Four companies with a meaningful footprint in AI and advertising reported financial results late yesterday afternoon ET.
Meta
- Markets: Meta stock was down 7% in after-hours trading yesterday.
- Stat: “Ad impressions delivered across our Family of Apps increased by 19% year-over-year”
- Company: Meta Reports First Quarter 2026 Results (April 29) – Meta
- Read: Meta stock drops as capex, user growth numbers come in below Wall Street estimates – CNBC
- Read: Meta Q1 2026 earnings: 33% ad revenue growth, MCP support for ad buying agents – Eric Seufert on Mobile Dev Memo (subscription)
Alphabet/Google
- Markets: Alphabet stock was up 7.1% in after-hours trading.
- Stat: “Search had a strong quarter with AI experiences driving usage, queries at an all-time high, and 19% revenue growth.”
- Company: Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results (April 29) – Alphabet
- Company: Q1 2026 earnings call: Remarks from our CEO – Google The Keyword blog
- Read: Alphabet beats on revenue, with cloud booming 63% and topping $20 billion – CNBC
- Read: Alphabet Exceeds $100 Billion In Q1 And Its Profits Almost Doubled – AdExchanger
Amazon
- Markets: Amazon stock was up 2.7% in after-hours trading.
- Stat: “Advertising grew to over $70 billion in trailing twelve month revenue”
- Company: Amazon.com Announces First Quarter Results (April 29) – Amazon
- Read: Amazon stock dips even though earnings beat expectations with strong cloud growth – CNBC
- Read: AWS growth accelerates to 28% in Q1 – Constellation Research
Microsoft
- Markets: Microsoft stock was up .3% in after-hours trading.
- Stat: “Our AI business surpassed an annual revenue run rate of $37 billion, up 123% year-over-year.”
- Company: Earnings Release FY26 Q3 (April 29) – Microsoft
- Read: Microsoft beats on top and bottom lines with 40% Azure growth – CNBC
- Read: Satya Nadella says he’s ready to ‘exploit’ the new OpenAI deal – TechCrunch
From tipsheet: AI is already showing up in revenue (search, cloud, ads), but the cost curve is still ahead of the payoff. Meta is the clearest test case: ad growth is strong, but capex is accelerating faster than monetization. And in the distance, what pursuing “Personal Superintelligence” means for Meta remains murky.
LLMs & CHATBOTS
Developments
- “Still wondering how you can use Codex for (almost) everything?” (April 29) – OpenAI on X
- Evaluating Claude’s bioinformatics research capabilities with BioMysteryBench (April 29) – Anthropic
- You can now easily generate files in Gemini (April 29) – Google’s The Keyword blog
BRANDS
AI ad opportunity reaches mainstream media
In a story about how AI is affecting SMBs selling consumer products, The New York Times reinforces what the industry already sees: AI is creating new opportunity in advertising and marketing.
The NYT’s Tripp Mickle and Eli Tan reported yesterday:
“For years, DribbleUp, a sports equipment company, spent its own time and resources figuring out whom it should advertise its basketballs and soccer balls to on Facebook. But for the last two years, it has placed those ads entirely through Facebook’s artificial intelligence tools.
Since then, DribbleUp’s sales have outpaced its marketing expenses. It has also started spending more money on Facebook.
The company’s experience speaks to how A.I. is reshaping the digital ad industry.
Over the past three years, Google, Meta and other tech companies have used the same artificial intelligence behind chatbots to power advertising.”
Read: “Behind the A.I. Boom, a Boring Business Is Soaring With Better Ads” (April 29) – The New York Times (subscription)
From tipsheet: Expect similar stories to emerge around ChatGPT ads and conversational ads, in general, including shopping assistants like Amazon’s Rufus and Walmart’s Sparky.
Of course, ChatGPT ads performance has yet to be proven. We’ll know soon enough.
MARKETING
Agentic marketing firm gets funding
Agentic marketing platform Hightouch announced that it had raised a $150 funding round led by Goldman Sachs, Bain Capital and The Trade Desk’s venture arm.
The company’s valuation is now a whopping $2.75 billion.
The Wall Street Journal’s Patrick Coffee explained the company’s core product:
“Hightouch says its key selling point is an ability to train AI agents on clients’ existing marketing communications in order to make sure the content they create stays on-brand and follows patterns that proved successful in past campaigns. Combining real imagery and video from client databases with newly generated material also helps avoid the “slop” look common to AI, according to the company.”
Co-CEO Tejas Manohar tells the WSJ that his company has reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue.
Meanwhile, Hightouch Co-CEO Kashish Gupta said on LinkedIn:
“The funding is not about the money. It’s about the vote of confidence that our customers, our partners, our team, and our investors have put in us and in our business – to reinvent marketing with AI.
We started as a company that builds data pipelines. Then we made data accessible to marketers self-serve. Now, we’re giving marketers the ability to generate on-brand creative for their ads and emails, and to orchestrate all of their campaigns intelligently with AI.”
Read more on LinkedIn. (April 29)
More:
- Goldman Sachs and Bain Lead Investment in AI Marketing Startup (April 29) – The Wall Street Journal (subscription)
- Raising $150M to build the AI platform for marketers (April 29) – Hightouch
From tipsheet: The real product isn’t AI creative — it’s the context layer. Large language models (LLMs) run on context, and Hightouch is turning customer data and past campaigns into training data — collapsing targeting, creative, and execution into one system.
How about that funding? Agentic tech is hot. And so is $100 million in ARR.
PLATFORMS
Meta adding AI connectors for ads via MCP
Meta “takeaways” for its new AI connectors announced yesterday:
- “Meta ads AI connectors let advertisers and agencies create, manage, and analyze campaigns in the AI tools they already use — no developer credentials, API setup, or coding required.”
- “Powered by Meta’s ads MCP server, the connector provides a secure, Meta-authenticated connection to real campaign performance, ad campaign creation, catalog management, and audience insights — not generic advice.”
- “Meta AI business assistant and Meta ads AI connectors are better together: use the assistant for guidance in Ads Manager, and your own AI tools for cross-channel insights and custom workflows.”
Read: Introducing Meta Ads AI Connectors: Manage Your Meta Ads From the AI Tools You Already Use (April 29) – Meta
More: Meta opens its ad ecosystem to third-party AI tools (April 29) – Digiday (subscription)
Related: Introducing Ads CLI: A Command-Line Interface for Meta Ads and Commerce (April 29) – Meta
- Meta: “Today we’re introducing the Meta ads CLI, a command-line tool for developers to manage Meta ad campaigns. Developers and AI agents working with the Meta Marketing API can now create, edit, and analyze campaigns directly from the command line, without writing custom code.”
CONNECTED TV
Closing the loop on performance TV
On the latest episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, analysts Eric Seufert and Andrew Lipsman commiserate on the state of agentic commerce today — neither is a believer in fully-autonomous agentic buying — and industry trends across media, commerce and ads.
Lipsman sees two big opportunities emerging in 2026 — performance TV and in-store, retail media.
For performance TV, he explained (lightly edited):
“When I say Performance TV, I mean TV ads — CTV ads, specifically — underpinned by closed loop targeting and attribution.
Think about what Amazon is building with Prime Video and also now that Amazon has plugged into all the other ad-supported CTV networks — that’s Performance TV and that’s a big market opportunity and will really change the dynamics of TV advertising because you still have the benefits of TV ads, which have always been about brand building and reaching the right audiences. But now you can actually see if they’re driving sales as well.”
Listen: “Podcast: Re-evaluating agentic commerce (with Andrew Lipsman)” (April 28) – Mobile Dev Memo
More: Will CMOs Finally Wake Up to Retail Media in 2026? (February 6) – Andrew Lipsman on his Media, Ads + Commerce Substack
From tipsheet: Amazon’s Brand+ in the Amazon DSP shows the shift to performance TV, too. AI turns TV from reach into prediction — modeling who will buy and measuring if they did.
PLATFORMS
Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green on agencies
In spite of the vitriol portrayed in agency holding company Publicis’ split with The Trade Desk, Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green still has plenty of admiration for agencies — the clients who initially propelled his company’s valuation into the billions.
Covering Michael Kassan of 3C Ventures’ on-stage interview of Green at Possible, Adweek’s Kendra Barnett reported:
“The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green expressed empathy for the strife of ad agencies, many of which are facing increasing margin pressure as they navigate tighter budgets, the AI boom, and shifting media supply chain dynamics.’
‘You can’t keep taking money out of the middle, providing a higher level of service in a more complicated ecosystem, and do that for less and less. (…). There has been this pressure being added to the companies in between the advertiser and publisher…’”
Read: “The Trade Desk’s Jeff Green Tells Agencies ‘We Want to Help’ After Months of Tension” (April 29) – Adweek
MediaPost captured Green’s thoughts on AI including: “I don’t think there is an industry that will benefit more from agentic AI… because of the fact that we can reason across very complicated decisions.”
Read: Trade Desk’s Green: Supply Chain Being ‘Cleaned Up,’ Agencies Face New Trust Questions (April 28) – MediaPost
More: WPP CFO says The Trade Desk operates in a smaller slice of the ad market (April 29) – Digiday (subscription)
From tipsheet: The Trade Desk’s AI-enabled Kokai has not gone away in the agency space. Agencies want to maintain strategic ownership of their relationship with marketers and their budgets while sharing the operational burden with AI solutions. Kokai can be that solution — unless The Trade Desk wants the relationship with the marketer.
AGENCIES
AI opinion: How-to elevate performance marketing
“Last-click attribution has always been reductive, but in an AI-driven environment, it’s actively misleading. If your AI optimizes creative and audience targeting based purely on conversions, you’re training it to find people already closest to buying – not to build relationships with people who might become valuable customers over time.
Smarter brands are layering in signals like brand search lift, repeat engagement rates and sentiment analysis from creative testing. They’re asking AI to optimize not just for the click but also for return shoppers. That might mean valuing a video view that drives a brand search three days later over a click that bounces in five seconds.”
Read: Stop Scaling Mediocre Ads: How AI Can Actually Elevate Performance Marketing – Erin Emmerson, Tower 28 on AdExchanger
GOVERNANCE
OpenRTB adds “live” features
IAB Tech Lab product director Hillary Slattery announced on LinkedIn yesterday: “After a full year of debate and 3 rounds of very contentious Public Comment, we’re doing one more round but this time the leaders within my Commit Group (all 10 of them, but especially looking at you Rob Hazan, Neal Richter, and Curt Larson) are giving the programmatic community one final chance to weigh in before this gets codified into OpenRTB.”
From IAB Tech Lab:
“IAB Tech Lab has introduced new OpenRTB attributes that now include signals for live, real-time, and first-run content! These updates aim to bring greater transparency and precision to programmatic transactions around live events, helping buyers and sellers better navigate high-value, real-time inventory and will be open for public comment through May 28.”
Read on LinkedIn. (April 29)
More: IAB Tech Lab Announces New OpenRTB Attributes Including Live Content For Public Comment (April 29) – IAB Tech Lab
From tipsheet: AI loves more signals. And “Live” is the “first-party data” of content.
LLMs & CHATBOTS
Tool for migrating Google ads to ChatGPT
“Adthena this week launched the free migration tool, AdBridge, that converts Google Ads campaigns into formats accepted by the ChatGPT Ads platform.
AdBridge analyzes advertisers’ search campaigns to generate keyword lists, negative keywords, and competitive insights that can be directly applied to ChatGPT campaigns. It tells brands how and when they serve up for specific auctions, how often they appear, and prompts that trigger those placements—at least for now.”
Read: Advertisers Can Begin Migrating Google Ads Into ChatGPT (April 29) – MediaPost
MORE
- How to land a junior ad agency job—what leaders say works as roles change due to AI (April 29) – Ad Age (subscription)
- Andrew Tindall: In a sea of AI sameness, we must build brand (April 28) – The Drum (subscription)
- Innovid Feature Beat: New Capabilities to Measure Real Performance (April 29) – press release
- “Possible 2026: AI is marketing’s Stradivarius. But ‘the violin can’t play itself.’” – The Trade Desk’s The Current