Trade Desk CSO joins OpenAI

LLMs & CHATBOTS

ChatGPT opens to more ad demand

Having taken the wraps off of its nascent ad platform earlier in the week, OpenAI said yesterday that it’s ready for more advertisers through its ChatGPT ads platform.

OpenAI VP Monetization Benji Shomair announced an expansion into new countries and a signup form on LinkedIn yesterday:

“More updates on ChatGPT ads — in the coming weeks, we’ll be expanding our ads pilot to the UK, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, and Mexico.

Again, ads are only being tested in free and Go subscriptions. Plus, Pro and Enterprise subscriptions will not have any ads.

These explorations continue to be guided by our ads principles.  Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you. Ads are always separate and clearly labeled.

If your business is interested in advertising in ChatGPT across these new markets, visit the link in the comments to sign up for updates and additional details.”

Read it on LinkedIn. (May 7)

The “sign up”: “Advertise in ChatGPT” – OpenAI

Related: “OpenAI is Opening the Window on Its Ad Ambitions” (May 7) – Analyst Debra Aho Williamson on her “The AI Ad Economy” Substack

From tipsheet: OpenAI has less than 8 months to meet its year-end $2.5 billion ad revenue goal.

LLMs & CHATBOTS

Developments

• From ‘Code with Claude’: Dario Amodei Says Anthropic’s Explosive Growth ‘Too Hard To Handle’ As Startup Sees 80-Fold Surge In Q1 (May 7) – Benzinga
• Advancing voice intelligence with new models in the API (May 7) – OpenAI
• Natural Language Autoencoders: Turning Claude’s thoughts into text (May 7) – Anthropic

TECH

Earnings reported yesterday

The Trade Desk

• Markets: The Trade Desk shares were down 16.1% in after-hours trading yesterday.
• Stat: “Q1 was another strong quarter for The Trade Desk, with revenue growing to $689 million, representing 12% year-over-year growth” – CEO Jeff Green
• Results: The Trade Desk Reports First Quarter 2026 Financial Results (May 7) – The Trade Desk
• Earnings call transcript: The Trade Desk Q1 2026 earnings call transcript – Motley Fool
• Earnings call quote: “One simple way to explain Agentic AI is that it is a layer on top of the API that can reason or, said simply, an API that can reason while simultaneously creating productivity.”
• Read: The Trade Desk Has A Grand Vision, But Needs A New Breed Of CMO To Make It A Reality (May 7) – AdExchanger

Unity

• Markets: Unity shares were down 2% yesterday.
• Stat: “Q2 2026 Guidance: Strategic Revenue of $455 million to $465 million, up 29% – 32% year-over-year.”
• Results: Unity Reports First Quarter 2026 Financial Results (May 7) – Unity
• Earnings call transcript: Unity Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript – Motley Fool
• Earnings call quote: “In terms of uses of cash, we’re really focused on our product road map, organic investment in our business. We think we have an extraordinarily exciting AI road map in front of us, and there is a high threshold as we evaluate M&A opportunities.”
• Read: Unity Q1 Earnings Lag Estimates – Zacks on Yahoo Finance

PubMatic

• Markets: PubMatic shares were up 3.3% in after-hours trading yesterday.
• Stat: Q2 2026 expectations — “Revenue to be in the range of $68 million to $70 million, inclusive of an impact from one of our top DSP buyers. Adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of $8.0 million to $10.0 million.”
• Results: PubMatic Announces First Quarter 2026 Financial Results (May 7) – PubMatic
• Earnings call transcript: PubMatic Q1 2026 Earnings Transcript – Motley Fool
• Earnings call quote: “Emerging revenues grew over 80% year over year and climbed to 14% of total revenues, aided by Agentic OS.”

S4 Capital

• Markets: S4 Capital shares were down 4.5% yesterday.
• Stat: “2026 like-for-like net revenue expected to be in line with current analyst consensus, slightly below 2025”
• Results: S4 Capital plc First Quarter Trading Update (May 7) – S4 Capital
• Earnings call transcript: S4 Capital earnings call transcript – Yahoo Finance
• Earnings call quote: “On the AI front, we’re seeing significant opportunities for new business, particularly driven by those AI tools and capabilities. We continue (…) to win multiple exploratory assignments as clients experiment and explore AI applications and develop use cases.”
• Read: S4 Capital maintains outlook despite softer first-quarter revenue – Yahoo Finance UK

More earnings: “Cloudflare to Cut One-Fifth of Workers in Move to AI-First Model” (May 7) – Bloomberg (subscription)

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PEOPLE MOVES

The Trade Desk’s CSO joins OpenAI

From Adweek’s Trishla Ostwal:

• “[Samantha Jacobson] will join OpenAI as vp of partnerships (Monetization), where she will lead the AI company’s monetization partnerships, shaping how it works with partners across advertising, distribution, platform infrastructure, and emerging business models. She will report to Torben Severson, vp and head of global business development, and is expected to start later this month, according to a spokesperson from OpenAI.”

Read: “The Trade Desk’s Chief Strategy Officer Samantha Jacobson Is Heading to OpenAI” (May 7) – Adweek

From tipsheet: The strategic layer for ads is growing at OpenAI with the addition of Ms. Jacobson to the BD side of OpenAI’s ads business.

Alongside that effort is the commercial go-to-market side led by recent hire David Dugan, OpenAI’s Head of Global Ads Solutions. He said earlier this week, “We’ve taken a conscious decision to be partner-led with agencies, tech partners and our shared advertisers, and the collaboration has been great in all directions. The pace of receiving input from these partners and getting features built with an AI-first product and engineering team is like nothing I’ve seen.” Read more on LinkedIn. (May 6)

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PLATFORMS

Google updates AI bidding, budgeting

Google VP of Global Ads Dan Taylor announced new AI advertising updates in advance of the company’s Google Marketing Live (GML) event in two weeks.

Taylor explained:

“Google is expanding its AI bidding and budgeting tools across Search and Shopping to help marketers capture new opportunities in real-time.

Here are three updates to keep on your radar:

• Journey-aware bidding (Beta): All clicks are not created equal. Instead of just looking at the final click, Google AI can now learn from your entire lead-to-sale funnel. It’s a great way to give the algorithm a clearer picture of what a ‘quality’ lead actually looks like.
• Smart Bidding Exploration: Announced for Search ads at GML last year, this is now expanding to Shopping and PMax. It helps you find high-value queries you might be missing, with early tests showing an average 27% increase in unique converting users.
• Demand-led Pacing: No more manual budget tweaks during peak times. This feature automatically shifts your investment to high-demand days while staying within your monthly limits. Early data shows campaign total budgets reduce manual work by 66%.”

Read it on LinkedIn. (May 7)

More:

• “New AI-powered bidding and budgeting innovations in Search and Shopping” (May 7) – Google Ads & Commerce
• Google announces Smart Bidding Exploration (May 2025) – Google
• Journey Aware Bidding info (November 2025) – via Georgi Zayakov on LinkedIn

From tipsheet: More data is better for AI. Journey-aware bidding suggests Google wants more downstream conversion intelligence fed into its AI systems — not just clicks, but signals tied to actual business outcomes. Over time, that could pull incrementality measurement directly into automated bidding itself.

CONNECTED TV

Data, AI feeding Amazon Upfront offering

In preparation for next week’s TV Upfronts, Amazon was promoting the cross-channel opportunity it can enable for marketers. Amazon VP of Global Ad Sales Alan Moss told Adweek that the upcoming Upfronts were more about helping marketers achieve verifiable outcomes with their ad budgets than buying ad space in content in advance.

Highlighting Amazon’s expanding network of data and media partners — including LinkedIn and Netflix alongside Amazon’s own footprint, Adweek’s Bill Bradley observed:

“With that data and its AI offerings for campaigns, the company is looking to help brands achieve outcomes across the funnel during the upfront. Moss also noted that AI is making the barrier to entry lower, with more SMB brands getting into video and live sports and bigger brands extending their assets and increasing overall buys.”

Read: “Amazon Bets AI Can Rewrite the Upfront Playbook in a Fragmented TV Market” (May 7) – Adweek (subscription)

From tipsheet: Amazon is increasingly translating AI, commerce data and authenticated identity into the traditional TV currency of reach and frequency. A new generation of buyers raised on performance media may make that transition easier.

TECH

Opinion: The AI bill is coming due

Are you managing your AI bill while enabling innovation?

Fluency ad product leader Eric Picard warns many companies are underestimating AI infrastructure costs.

In a LinkedIn essay, Picard notes that AI costs have already plummeted. But:

• “The companies that will get hurt aren’t the ones that adopted AI extensively. They’re the ones that adopted it naively — without the discipline to route workloads, cache aggressively, and meter every model call. The companies that will thrive are treating AI compute the way mature companies have treated cloud infrastructure for a decade: as a real cost center that needs real engineering discipline, not a magic productivity tool that’s free until further notice.”

Read: “The AI bill is coming due” (May 7) – Eric Picard on LinkedIn

From tipsheet #1: The infrastructure must pay for itself today for some, someday for others. The divide may come down to who treats AI like infrastructure and who treats it like magic.

From tipsheet #2: Eric Picard was the first person I ever heard use the term “programmatic.”

MARKETING

The guardrails for agentic media buying

Reporter Asa Hiken reviewed the risks of agentic media buying in Ad Age. He begins:

“Marketers experimenting with media buying agents risk wasting ad spend and damaging campaigns if they don’t know how to spot when these AI systems make mistakes and prevent them from messing up again. To avoid those risks, marketers need to understand where AI agents are most likely to fail, how to audit their decisions and what guardrails to put in place before mistakes scale.”

Read: AI agents are making media buying mistakes—how to catch and prevent them (May 7) – Ad Age (subscription)

From tipsheet: There are echoes of Picard’s piece in Hiken’s Ad Age article. Agentic media buying may ultimately depend less on smarter models and more on smarter constraints.

DATA

UID2 and deterministic vs. probabilistic

AdExchanger’s Anthony Vargas reported that a publisher’s CTV inventory was improperly configured for The Trade Desk’s Unified ID 2.0 (UID2) for roughly three months — yet neither the publisher, buyers nor The Trade Desk appeared to detect meaningful performance issues.

Vargas added: “The Trade Desk confirmed that this publisher’s errors would have made its UID2s useless for ad targeting. But The Trade Desk also told AdExchanger that it wouldn’t have had enough information to flag anything wrong with this publisher’s UID2 setup. (…) But something more concerning stood out once the error was rectified. According to the publisher, they saw no noticeable impact to their ad revenue – either positive or negative.”

Read: “A Publisher Didn’t Get Its UID2 Setup Right. The Trade Desk Didn’t Notice. What Went Wrong?” (May 7) – AdExchanger

From tipsheet: UID2 emerged after Google’s cookie deprecation plans and Apple’s ATT changes pushed the ad industry away from deterministic tracking and toward probabilistic prediction. The AdExchanger story raises an uncomfortable question: Are modern AI-driven ad systems increasingly competing on modeling quality rather than identity resolution itself? Just saying.

SELL-SIDE

IAB Tech Lab CEO polls publishers

IAB Tech Lab CEO Anthony Katsur said on LinkedIn yesterday:

“If you’re a Publisher, you know that approximately 25% of open web traffic is powered by browsers that have deleted cookies and stopped sending additional signals you can monetize.

So, I have 3 questions for you that I’ll share over the next couple of weeks.

My first question. You are offered a FREE turnkey approach that, once implemented, would deliver an incremental 20% CPM lift in your signal-restricted environments…

As a Publisher, would you take this solution?”

Katsur offers three possible answers to choose from.

Vote now on LinkedIn. (May 7)

From tipsheet: I ‘smell’ AAMP — not IDs.

MORE

• Why Vidmob believes creative data will shape the next era of AI marketing (May 7) – The Drum (subscription)
• ‘Maybe ChatGPT is a different kind of a place’: Why OpenAI is saying no to search budgets — for now – Digiday (subscription)
• When it Comes to TV, Instagram and TikTok Are Headed in Opposite Directions (May 7) – Mike Shields on his ‘Next in Media’ Substack
• AI Max vs Dynamic Search Ads (DSA): Advertisers question control as Google responds (May 7) – Search Engine Land
• Official: “INCRMNTAL has been acquired by Smartly” (May 7) – Smartly on LinkedIn