AI means advantage for agencies

“Beset by contract setbacks, Britain’s WPP Plc has plunged 60% this year, while rivals including Publicis Groupe SA and Omnicom Group Inc. have fallen by a lesser extent amid broader fears that AI will replace much of the manual work behind advertising.

Yet a school of thought is developing among analysts that these companies will be able to turn the disruption to their advantage. Bulls argue that major brands will depend even more on agencies to navigate an increasingly complex, multi-platform media landscape. That’s reflected in recommendations for Publicis and Omnicom being near the best levels in years.

‘The industry is being disrupted, but it’s not being disintermediated — I think that’s the key,’ said Morningstar analyst Mark Giarelli.”

“Building on our existing partnership, we will be able to extend performance campaigns to the biggest screen in the house, turning Pinterest into a true search + social + CTV performance solution that reaches Pinterest’s exclusive high‑intent audience.

Pinterest’s 600M monthly users generate ~80B queries each month and have saved to 15B boards, an unmatched intent signal. With tvScientific, we’ll be able to connect that signal to an outcome-based CTV platform and give advertisers a clearer view of how TV drives incremental results across their performance mix.

tvScientific’s media buying tools, AI-powered optimization models, and deterministic attribution will meaningfully accelerate what we’re building in performance advertising. Advertisers will be able to run coordinated, multi‑screen campaigns across CTV, search, and social, and measure how these channels reinforce one another.”

“M&A activity is back. The accelerated pace of technology innovation (and continued strength of the economy and easing of macro uncertainties) is driving the market towards more M&A. The steeper the innovation curve, the more companies have to default towards BUY vs. BUILD. 2026 is looking good!…”

“We’re now piloting a new commercial partnership program with a range of news publishers globally — including Der Spiegel, El País, Folha de S. Paulo, Infobae, Kompas, The Guardian, The Times of India, The Washington Examiner and The Washington Post, among others — to explore how AI can help drive more engaged audiences.

As part of this new AI pilot program, we’re working with publishers to experiment with new features in Google News. For example, we’re testing AI-powered article overviews on participating publications’ Google News pages to give people more context before they click through. And we’re experimenting with audio briefings for those who prefer listening. These features will include clear attribution and link to articles.

We’re also partnering with organizations like Estadão, Antara, Yonhap and The Associated Press to include real-time information to enhance results in the Gemini app.”

“We’re increasing the number of inline links in AI Mode, and updating the design of those links to make them more useful. We’re also adding contextual introductions to embedded links in AI Mode responses. These are short statements that explain why a link might be helpful to visit.”

“As GTM Narratives Lead at Anthropic, you will own the strategic storytelling that defines how we communicate Claude’s capabilities, Anthropic’s mission, and the transformative potential of safe AI to enterprise customers and the broader market. You will craft the keynote presentations, executive briefings, and core narratives that shape how leaders, customers, and industry stakeholders understand what we’re building and why it matters for the future of AI.”

“I thought this was a fascinating role that Anthropic is hiring for. At the intersection of strategic comms, product marketing, and GTM excellence.

I bet we see more of this kind of new hybrid job. It’s sounds like a very compelling org design model.

“The first new rule requires advertisers to disclose when they use AI-generated ‘synthetic performers,’ digital creations that look and act like real people. With more companies turning to computer-generated faces and voices to pitch products online and on social media, officials say the line between real and artificial has blurred too quickly for comfort.”

“I’ve been proud to stand as you strike and say, ‘What about us? What about the human face? What about the flesh and blood people who are the creators of this? And it’s at a time when we do want to embrace innovation. We really do. It’s who we are as New Yorkers. It’s what makes us so fabulous and so great. But not to the detriment of people. That has to be the dividing line.”

“The goal of the initiative was to better align ~100K+ phrases/search keywords (starting with strong performing organic traffic keywords) with ~4500 different ad categories and groups. Pinterest initially leveraged several open-source model libraries from AWS Bedrock, including FastText (first developed by Meta) and an internally developed BERT model (first developed by Google) for bulk labeling.

But this created challenges like a lack of transparency into the LLM’s decisions, as well as ‘unconstrained outputs’ that led the LLM to create ad categories that weren’t included in the original list. The team ultimately found the most success through a “hybrid approach” that included a vector database to help improve the text classifications, specifically tapping OpenAI’s vector embedding models.”

ARI PAPARO: “I think Meta is in TV in the next six months.”

JIM PAYNE: “Yeah. I think it makes obvious sense for them to do it. And so I would expect them to. If you look at what they’re doing with us in third-party, I think it’s a good signal that they’re trying to go outside and make the investments that they’re making in ad recommendation engines and AI overall. Just drive that our way.”

ARI PAPARO: “Do you think, Jim, that’s because Meta feels like they’ve moved beyond IDs and to their AI-based system? If it was all IDFAs, and IDFAs get wiped out, then offsite isn’t as attractive. But now, they have this magical AI engine.”

JIM PAYNE: I do think that that’s driving it, yeah. Obviously, we’re going to work really hard to make them successful in mobile advertising next year too.”