Edition #510
City playground, live from NY and loads of new stuff across the board.
The city becomes a playground when so many are in town. And NY had that vibe last week! I’ve tried to catch up with as many as possible, but with a busy week anyway, that makes it challenging. Thanks to all who came to the breakfast, good group of people.
And thanks to Ben Dietz who offered some tickets to the John Candy documentary – thoroughly enjoyed that. If you don’t read his note, you should, it’s definitely an overlapping circle with mine on the media side, but more culture & fashion too. If you like mine, you will probably like his too. Click here.
A16z got Sam Altman talking about ads, he first said they’re distasteful, but then said he liked Instagram Ads. Connecting the dots maybe, that Sora Pulse will get ads like that. Especially when so much of the ad team is rumored to be ex Facebook.
But I think, on balance, Sam is trying to preserve the integrity of the trust with the user and wants to ensure that ads don’t deter from that. That is a good position, and does set up for a, we have found a way to do that…
Paramounts new CTV ad unit is kind of interesting “When an advertiser buys the unit, it it is also buying a guarantee that Paramount will run the ad in a fixed place, such as the first spot in a commercial break, for the first seven days after the episode debuts.”.
ADWEEK House had the best get of the week, with American Eagle CMO – Chris Brommers. Talking about behind the scenes (savvy readers might have caught – that they were in a quiet period during this) so had their hands tied.
But nonetheless, the essence was they spoke to their customers and realized, this is a social media storm in a teacup. And went ahead with their plan. Underpinning that, was the relationship with CEO and the team, they had his back.
Love to see this, and the, just talk to customers, what’s happening, do they believe the backlash. Oh and also, the campaign of getting this years ‘it girl’ – added 1m net new customers. Incredible.
Notable stories this week
- Anthropic’s Anti-AI Slop Pop-Up Draws Thousands in NYC.
- Yahoo, PubMatic, and Others Launch New Standard for Agentic Advertising.
- The problem Instagram doesn’t want to fix.
- Agentic Commerce is (still) a collective hallucination.
h - Nativo adds standard display ads to native platform.
- A wave of patent lawsuits is hitting big news publishers, including Gannett and The Guardian.
- Branded Entertainment is at a Crossroads. Just Ask Kevin Hart.
- Perplexity Pauses New Advertising Deals to Reassess Ambitions.
- Canva’s latest hire hints at major global creative push.
- AppLovin pulls mobile product as backdoor app install allegations mount.
- MrBeast launched Vyro, a distribution marketplace for ‘clips’ of your content.
- Walmart is teaming up with OpenAI to enable shoppers to browse and purchase its products on ChatGPT.
- With OpenAds, The Trade Desk is rewriting what it means to be ‘buy-side’.
- Takeaways from the Prebid Summit.
- Google is gaining search share.
- Every Mark Cuban Sora generated video on Cameo includes a shout out to Cost Plus Drugs.
- ^ Smart for Cameo to lean into this.
- AI Ad Tech ‘Land Grab’ Pits Salesforce Against Google, Microsoft and Amazon.
- Meta to roll out ads in WhatsApp Updates Tab.
- Universal has quietly launched a creator marketing app that pays influencers to post content on TikTok and Instagram. Meet ‘House of Carmen’.
- The Economist licenses its content to enterprise clients’ private LLMs.
- Why advertisers are quietly returning to news-driven media channels.
- Mozilla, Index Exchange Launch New Privacy-Based Programmatic Model.
- Sam Altman says there are no current plans for ads within ChatGPT Pulse — but he’s not ruling it out.
- Veylan Debuts First End-to-End AI-Native Advertising Platform.
- Here’s What You Missed At Programmatic IO New York’s CTV Panel.
- Google Tests More Publisher Friendly Recipe AI Overviews.
- Michael Sugar on the next frontier of brands and content.
- Netflix gets into beer marketing with AB InBev partnership.
- Bari Weiss outlines 10 principles that will guide her leadership of CBS news.
- Microsofts Xbox Advertising ambitions.
- American Express launches Amex Ads.
- Inside The Economist’s plan to grow revenues in a post-search, AI-driven future.
- CNN to launch streaming subscription tier.
- Duolingo is building an in-house adtech platform.
- Spotify partners with Amazon and Yahoo to expand programmatic ad reach.
- DoubleVerify expands its partnership with Microsoft into Bing, Outlook & casual games.
- Paramount Aims to Keep Some Top Streaming Ads Out of Programmatic Fray.
- Blackbird Spyplane’s Jonah Weiner on Substack, resisting selling out, and Obama’s pants legacy.
- United hires Chris Foo as its new SVP of Programmatic.
- Are publisher-branded AI engines the next big thing or a dead end?
- Inside the marketing trends reshaping creator partnerships—from expanding into live content to co-owning the brief.
- Discord puts proof behind its ad pitch with first measurement push.
- Netflix partners with Spotify for video podcasts.
- Advertisers Push Big Tech to Adopt Standards for Transparency in Ad Sales.
- BDG’s influencer pivot.
Deals/M&A
- Knorex makes NYSE debut, highlights AI advertising platform.
- Scoop: Rothschild family to sell full 27% ownership stake in The Economist.
- Los Ángeles Times looks to raise $500m for planned IPO.
Campaign of the week
- Brian’s first day as CFO, live from NY. They had up to 73,000 live viewers on it. Polymarket even got in on the action.
Smartest commentary
- “It has gone largely unnoticed that time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has since gone into steady decline, according to an analysis of the online habits of 250,000 adults in more than 50 countries carried out for the FT by the digital audience insights company GWI.” –FT.
- “You don’t have your data right, you aren’t going to get your AI right. You’ve got to get your priorities right. Your governance right.” –Marc Benioff.
Datapoints of note
- Eighty percent of all digital ad sales occur in “closed loop” auctions run by one major player, according to the Media Rating Council.
- There are between 9 and 10 million Firefox users in the U.S.
- WhatsApp has 3 billion monthly active users — 100 million of whom are based in the U.S.
- Gemini visits are up by 46% in September, hitting the 1 billion milestone.
- Sora hit 1m app downloads in <5 days, even faster than ChatGPT did.
- 10,000 advertisers depend on Teads Ad Manager.
- Amidst 4,700% surge in AI-driven traffic to U.S. retail sites.
- OpenAI has 40m paying users.
- Ramp had 73,000 live viewers on their CFO stunt in NY.
- Vercel shares their share of AI referral traffic.
- A Components analysis estimates that about $600 million will be spent on Substack subscriptions this year. 71% of the money passing through Substack was spent on publications with fewer than 100,000 subscribers — a reversal of the fat-tail revenue distributions that have defined the platform age.
Events
- Next breakfast coming up in November. Ping me to join.
That’s it for this week.
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