What are marketers doing about Amazon’s AI assistant Alexa and making sure their products get recommended? Ad Age senior editor Garett Sloane shares on LinkedIn:
“… AEO/GEO are not simple on Amazon, because of its no scraping policy. That leaves most AEO startups in the dark.
Amazon’s Alexa is getting its data from all the product and store information brands provide, and how sellers set up their content there has to change. For instance, last month, Amazon shortened the headlines on product details, but brands can stuff all those keywords into other parts of the system…”
Read more. (August 17)
Also – no more infinite Amazon shelf space.
Mike Feldman of Omnicom commerce agency Flywheel tells Sloane: “In an AI-driven world, you’re going to get one, maybe two different product recommendations. So the shelf is just shrinking and shrinking and shrinking.”
Read: “Amazon’s agentic shopping reshapes brand commerce tactics” (August 17) – Garett Sloane in Ad Age
From tipsheet: Collapsing “shelf space” makes recommendation share more critical and, presumably, heats up the competition — and price — for placing an ad on Amazon in those recommendation moments.
MEASUREMENT
YouTube redefines the view
YouTube announced changes to the way it measures video views yesterday:
- Old view: evidence someone watched (“engaged views,” i.e. viewed “past the initial seconds”).
- New view: evidence someone was exposed.
Read: An update to how we count public views across YouTube (August 17) – YouTube Help
From tipsheet: Marketers will like the bigger number and so will their CFOs. At first. But nothing about the underlying exposure changed.
COMMERCE MEDIA
AI builds a bigger basket
Albertsons says shoppers using its AI-powered shopping assistants are spending more.
Jill Pavlovich, SVP of digital shopping experiences, told the Wall Street Journal that standard conversational search produces about a 10% lift in average order value (AOV), while more comprehensive assistants that help shoppers plan recipes and find ingredients produce about a 26% lift.
The difference: rather than searching for individual products, shoppers can give the assistant an objective, such as planning taco night, and let it build the basket across categories.
Read: “Albertsons Says Its Shoppers Are Buying More—Thanks to AI” (August 17) – The Wall Street Journal
From tipsheet: Is there a middle ground in agentic commerce?
Fully autonomous shopping may be unrealistic. But agentic commerce with guardrails, such as planning a recipe or finding the “fixings for a burger,” may be the right idea. The human provides the objective and AI does the shopping.
The result may be a bigger basket as AI optimizes for a tasty outcome.
CREATIVE
AI creative gets a $5 billion valuation
The economics of AI-generated creative are starting to show up at enterprise scale.
AI video startup Higgsfield says annualized revenue has grown from $20 million a year ago to $700 million today, while business customers have gone from less than 25% of revenue in January to a majority. The company says 390 Fortune 500 companies now use its platform for visual production.
That growth comes as Higgsfield pushes beyond AI generation into automating more of the creative process. Since the May launch of Supercomputer, which automates workflows in video creation, Higgsfield says adoption of its agentic products has increased 42x.
Rather than having a person prompt, generate and assemble content step by step, Supercomputer can take over more of those steps itself, turning an instruction into finished visual content with less human orchestration. Higgsfield says its agentic products now generate more than 20 million pieces of content per month.
Read: “Higgsfield Raises $400 Million Series B Financing at $5.4 Billion Valuation With Annualized Revenue Reaching $700 Million” (August 17) – press release
From tipsheet: Higgsfield’s enterprise growth suggests creative abundance is becoming an operating model: hand more of the production workflow to AI, generate far more possibilities and give marketers a much larger creative surface to test and learn from.
LLMs & CHATBOTS
ChatGPT Ads adds countries, languages
Benji Shomair, VP Monetization, OpenAI on LinkedIn yesterday:
“ChatGPT Ads are now live in Mexico and Brazil —our first Spanish and Portuguese language markets… For advertisers in Mexico and Brazil, ChatGPT Ads create a new opportunity to reach people while they are actively exploring and evaluating their options—and to be useful in the moments that drive discovery, shape decisions, and lead to purchase.”
From tipsheet: OpenAI keeps pitching ChatGPT’s inventory around the decision process, not search queries or content consumption.
Related: “Six months of ChatGPT ads — 19 pages” (August 17) – Entrepreneur Joe Kaziukėnas on LinkedIn
MEASUREMENT
Measurement becomes a signal
Not all measurement has the same job.
On last week’s episode of Eric Seufert’s Mobile Dev Memo podcast, Incrmntal CEO Maor Sadra distinguishes between measurement that acts as a “referee,” such as attribution, and measurement that becomes a signal for making better decisions.
“There are two types of measurement solutions. There is the referee that connects between demand and supply and acts as the one telling you who scored the goal. They have the mechanism for this. That’s pretty much what attribution does.
Then there’s a measurement solution that is a signal that makes you smarter. There is a whole intelligence suite around it. I think that’s the type of measurement solution Incremental is. That’s a signal that’s valuable.”
That second category becomes particularly valuable when the signal can feed directly into optimization. Advertising platform Smartly’s acquisition of Incrmntal (first announced in March), Sadra argues, lets its customers use always-on incrementality as an input for optimizing campaigns across platforms.
Listen: “Digital Advertising’s M&A Resurgence” (August 12) – Mobile Dev Memo podcast
From tipsheet: As agents take on more execution, measurement that teaches the system what to do next may become more valuable than measurement that simply keeps score.
COMMERCE MEDIA
TikTok Shop affiliates replace paid media?
Performance marketer David Herrmann says his agency has largely stopped buying TikTok ads this year, shifting the channel to “100% affiliate.”
From tipsheet: This is one impact of the creator economy — in this case, TikTok Shop could change the economics of performance advertising: brands compensate affiliates for generating sales rather than paying for media and optimizing toward them.
Trust in the creator.
SEARCH
Creators optimize to be recommended by AI
Creators are building GEO strategies to surface when brands and agencies use AI to find potential partners, according to Digiday. Olive oil brand Kosterina says it often starts creator searches in Claude, while agencies are beginning to include AI visibility in creator briefs.
Creator Rachel Lowenstein says:
“If a brand wants to work with someone who talks about culture, girls, and brands, I want to be the creator who is showing up in their queries about the best marketing and culture creators.”
Read: “Creators build GEO strategies to get discovered by brands and agencies in AI search” (August 17) – Digiday (subscription)
From tipsheet:
- Brands want AI to recommend their products to consumers (which creator content can influence).
- Creators want AI to recommend them to brands.
- Everyone wants an AI visibility, or GEO, strategy.
MEASUREMENT
Panel measurement for chatbots
Susan Dunn, CRO of measurement firm Similarweb, wrote on LinkedIn yesterday:
“Today, we announced our newest Ad Intelligence data set, AI Ads, that fills an important gap for advertisers trying to understand the changing competitive landscape for ads in ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode and AI Overviews.
Read more. (August 17)
See some stats: “Similarweb Unlocks the Black Box of AI Ad Placements Across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and AI Mode” (August 17) – press release
From tipsheet: What’s old is new.
TECH
Opinions
- For Agentic Advertising To Work, We Must Decide What AI Can Never Touch (August 17) – Eric Picard, SVP, Fluency on AdExchanger
- YouTube Kills The Viral Money Machine (August 17) – Jim Louderback, Editor & CEO, Inside The Creator Economy on LinkedIn
- Why GEO Scores Aren’t the Solution To Your Brand’s AI Engine Visibility (August 17) – Andrew Bolton, CCO, Knotch on Adweek
LLMs & CHATBOTS
Developments
- Anthropic tells investors annualized revenue run rate climbed to $65 billion in July (August 17) – CNBC
- OpenAI joins PORTS-Pike project (August 17) – OpenAI
- Google Aims to Boost AI With Purchase of Spirit Airlines Data (August 17) – Bloomberg Law
MORE
- PepsiCo is conducting an AI marketing transformation review (August 17) – Ad Age (subscription)
- Earnings calendar: Walmart reports Thursday morning – Walmart
- “Google updates Demand Gen view-through conversion optimization” (August 17) – Search Engine Land
- “Apple bows to Germany and rewrites its tracking-consent rules, ending a self-preferencing probe” (August 17) – The Next Web