Edition #546
On how speed solves ads problems, in more ways than you think, 20 years of the feed and Barbour has two stars in tartan.
A business I started was the 8th fastest growing business in New Zealand. Our philosophy was speed solves a lot of problems. By just getting stuff done, you move everything forward faster. And get the results all want, faster.
And you only need to look at OpenAI and their ads product to see this in action. For every critique, they’re probably already building it right now, to solve that problem.
WSJ covers a bit more behind it, OpenAI’s head of global ads solutions, David Dugan said: “This is one of the fastest ad builds in history, from my experience”.
There’s no time for panels. They’re just getting it done. And that, gets a lot of respect from the industry.
I suspect they have zero problems hiring. Or if they ever get acquisitive, zero problems there.
We also collectively passed a new internet history milestone, Facebook introduced the news feed 20 years ago! Wow.
Recently Instagram’s CEO Adam has been making some waves, saying when people experience the chronological feed, their engagement drops less. Companies post too much etc. So the algorithmic feed is the way to balance those interests.
And in other Meta tidbits, you think your ads are good, but do you have custom silicon serving them? Well, Meta does. Crazy huh. But also, it speaks to how ads provide a subsidy, by running ads on the chips, they are driving their existing margins, but subsidizing their AI efforts. Smart.
This is actually Koah’s pitch to AI apps, let us put ads in your output, to drop your inference costs. And for one app developer, that meant, they could unlock how much free access they gave to their users. i.e. Koah unlocked growth for them.
You can envisage this will be the case with OpenAI too, millions of developers around the world, build on their stack. It wouldn’t be hard for them to go, hey, do you want cheaper inference or would you like some revenue? Just put in our ads SDK. And bam.
How’s that for some thought starters, we’re still early.
Notable stories this week
- TikTok rejects Meta ads amid settlement pressure campaign.
- Google debuts ‘ad detection tool’ letting marketers better assess ad experiences in Chrome.
- Agentic creates brand language, data challenges.
- Sonos new brand story aims to win back trust two years after botched app update.
- Casey Newtown and Kevin Roose partner with NPR to launch ‘Machine Gods’.
- What we’ve learned from the creator snafus at this year’s US Open.
- Netflix, Amazon, YouTube launch new streaming coalition.
- Google must make tech more compatible with rivals, Judge rules.
- Wired launches new global app.
- Inside the scramble to measure a brand’s AI visibility.
- Pinterest announces new deal with Nvidia.
- Electronic Arts is bundling its games to make a bigger pitch to advertisers.
- Google rolls out pay per value AI licensing program to publishers.
- OpenAI strikes first news deal in Canada.
- Axios HQ turns profit on $20m in revenue.
- People Inc CEO on AI-hungry Google: They don’t share anything with us.
- OpenAI’s next ChatGPT ad format: click to chat, not to site.
- Media execs sound alarm on AI.
- Inside OpenAI’s ad rush.
- Why brands are becoming storytellers.
- Former TV anchors reflect on the great unbundling of news.
- Instagram’s Head just challenged a marketing rule many brands follow.
- Meta has a chip, for ads.
- How Reuter’s dynamic paywall is boosting subscriptions and ads.
- What kind of media channel is AI, anyway?
- How Publicis keeps winning clients without pitches.
- The ad network for AI.
- The mushy middle of AI adoption.
Deals/M&A
- Steven Bartlett will bet up to $400m to build a new generation of star creators.
- Noise raises $5.5m seed to pay everyday creators for brand content.
Campaign of the week
- Barbour with Sir Idris Elba and Sienna Miller.
Smartest commentary
- “What Salesforce is in fact admitting is that the entire agent thing wasn’t the answer; the answer is headless: make all of Salesforce’s data available in the environment where the most capable agents can do something with it. It’s leaning into the fact that Salesforce is a system of record, and betting the company’s defensibility on that.” –Ben Thompson, Stratechery.
Datapoints of note
- Google says its news AI scheme already involves more than 200 titles globally, while its Google News Showcase licensing programme now covers over 2,800 publications in 33 countries.
- On average, artists featured in the GTA VI: An Extended Look trailer saw their Spotify monthly listeners grow by 670% (27.08-03.09) week-on-week.
- Old Navy’s MrBeast campaign lifts kids traffic by 22%.
- DoubleVerify reports AI slop hits 500m+ impressions in first half of 2026.
- Top streamers have added on average 18% more advertising minutes for the top nine premium platforms in August 2026 versus January 2026. Paramount+, Hulu, and Disney+ are on the high side — averaging 9 minutes/hour, 8.2 minutes/hour and 7.5 minutes/hour, respectively, according to Ampere Analysis via a Business Insider report, as well as Guggenheim Securities analysis.
Events
- The Advertising CMO breakfast in early October..
That’s it for this week.
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