ChatGPT

Expect more ad agency holdco consolidation in the next year; people are starting to talk like ChatGPT; inside the weirdness of matching political funds.

With no-click generative AI search gaining steam, here’s how publishers can thrive when search traffic disappears.

YouTube finds new ways to crack down in ad-blockers; the Better Business Bureau takes swipes at AI marketing; and Gen Z only trusts digital-native brands.

Classify is entering a crowded space of AI-powered contextual curation offerings. But the company is already teasing some high-profile integrations thanks to its network of well-connected advisors.

YouTube is winning the CTV race by not just focusing on TV; ads threaten the gen AI user experience; and sports still brings brands incremental reach.

Sports sponsorships can play well for small brands; Perplexity was first to AI search ads, but advertisers waited for Google; and GroupM officially rebrands to WPP Media.

Amazon Prime Video rolls out new audience and contextual targeting; streamers wring more revenue from subscription-weary consumers; and AI is an app, so it must obey Google and Apple.

Perplexity is thirsty for revenue streams; Marketecture’s media biz grows; and Duolingo goes dark on social after its AI pivot.

DDM reported 1% Q1 revenue growth, citing traffic downturns Google’s AI search results and soft advertising demand due to tariff-induced uncertainty.

Shopify checkout might be coming to ChatGPT; private equity builds a French ad tech stack; and how Meta turning off news in Canada is affecting news access ahead of this month’s election.

Earlier this year, Pinterest conducted reviews of five potential ad tech acquisitions. Plus, what do LLMs think is the best retail media tech for retailers, and why? 

The process of setting up curated private marketplaces for bespoke audiences and vetting what inventory gets included can be incredibly time-consuming for agency teams.

Oracle’s TikTok bid is a warmed-over Project Texas; Amazon’s ads biz has its sights set on Google; and gen AI search is a good traffic source for retailers, but bad for news pubs.

Curation is amazing – for SSPs. The question publishers continually ask is, “Is curation good for us?” That’s the wrong question. 

The IAB gave us new retail media standards for Christmas. But will the industry actually adopt them? Plus: how AI will be used in advertising in 2025.

Rival browsers raise an objection to Google being forced to sell Chrome; ad agencies pivot to software and services; and people are turning to chatbots instead of search, with error-filled results.

Black Friday ecommerce continues to surge, mainly on mobile; social platforms pull optimization features for health and beauty brands; and Google’s antitrust lawyers subpoena info about rival AI search startups.

A creative director shares his favorite use cases for generative AI, his favorite AI tools (and the ones he won’t trust yet) and best practices for refining outputs.

Why the agency pivot to alternative payment models is good for M&A; Zeta Global responds to a short-seller’s explosive claims; and X sees a mass exodus after the election.

One priority for Republicans once Donald Trump is back in the White House is to reduce regulation and, specifically, to replace FTC Chair Lina Khan. Plus, Microsoft Bing has a new claim to relevance.

Walmart’s latest data play: an app for unlocking barricades on store shelves; training generative AI may rely more on scraping big-name sites than previously thought; and tracking the issues that mattered most to Trump and Harris, based on ad spending.

Oracle’s advertising and third-party data businesses are officially kaput; political pollsters are abandoning misleading online data; and AI-generated slop is already overtaking the internet.

With a landmark ruling potentially forcing Google to change its business practices, who is actually likely to steal some of its search market share? And what should marketers do about it?

Ad revenue was helped along by 9% growth in unique visitors to the top sites in DDM’s portfolio. Programmatic ad rates were up roughly 36% in Q2, spurred by adoption of DDM’s D/Chipher contextual targeting solution.

In today’s newsletter: Amazon’s argument that advertisers should trust optimization algorithms over alternative IDs; Japan passes an app store antitrust law targeting Apple and Google; and Google Ads ends support for credit card payments.

Audience targeting and online information campaigns have had some gnarly byproducts. Advertisers need to own our contributions to political polarization before it can get better.

In today’s newsletter: Companies looking to sell data target the US market; which media companies to bet on at TV upfronts; and generative AI data licensing is the new publisher revenue stream.

Dotdash Meredith previewed plans for how its OpenAI partnership could provide incremental traffic and scale its contextual targeting capabilities across a wider network of sites and media types.

In today’s newsletter: The CMA still has a bone to pick with the Chrome Privacy Sandbox; the FCC fines mobile carriers for selling customer location data to data brokers; and the Financial Times is the latest publisher to strike a licensing deal with an AI company.

Digital media agency Hotspex Media’s emotional contextual tool, Reticle AI, analyzes the emotions an ad is trying to evoke and the context of where the ad might show up to find congruent ad placements.