Blog
Bridging commentary on the art & science of content; content marketing, branded content, native advertising and the analytics, attribution and intelligence that powers it.
Edition #541 Ads to AI Agents, bots vs agents and principal media. Recently Cloudflare proclaimed bots had overtaken humans. The leap that many made, is that AI agents had taken over the internet. But the story is a little more nuanced. Yes, the growth in bots, has been driven by AI agents. But to say half the internet is now AI agents, isn’t correct. Lets draw a distinction A crawler bot, that fetches your website to appear in a… Continue reading
Edition #540 Buzz in the group chats, measurement stories and audience networks are in vogue for AI? Amongst the group texts, were a couple of things this week, Buzz from Jack Dorsey, an open source workspace, think Slack + AI. See a video here. Think of Buzz like a digital deskpad, you have your work in there, and bring in your agents where they’re needed. Animated profile pic is kind of fun. The… Continue reading
Edition #539 Measurement, The Big Short & Ask the News. I gave a shout out a while back to Ask the Post, the Washington Post’s AI driven feature to interact with the site but also to dig deeper around articles. Recall they have a subsidiary, Arc, which provides their own CMS/tech stack for publishers to run on. Now Arc has rolled out Ask the News, for any publisher using Arc to leverage. Smart. Next step, monetise those queries! Now, have… Continue reading
Edition #538 – Cannes, creators and a huge step up in AI substance. Cannes was super productive this year, with an expansion of brand cafes, and as an attendee you can’t complain, with a dearth of choices. And the quality of panels, at least from my corner, were a lot better. It’s like the AI chat took a 5x step up from last year. There was a heat wave, but it didn’t seem as hot as last year? I guess… Continue reading
Edition #537 One of my fav beers has a stellar (but not Stella!) World Cup ad, Roku acquired & Albertsons does Microdramas. Peter Buckley had some nice framing on early vs late when thinking about brand vs performance. I liked it. In his words, late is deterministic, someone has taken action, it feels efficient but can be dangerous. “The closer an ad is to a sale, the less likely it caused it”. And the more likely it is over… Continue reading
Edition #537 On Siri and how it changes the LLM landscape, Substack is keeping media fun and Ritz Carlton floats some boats. I had to double check that I hadn’t done a newsletter titled Siri before. And really, what could I have said? We’ve always been disappointed by Siri. However, way back, when Google Home launched, I did note. If you turned on the privacy settings on Google Home, to match that of Siri. Google Home was just as useless. Continue reading
Edition #536 On how the new LLM monetization model is being calculated, Google has a new adblocker & what Pinterest says we’re wearing this summer. Last week Parallel, announced Index, a way to help content owners, monetize their content for LLMs. At the moment, the monetization, is only for developers who also use Parallels Deep Research API. However, there are 100,000 developers using it. This is the first (transparent) stab at how should content creators be paid for their… Continue reading
Edition #535 On digital spines, the two track internet and Stanley Tucci. The Sunday blue blobs were flying in the group chat. Publicis acquired LiveRamp. Putting together a foundation for the agentic media future. A quick recap, LiveRamp is an identity spine, where you can match IDs. Imagine a literal spine, and you hang your ID on one part, and it helps you connect that ID to another on the spine. On the deal, ‘Publicis CEO Arthur Sadoun said… Continue reading
Edition #534 A voice for radio, the disconnect between CMOs better equipped to scale AI and those that aren’t and margin expansion. You’ve heard the saying, they have a voice for radio. But podcasters are recently finding out, they need to turn on the video. In the search for more ad dollars, the extended reach of video, podcasts which have been audio only are now pressing the video record button. There’s some rationality to this, you’ve already got the content,… Continue reading
Edition #533 What makes CTV exciting, Criteo has 1,000+ advertisers in its ChatGPT pilot & WealthSimple’s The Trade Show. I didn’t get CTV initially, we did some work, helping measure early CTV campaigns. I mean, as a consumer, I got it. But I didn’t get the hype around the advertising side. And that only really clicked for me in the last 6 months. And maybe I’m slow on the uptake. But CTV enables advertisers to do the early digital… Continue reading