digital ad creation, especially among brands with smaller budgets. [Marketing Brew]
The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on Wednesday regarding generative AI scraping of copyrighted content. Senators were highly skeptical about the fair use defense that Meta and Anthropic both deployed in recent legal victories. [video]
You’re Hired!
Vidmob makes three new business development hires. [release]
Amagi, which provides cloud-based solutions for broadcast and streaming television, brings on Sangeeta Chakraborty as CRO. [TVTechnology]
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