Chat To Cart
As more people use AI chatbots for, well, everything, advertisers need to blow up their old playbook.
Take product research.
Brands have a tremendous opportunity to get in front of consumers as they move away from classic Google Search in favor of recommendations from AI, according to Debra Aho Williamson, founder of Sonata Insights, during her keynote at AdExchanger’s Programmatic AI event in Las Vegas on Tuesday.
Consider that 41% of people now use AI to research products, according to IBM, and they often encounter brands they’ve never seen before. This is triggering “a structural shift in marketing where [purchase] intent is being mined in different places,” Williamson said.
Because “wherever decisions happen,” she said, “monetization follows.” (We’re looking at you, ChatGPT.)
Meanwhile, folks increasingly trust AI recommendations. Research from Sonata Insights and MRI Simmons suggests 62% of US adults trust AI to provide reliable information, up from 50% last year.
It’s worth clarifying, though, that this data only refers to interactions with AI chatbots and not to AI-generated content. Most consumers hate AI slop.
Knowledge Contained
As if programmatic needed more jargon, the rise of custom bidding and AI-driven buying is sparking debates and birthing new terminology.
For example, there are schisms when it comes to the adoption of certain frameworks. The IAB-backed Agentic RTB Framework (ARTF) is at odds with the consortium behind the new Ad Context Protocol.
And there are also disputes about the role and future of “containerization,” a term for when a cloud-based exchange or SSP hosts a model operated by the demand side.
One custom bidder startup, Cognitiv, says it’s developed a server-to-server model it claims is “900% more powerful than containers.” The argument being that containerized environments offer relatively little compute power in real-time moments and no persistent storage.
Meanwhile, one of Cognitiv’s early rivals in the custom bidder category, Chalice AI, announced a partnership with the SSP Equativ this week that puts Chalice’s models in Equativ’s containers, so to speak.
In programmatic’s AI era, even the infrastructure is a battleground.
Out Of Joint
Publishers trying to monetize AI search engine traffic have two main options: sign an AI content licensing deal or sue, sue, sue. Not that either is a durable fix for most folks in the industry. If you’re not a big, well-known publisher, forget it.
But what if media companies banded together to negotiate from a position of greater leverage? It’s starting to happen, according to a post by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
Consider SPUR, short for “Standards for Publisher Usage Rights,” a global media coalition led by the BBC together with the Financial Times, The Guardian, Sky News and The Telegraph. SPUR was formed to create shared technical standards and licensing frameworks so that AI developers pay for and use original journalism responsibly. There’s also a similar joint publisher collective in Denmark.
These efforts are centralized in Europe due to antitrust rules. What in Europe are called collective management organizations – confusingly dubbed “CMOs” – are prohibited in the US as collective bargaining. US publishers would need a government exemption to collectivize.
What an irony that news pubs struggling for survival could be classified as antitrust offenders. Not in Europe, though. European pubs are fighting back.
LLMs “cannot claim that, because it’s on the web, it is available for them to retrieve, to train on, to basically substitute their own content for yours,” says Doug Leeds, co-founder of a startup called RSL, which is working on an open technical standard that lets web publishers set machine-readable licensing and compensation terms for AI crawlers.
In the US, though, that’s pretty much exactly what they do claim.
But Wait! There’s More!
WTF is back button hijacking? [Digiday]
Did podcasting put an end to the “Dad Book”? [WSJ]
Welcome to the era of the “intelligent search box”? Google just unveiled the biggest overhaul to its Search box in 25 years. [Gizmodo]
The Take It Down Act, which is intended to crack down on internet deepfakes, might inadvertently censor more than it saves. [The Verge]
Microsoft has ”missed the AI wave,” claims former VP Mat Velloso. Microsoft is now scaling back its Copilot integrations, as only 3% of paid users are using the tool. [Windows Latest]
Sports Illustrated deleted the entire profile and article history of a writer recently accused of using AI to plagiarise other writers. [Futurism]
Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-VA) raises concerns about Trump Mobile’s business practices and advertising claims. [release]
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