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Bridging commentary on the art & science of content; content marketing, branded content, native advertising and the analytics, attribution and intelligence that powers it.

Commentary

Analytics Agent

Edition #471 On the agent’ifying of everything (or will it), playful ads and programmatic audio can be problematic? AI Agents are suddenly all the rage, Salesforceis leading the charge with Agentforce. Yet Ari Paparo commented a while back that adtech world has been a bit slower to ‘AI’, so I thought I’d touch on the topic. Here’s what I shared with a colleague downunder earlier this week: Seeing a few clients very early thinking about ‘AI Agents’ – Sequoia… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
November 7, 2024
Commentary

Hallows earnings 🎃

Edition #470 What an earnings week, there’s a new search engine in town & PAAPI. Halloween edition! This week, we saw YouTube surprise, surpassing $50b in revenue in the last twelve months! Imagine that as a standalone business. Snap, hit new highs on subscribers (12m) and Reddit feels the Google traffic bump with a 68% year on year growth in revenue. What’s driving YouTube? In their words “YouTube Ads revenues grew 12% year-on-year, driven by brand, closely followed… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
November 1, 2024
Commentary

CAC LTV

Edition #469 On my surprise in finding which industry this vernacular has gone into, branded content announcements & dark traffic. I spent some time looking at food ads this week, that is DoorDash & Uber Eats and co-incidentally was able to speak with a restauranteur about it. One thing that surprised me was about this space is, the vernacular! As long as your CAC is below your LTV, you’re gravy! Wait, what. Restaurants now think about customer acquisition cost… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
October 24, 2024
Commentary

Branded audio

Edition #468 Digg, gamification of leisure and audiobook growth at Spotify, will it lead to branded audio? I enjoyed this bit of internet history with TheVerge‘s interview of Digg founder Kevin Rose, they even made the story Digg themed. This was like the last year of university when Digg was at its prime, the whole Web 2.0 era was upon us! I remember using rails to build my own ‘Web 2.0’ app fun. Which gets me to a conversation… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
October 17, 2024
Commentary

Game metrics

Edition #467 On the problem with game metrics, Adweek AI and loads of deals this week. Thoroughly enjoyed the AI in Marketing panel that Chalice AI hosted, turning the tables and having the journalists as the panelists, Sara Fischer, Lara O’Reilly, Allison Schiff and Kendra Barnett. Thanks for hosting. I haven’t had a chance to read through the latest in Google / DOJ but there’s no rush, any outcome is going to be years in the making with appeals… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
October 10, 2024
Commentary

LLM Ads

Edition #466 On what LLM ads could look like, Outbrain brings Moments to their publishers and who makes $1m/year on Substack? As promised I put some thoughts down on what LLM advertising could look like. I think the big variables in whether there is a whole net new ecosystem/platform does still come down to two variables, 1) how big each of them get with sustained usage. Alphabet, Meta & Microsoft are all exhausting the potential use cases and growth… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
October 3, 2024
Analytics

How brand studios can leverage ML & AI

Smart studios leverage their knowledge to predict & create better work Brand studios have been experimenting with AI tools on the content creation side but may have overlooked the potential, on the data & insights side. This is where there is a whole whitespace of opportunity, to not only improve the work & drive performance but stimulate creativity. Studios can now build predictive models, which can take any new piece of work, and predict… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
September 27, 2024
Commentary

Event week

Edition #465 Cloudflare comes to the creators rescue, conversational podcast on demand & Spotify giving out big deals. A huge week in stories, bare with us, and do take your time, there’s some goodies in there. One thread I picked up on Twitter was talking about how LLMs ads might look/work. So I think I’ll put together a piece on that, would love your thoughts/feedback. A question I am lingering on is, how is this an opportunity to do something… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
September 26, 2024
Commentary

Real AI

Edition #464 Viant launch something tangible to point at, Perplexity posters and will the Google breakup be everything everyone wants? This week we have Joe Zappa joining us for the intro, he’s been a sage voice of recent on adtech marketing & positioning and I’ve been enjoying how he shines the light on the good stuff in the industry. Joe here. Monday Viant launched ViantAI, an “autonomous advertising” platform that automates a great deal of the media buying process. As… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
September 19, 2024
Commentary

Brand vs Performance

Edition #463 A great example of brand vs performance from ANZ, AI fraud on Spotify and 007. How could I not touch on this Mark Ritson piece, featuring ANZ bank in New Zealand. It lifts the veil on how a brand campaign, got stretched into other areas and lost its way. “And you try to build brand and achieve customer acquisition all within the same ad, you end up not doing either one particularly well.” Not that this is… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
September 12, 2024