Edition #509
Why marketers should care about self driving Waymo’s, NY has a new CFO from Ramp & Threads is pulling ahead.
I was excited to see my first Waymo in NY this week. A glimpse or promise of a driverless future around town.
Getting to self driving is a mean feat. It’s achieved progress by starting with sandboxes, defined areas, then adding a lot of training data, real world practice and then expanding it.
Behind the scenes there’s a bit of a stoush of who has the best mechanism, lidar and visual or just visual. Tesla thinks one is better because what if another signal gives you a differing result, how do you decide which is right? Ie Lidar says there’s no barrier but visually says there is.
Confounding signals like this aren’t uncommon in media, we’re often trying to decipher what they really mean.
But when it comes to automated media – the machines are going to have to make a decision. The easy way is to push that decision to the humans, and build out mental maps that way. Another is to just steamroll and fine tune the algorithm as you go. Waiting for mistakes and fixing them.
The latter is probably better for progress but risks expensive mistakes, the former will take longer but more consistent progress.
In case you’re wondering, Waymo used the former.
Notable stories this week
- Why that $14b TikTok deal may not be what it seems.
- General Mills doubles down on snackable content with sketch series.
- Day 8: Did Google just win?
- Meta in talks to use Google’s Gemini to improve ad business, the Information reports.
- Instagram head says company is not using your microphone to listen to you (with AI data, it won’t need to).
- Google considered selling part of ad tech unit last year.
- Eric’s riff on why advertising is important.
- How New Sponsored Content Marketplace Outlink Plans To Revolutionize The PR And Influencer Spaces.
- The inevitable return of ad networks.
- The high cost of bad measurement: why randomized geo experiments are the gold standard.
- AI isn’t a bubble, it’s a mountain.
- Threads finally passes X in daily users.
- Threads adds communities.
- GrowthOps warns that social media is losing its soul.
- Meta unveils AI Agents to automate ads for brands and shoppers.
- ChatGPT launches shopping.
- Comet Plus announces their launch partners.
- Your Meta AI Chats Will Soon Influence the Ads You See.
- Google continues to improve Meridian.
- Apple builds a ChatGPT-like appt o help test the revamped Siri.
- Merriam Webster to launch their own LLM.
- Reddit sinks on heavy volumes, social media chatter of reduced referral traffic from ChatGPT.
- The rise of the creator conglomerate.
Deals/M&A
- Salesforce challenger Zeta Global is making its biggest-ever acquisition as it looks to corner the loyalty market.
- Yahoo nears deal to sell AOL to Italy’s Bending Spoons for $1.4 billion, sources say
- People Inc acquires Feedfeed.
- Spotify Enables New Ad Buying Through Amazon and Yahoo DSPs.
- See the pitch deck that helped Vibe.co, the meta for tv advertising, raise $50M.
- Former Chartbeat, Scroll CEO Tony Haile raises $10.7M for new startup Filament.
- OWM lets creators trade influence for equity.
Campaign of the week
- Ramp, CFO of New York.
- Highsnobiety & their Oktoberfest popup.
Smartest commentary
- “Organizations that can’t measure performance end up measuring performativeness instead.” –Paul Graham.
Datapoints of note
- ChatGPT will probably reach 1 billion weekly active users in early 2026.
- Taboola’s Realize Now Claims 650+ Advertisers.
- Creators contribute to a 19% reduction in acquisition costs and a 71% increase in intent/brand lift.
Events
- AI Breakfast coming up. Ping me to join.
That’s it for this week.
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