Edition #529
KFC’s new campaign, Time Inc gets creative with branded content & AI, and JP Dimon to start a media company?
Time Inc are dong something smart with their branded content. They shared with DigiDay, they will look at how a brand is perceived in the LLMs and contrast that to the brands current messaging in market. And then branded content to help change the LLMs perception. Leveraging their own visibility to get fresh, new authoritative content into the LLM. Mobian is in the mix, to help with that. Smart.
On the topic of smart branded content strategies. Friends of the newsletter are hosting Branded Content Days coming up in a few weeks. They gave us a special offer code use FRIENDOFBEN100 to get $100 off ! If you are going, love to hear from you.
Last weekend I met a few readers at MeasureCamp New York, really enjoyed it, good breadth of topics. A common thread was about Bad Data, so I wrote on that.
But I’m thinking of going to some others, are you going to one near you? Let me know. The format is an unconference, so you turn up and if you’d like to host a session, whether it’s a discussion, a talk, a brainstorm. You just write it up and put it on the session board. Makes the day quite dynamic and fun.
And for JP Dimon fans in the mix, he eyes up a post-JPMorgan media venture. Telling Axios that there isn’t enough media infrastructure to educate opinion leaders and policy makers about what to do. Maybe he should collab with these Nuns turned podcasters that the NYTimes featured.
I’ll be out next week, so the next note will be the following! Enjoy.
Notable stories this week
- Time Inc pitches GEO insights into a new brand offering.
- Amazon’s AI Chat Ads yield data but few sales.
- Bluesky’s new AI tool Attie is already the most blocked account.
- Real time AI video is Nvidia’s new pitch to agencies and it’s turning creatives into curators.
- TikTok ran ads for AI apps that digitally undress people in photos.
- Why luxury brands are getting serious about humor.
- The Tension of Scale in the Creator Economy.
- The Puck model comes to food.
- Creating with the Barbell Strategy.
- Don’t call them Nuns. They’re podcasters.
- So many events, Possible’s Christian Muche on standing out.
- Criteo makes self serve push with GO, targeting SMB growth.
- NYT and Delta Air Lines strike distribution deal.
- What is YouTube’s dominance doing to us? We asked its CEO.
- What AI disruption means for experimental ad budgets.
- OpenAI’s new partner wants to build ads that can chat with you.
- Inside The Daily Mail’s creator-led content playbook.
- Beehiiv makes a push into podcasting.
- Yahoo moves downmarket with DSP performance push.
- Future of Marketing Briefing: A cynic’s guide to the most transparent dispute in programmatic history.
- Spotify’s ad exchange grew its programmatic ad base, but buyers want more.
- Meta starts testing Instagram premium subscription.
- UK publisher Future’s shares plummet as changes in Google search traffic hit margins.
- The new X Ads Manager is live.
- Meet the ‘Corporate Bro’ making millions satirizing tech sales.
- An AI upheaval is coming for media. This journalist is already in.
- ELF Beauty says AI answer engines are already changing how people shop.
- Instagram is popping off in Google AI Overviews.
- PR in the zero-click era: why visibility now means being cited, not clicked.
- [Long read] Status as a service (Staas).
Deals/M&A
- Multiply raises $9.5M for AI systems that continuously optimize B2B ads.
- CourtAvenue Acquires GTX Solutions to Bolster Enterprise Data And AI Capabilities.
- WME Sells Sports Agency to Publicis.
- Versant acquires AI-powered financial insights platform StockStory.
Campaign of the week
- KFC How much do you believe in Chicken? More about the campaign.
Smartest commentary
- “Market share alone doesn’t tell you whether a winner is durable. The history of consumer technology is littered with products that spiked in usage and then faded. Remember Google Wave? Clubhouse? BeReal? Clubhouse hit 10M downloads in its first month. BeReal was the #1 app in the App Store. Neither built a habit. Not all usage is created equal. A user who opens an app once a month out of curiosity is fundamentally different from one who opens it every day out of habit. The real question isn’t who has the most users. It’s who has the most habitual users. And that’s where engagement and retention come in.” –Apoorv Agrawal.
Datapoints of note
- ChatGPT ads remain scarce (<0.1% of US prompts) but are increasing week-over-week.
- Spotify’s ad exchange more than tripled its programmatic advertiser base in the year.
- Historically, the agency followed an 80-20 rule: 80% of spend goes to core media and 20% to experimenting. “There’s a little bit of a tailwind for a bigger expansion budget that might be getting closer to 25%.
- ChatGPT is the overwhelming leader in consumer AI with more than 900 million weekly active users, and over 50 million subscribers. ChatGPT has 6x the monthly web visits and mobile sessions than the next largest AI app, while total AI time spent is 4x the next largest AI app and 4x all others combined. Search usage has nearly tripled in a year, and our ads pilot reached more than $100 million in ARR in under six weeks. .
- Customers use Ask Macy’s have spent around 4.75 times more than those who don’t.
- “Nano” and “micro” influencers will claim “a combined 45.5% of the $12.42 billion spent on influencer marketing in 2026.” That’s up from 16.4% in 2021.
Events
- Branded Content Days is coming up in New York mid April.
That’s it for this week.
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