As part of a limited number of Google announcements at the Cannes Lions ad festival, Google Commerce Media touted yesterday its “AI-driven performance” across a beta update for Search Ads 360, Display & Video 360.

Google Group Product Manager Shreya Mathur shed a little more light on what that meant with partner Roundel, Target’s retail media network (RMN), on the Google Ads and Commerce blog:

“Brands and retailers can use Google AI for strong Commerce Media results. Roundel is the first retail media network to enable online, app and offline sales data measurement in Performance Max via Search Ads 360. Beyond Performance Max, Google Ads now also supports Search, Shopping and Demand Gen campaigns.”

Translation: Google sees opportunity with RMNs and its AI-infused offering.

Also of note from Google: “Finally, we are piloting product-level measurement for brands and retailers to assess effectiveness of media spend against product and category sales data.”

Feeding prompts

“The Personal Touch: Why You Should Stop Using Generic AI Prompts and Start Building Custom Projects” (June 17) – Alexander Harris VP, AI Programme Lead at TAU – Read more on LinkedIn.

Was ad tech, now workforce

Former Dynamic Signal CEO and co-founder, Russ Fradin has a new AI startup called Larridin, which looks to “measure and optimize workforce & AI agent productivity.”

He writes on LinkedIn about the problem his company is trying to solve for customers:

“Our productivity is down despite heavy AI investment”
“…because 90% of AI tool usage is happening without approval”
“…because employees are afraid to admit they’re using ChatGPT for work”
“…and we have no idea which tools are actually moving the needle”

Trade Desk places product

Yesterday, New Street Research analyst Dan Salmon wrote about recent news in media and notes, “Getting less attention are advances in AI ad creative tools, including [Amazon’s] first disclosure about adoption of its tools. [The Trade Desk] is not developing its own gen AI ad creative tools but expanded its roster of partners this week.”

To Salmon’s point, on Tuesday, The Trade Desk announced another partner and said that it would add the AI-based product placement offering from Rembrand to its gen AI “creative marketplace” in Kokai, The Trade Desk’s AI-powered demand side platform launched in 2023.

See this week’s press release.

more: “Advertisers Can Buy Product Placement Ads Through The Trade Desk” (June 17) – Adweek

Cross-DSP audience

Yesterday, former MediaMath biz dev guru Mike Hauptman announced that his new startup, AdLib, has created a solution for buying audiences programmatically across DSPs with AI’s help.

He says AdLib’s new audience builder includes:

“Composable rule groups”
”AI-powered audience search”
”Exchange and data provider transparency”

Hauptman admits on LinkedIn that there are still some “rough edges” but provides a screenshot of the tool and invites its self-serve client base to kick the tires.

Former MediaMath engineering VP Dan Bougard is a co-founder and CTO. Former HudsonMX co-founder, Will Batson, is Head of Growth.

more background: MediaMath’s New Owner Is On A Mission To Re-sign Former Partners (Feb. 2024) – AdExchanger

Podcast: ad jobs and open web

On the Open Market podcast with Aperiam investor Eric Franchi and ad tech startup “whisperer” Joe Zappa, the duo explore “How AI Disruption Will Affect Advertising Jobs and Romanticizing The Open Web” in an episode published yesterday.

Franchi previews the episode on LinkedIn and writes, “It’s hard to say for sure, but one thing I am confident about is that we’ll see a new class of roles emerge – ones that blend human creativity with AI oversight.”

Hear more on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Raspberries for Perplexity

LLM startup Perplexity is shown no love by Stratechery analyst Ben Thompson and co-host Andrew Sharp. in a Sharp Tech podcast episode titled, “The Futures for Cursor and Perplexity…”

Both companies aggregate LLMs for their products.

Hear it on Apple Podcasts.

Perplexity.AI has been mentioned (and appeared on stage) as an LLM chatbot that inevitably incorporates ads into its answer engine and, therefore, begins eating away at the Google search ad empire.

But if you listen to Thompson and Sharp, Perplexity will be lucky to get there due to a limited proprietary offering.

Sharp quotes a listener (named “Sir Rob”): “Is Perplexity today’s Snapchat? It’s a bit of a contrarian take but they don’t own any infrastructure. Everything runs on AWS and Azure. No custom inference stack. No vertical integration. Likely skating by on credits from cloud providers looking to chip away at Google. Fine strategy for a B2B SaaS startup but not for what Perplexity wants to be.” And on the LLM “model side,” Sharp doesn’t see much value either with “no meaningful monetization path, yet.”

Thompson wholeheartedly agrees. He’s a Cursor fan, but makes no Cursor case for ads in this podcast. Thompson also isn’t buying rumors that Apple could buy Perplexity.

Meanwhile: Tech pundit Greg Isenberg gives a Perplexity demo and in a video on X and tweets, “I just replaced a salesperson, copywriter, film director, social media manager, and financial analyst with ‘Perplexity Labs’. One AI tool. Five jobs. This is actually insane.”

Prompt: If you just graduated college, would you consider a career in advertising?

Response from ChatGPT:

If I had just graduated college and were evaluating a career in advertising, I’d consider it under certain conditions—because while advertising can be an exciting, creative field, it also comes with trade-offs. Here’s how I’d break it down:

Reasons to Consider Advertising:

Creative Expression + Strategy – Advertising is where art meets business. If you’re into storytelling, branding, behavioral psychology, or creative tech (like AI-generated content), it’s a strong fit.
Fast-Paced, Always Evolving – The industry is constantly changing—especially with AI, data-driven personalization, and new platforms like TikTok and streaming platforms. That keeps things fresh and engaging.
Early Career Acceleration – Agencies often give young talent a chance to own big projects earlier than more traditional corporate roles. It can be a springboard for future roles in marketing, product, or even entrepreneurship.
Networking & Exposure – You’re often working with high-profile brands, which builds connections across industries quickly.

AI simplicity, standards

If you’re at the Cannes Lions ad festival, maybe you’ll related to this next story. Or not.

On LinkedIn, Matthew Birkby, an SVP at IPG agency Initiative, reported in from the Cannes saying in part:

“Having sat in client-side marketing teams, I’ve seen how new solutions often confuse brand and marketing folks with unnecessary jargon. Maybe this time we can do better.

Here’s my attempt to start the conversation around simplification:

Firstly, AI isn’t one thing, it’s a catch-all term for many.

We’ve all heard about Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT that generate human-like text. We talk about machine learning that spots patterns and makes predictions. Specialised AI optimises bidding or segments audiences. Each has its role. And this is, by no means an extensive list but just know that AI covers many things.”

Birkby concludes his post with a plea:

The world of agentic AI needs to be simplified for non-tech geeks or “risk ending up with the same confusion we had with programmatic.”

In a comment discussion with Aqfer’s Daniel Jaye, Birkby said about future standardization:

“With [Model Context Protocol] beginning to be adopted and [Agent to Agent] being presented by Google, who will oversee the ongoing improvement of the standards[?] I’d want it not be single commercial entities, but I don’t think we’d see the emergence of a W3C-type org for the agentic internet because of how much money is involved now.

Could the IAB have a role? IAB AI Lab?

AI-curated PMP

From Cannes: “Zillow’s CMO, Ravi Kandikonda, alongside Paul Woolmington, CEO of Canvas Worldwide—the first to deploy the “containerized” AI-curated PMP from Chalice AI and Index Exchange…”

Read more on LinkedIn from Chalice’s Ali Manning about what that means. And, see the photo.

more background: “Adtech Firm Chalice’s Tool Ups Buyers’ Access to Quality Media on the Open Web” (Oct 2024) – quote: “The specific innovation within the curation tool is page-level bidding—using buyer data and ingesting metadata—which lets buyers get more granular with the pages they want their ads to appear on.” – AdWeek

More stuff

“How Reddit is influencing brand visibility on AI search—and what marketers can do about it“ (June 18) – Ad Age (subscription)
“Seizing the agentic AI advantage“ (June 13) – Quote: “Nearly eight in ten companies report using gen AI—yet just as many report no significant bottom-line impact. Think of it as the ‘gen AI paradox.’” – McKinsey



	subscribe about privacy policy @2025 tipsheet.ai

Google “Targets” retail media networks