China reclaims Manus from Meta

Agentic AI firm Manus, which was acquired by Meta in late December and quickly went to work at the social giant, is being reclaimed by China.

In the lead-up to yesterday’s events, China had forbidden Manus’ Chinese founders from leaving China in late March.

Bloomberg reported yesterday:

“China has decided to block Meta Platforms Inc.’s $2 billion acquisition of agentic AI startup Manus, a surprise move to unwind a controversial deal that’s drawn fire for the leakage of technology to the US.

The National Development and Reform Commission ordered the deal’s cancellation in a brief statement Monday. The powerful state planner said in a one-line notice that it’s decided to prohibit foreign investment in the startup in accordance with laws and regulations, without elaborating.”

LLMs & CHATBOTS

Developments

The next phase of the Microsoft OpenAI partnership (April 27) – OpenAI
Amazon pushes AI use and closely tracks adoption, as some employees push back (April 27) – Business Insider (subscription)
Our Principles (April 27) – Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI

TECH

AI powers matching in the creator market

Efficiently connecting brands and creators remains a core challenge on both sides, according to a Wall Street Journal article.

The bottleneck isn’t attention — it’s matching:

“[The creator] Sambucha works with Agentio, a startup that automates the process of connecting brands with creators and their ad inventory. Google at a sales presentation last month highlighted the ways its AI platform Gemini can now pair creators and brands.

Semi-stars with millions of followers may be frustrated that more brands aren’t calling them, but ultimately it’s their own responsibility to persuade marketers that they can bring real value beyond quick impressions, according to [Samir Chaudry, one half of creator duo Colin & Samir], who compared partnering with a brand to bringing a new person to a party.‘

‘Is there a clear-cut reason why I brought this friend to this party?’ he said. ‘If not, then your other friends are gonna start to not really trust you as much.’”

Read: Big Brands Boost Creator Spending, but Smaller Firms Dominate the Deals (April 27) – The Wall Street Journal (subscription)

From tipsheet: If platforms like Agentio or Gemini can scale creator discovery and pricing, this starts to look like AdSense for creators — turning fragmented supply into liquid, addressable inventory.

The result: budgets move to the outer bands of the enormous long tail.

SELL-SIDE

Hershey asks agents for ‘green’ MMM

“Hershey is revamping one of marketing’s oldest measurement tools—marketing mix modeling—by enlisting agentic AI in a bid to turn what has historically been a slow, backward-looking process into something closer to real-time.

The confectionery giant, home to brands like Reese’s and Skinny Pop, is working with the analytics platforms Mutinex and Tracer to automate marketing mix modeling — a statistical technique that measures how media spending and other variables drive sales — making it faster and more frequent.” – Trishla Ostwal, reporter, Adweek (April 27)

Read: “Hershey Bets on Agentic AI to Rethink $2B in Marketing Spend” (April 27) – Adweek (subscription)

More: “Congratulations to Vinny Rinaldi, Vice President, Consumer Connections, The Hershey Company, for great coverage in Adweek on the revolution he and CGO, Stacy Taffet, are leading at the 132-year-old marketing behemoth and to Mutinex for bringing forward technology enabling their vision.” (April 27) – Lou Paskalis on LinkedIn

From tipsheet: Agentic workflow for the win. This time it’s media mix modeling.

TECH

AppLovin CEO discusses AI, opportunity ahead

On the 20VC podcast with Harry Stebbings, AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi sits down for a rare interview and discusses all things AppLovin including AI transformation at his mobile ad platform company.

AppLovin lost 92% of its value in 2022, as Foroughi recounts in vivid detail, and then came all the way back from its original IPO price to today’s $154 billion market cap.

As Stebbings emphasized, AppLovin has $5.5 billion in revenue on an astonishing $10 million in EBITDA per employee. And 80% margins.

Here are a few of the highlights (lightly edited):

Engineers are now product managers

Adam Foroughi: “You have to understand the KPIs of the business, to drive the business. And our organization was built pretty nicely for this era that we’re in.

One – we don’t have a product organization. Our engineers are meant to be product managers. And if you think about what’s happening with AI native or engineers today, they have to be really imaginative. They have to be product people. They don’t have to know how to write code, but they have to be able to audit code, because frankly you can’t just go type out like what you need in a complex system and get a deliverable and it’s done. They still need to be able to review the code and make sure what they’re checking in is safe and high quality. But first and foremost, they need to know what the business needs, and they need to know how to measure it.”

The LLM threat and staying lean

Harry Stebbings: “Do you think the majority of companies we see created today will be commoditized or eaten by Anthropic and OpenAI and frontier models?

Adam Foroughi: I would be very, very nervous if I was building a business as an interface on top of those companies.

Harry Stebbings: What does your team use internally engineering-wise, Cursor or CloudCode?

Adam Foroughi: Most people are on CloudCode, Codex is utilized as well and Cursor less.

Harry Stebbings: “You have 895 people today. How many people will AppLovin have in five years?”

Adam Foroughi: “So it’s tough to say. I mean, again, it’s 400 people on the core business. We run Lean. Is it going to be 800 on the core business? I highly doubt it. Is it going to be 50 on the core business? I’d love it, but I highly doubt it, too. So I think we’re in a range of a good level for what we’re doing today. Now, if some of the things that we’ll take bets on over time work, we’ll need more people around other businesses.”

AppLovin becoming a trillion dollar business

Adam Foroughi: “…If we ever got to generating $30-35 billion in cash a year, we would probably be a trillion dollar business. So you think about what can get us to that point. There are a couple of things that can get us there…

One is continued execution in the domain that we’re in. We think we can get much bigger by better monetizing the gaming audience. It’s a billion plus daily active users who play these games, adult audience, a lot of heads of household.

And the next thing you think about is how do you expand what you have? So in the past, I’ve talked about connected TV is one of the holy grails of advertising. If you can port the performance ad we serve on mobile to the television and allow small and medium-sized businesses to serve there and make it all performance-based, that’s a really big unlock…

So it’s something we still take seriously. Then you think about what are other applications of the technology? We’re really good at advertising model. We have yet to have a chance to have our team work on an engagement model. So, a social network for us is not a requirement to get to a trillion dollars…”

Listen: Adam Foroughi is the Co-Founder and CEO, Applovin (April 27) – 20VC on Apple Podcasts

From tipsheet: This is a great discussion which covers not only AI but Mr. Foroughi’s unique, unrelenting management style. He is “Robo CEO” — and I don’t mean robotic. More Robocop. He wants to win (full-stop), always.

Whether AppLovin fails or succeeds going forward, Mr. Foroughi will be placing bets that CEOs and strategists will be watching from across all of advertising and technology.

AGENCIES

The new ‘Mad Men’ embrace AI

The ad agency industry is embracing AI while confronting a deeper shift: value is moving from creative ideas to how they’re executed, measured, and distributed, according to Financial Times’ Daniel Thomas.

He reported:

“Scale is no longer ‘the trump card it used to be’, [Jessica Tamsedge, CEO of Dentsu Creative] says, instead pointing to the growing importance of adopting technology for strategic and creative thinking. ‘Designing brands for distinction at a time of supercharged AI sameness will stand us in good stead as an industry of strategic and creative advisers.’

The problem is that agencies will be at risk if they pivot too hard to compete with the likes of OpenAI or Microsoft, according to executives, chasing low-margin scale with self-service marketing products. One describes it as a ‘dangerous game and not where we will win’. Others say AI is just another medium to be used by creative talent.”

Former WPP CEO Mark Read also appeared saying, “The big idea is still important but it’s not where agencies make the money any more. It’s now how the idea is being transmitted.”

Read: End of the road for the ‘Mad Men’ as AI moves into advertising (April 27) – Financial Times (subscription)

From tipsheet: The more positive take on how AI will shape creativity is notable.

Dentsu Creative Tamsedge’s point-of-view leans into the negative space of AI: LLMs’ inherent probabilistic qualities create toward sameness. The opportunity for agencies is in the deviation — using human judgment to produce something sharper.

LLMs & CHATBOTS

Dappier serves ads in AI conversations

AI-powered ad tech platform Dappier launched “Sponsored Conversations” yesterday. Embedded on publishers’ sites, the conversations are designed to “give advertisers a way to engage users inside active AI sessions with interactive experiences designed for the flow of the conversation itself,” according to Dappier CEO Dan Goikhman.

AdExchanger’s Joanna Gerber reported on the experience from a user’s perspective:

“There may be several prompts based on an article’s context that appear at the bottom of an article. When a user clicks on one, it launches a conversation with the publisher agent, said Mark Balabanian, Dappier’s chief business officer.

The agents only pull from a publisher’s own site content unless the site owner opts to ‘augment’ with third-party content, he said, like weather or stock market data.

Once a conversation is underway, users may now also see a sponsored prompt from a brand that, if clicked, launches a new conversation, this time with a brand agent. The prompt to begin a sponsored conversation is determined by whichever advertiser won the programmatic ad auction for the banner slot.”

TECH

Trade Desk positions, coordinates for AI

In an op-ed titled “More AI won’t fix advertising. Coordination will,” The Trade Desk VP of Product Eric Bosco outlined how fragmented AI systems risk working at cross purposes without shared infrastructure.

He pointed to OpenTTD, the company’s recently announced partner integration layer:

“The open internet has always stood for choice and transparency. AI should reinforce those principles — not erode them by creating more black boxes. The platforms that will matter are the ones that connect partners deliberately, with clear boundaries, enabling AI across the ecosystem to work in concert rather than in conflict.

At The Trade Desk, this is the vision behind OpenTTD — a foundation designed to connect data, AI and partners in a way that enables orchestration with purpose, transparency and control. Not more AI for the sake of it. Better-coordinated AI, in service of outcomes that actually matter to the business.

The opportunity isn’t artificial intelligence. It’s coordinated intelligence, built on trust.”

From tipsheet: Put another way, in a market dominated by walled gardens and their AI stacks, coordination and standardization are how independents compete.

LLMs & CHATBOTS

OpenAI monetization lead on ads

OpenAI’s Head of Monetization, Asad Awan, spoke at Profound’s Zero Click Summit in San Francisco on April 8.

The video from his conversation with James Cadwallader, CEO of GEO firm Profound, was made publicly available yesterday, shedding more light on OpenAI’s process with ads.

Mr. Awan shared (lightly edited):

“Adding ads on OpenAI has been a really great product journey in terms of how we think about adding ads into this conversational format, which is what the native experience is — which is very different than a feed through which to discover content and products or through a more transactional search-like experience.

But it also gave us an opportunity to rethink what the overall stack is going to be and how relevance is going to work. In a more discovery-centric environment, it is more identity-driven and [tied to] what your actions around the internet are. And search is more keyword-driven.

Here it’s more personalized because we understand the user much better and, as a result, you can help them find the products that are valuable and useful for them. So the whole stack is geared towards making that happen.

Clearly, the way users interact with it is conversational. So the natural way for advertisers to show their intent is also to say this is my audience, this is my brand voice, this is what I care about.”

Hear more of the 25-minute interview on the Zero Click Summit site. (signup required)

Related: “Marketers join OpenAI’s ad pilot, nudged by FOMO” – Digiday (subscription)

From tipsheet: Prepare to run campaigns via conversational prompts on OpenAI. This aligns with agentic workflows launching across ad tech, as manual campaign setup is replaced by natural-language inputs.

It also relates to why Profound is advocating for a new role: “The Marketing Engineer.”

PLATFORMS

Sell-side platforms race to agentic future

On Monday, two of the leading independent sell-side platforms (SSPs) published press releases updating customers on their agentic strategy progress.

Workflow remains the key lever, for now.

“Magnite Unveils New AI-Powered Intelligent Assistance and Agentic Execution Capabilities, Empowering Media Owners and Buyers (April 27)” – Magnite

Jamie Power, SVP of Addressable Sales, Disney Advertising. “At Disney Advertising, we’re always looking for ways to remove friction and make it easier to transact. This work with Kepler, Magnite and MiQ is squarely focused on workflow automation – using agent-driven technology to streamline how buyers and sellers operate. It’s an important step toward a more efficient, automation-first marketplace, where execution is faster, simpler, and more connected.”

“PubMatic’s AgenticOS Accelerates Globally as Agentic Campaigns Unlock Efficiency and Performance” (April 27) – PubMatic

Tom Leone, Vice President, Media Services at Brkthru: “Early on, we’re seeing real workflow improvements that are freeing our traders from manual coordination work. AgenticOS is allowing us to simplify how we execute across platforms and data sources, which means our team can focus more on strategy and client relationships.”

From tipsheet: SSPs are positioning for both sides of the market as agentic execution takes hold. Offering, controlling, and monetizing the agent is the opportunity.

Also — what’s next for the acronym SSP: Buy-side SSP (BSSSP)? Agentic platform (AP)?

TECH

PayPal turns payments into identity

PayPal Ads SVP Dr. Mark Grether announced the launch of a new identity layer built on what the company calls a “Transaction Graph.”

He said on LinkedIn: “Today, PayPal launches the PayPal Ads ID — built on something different: the Transaction Graph. Verified payment data from PayPal and Venmo customers, credit cards attached, no third-party signals, no probabilistic inference. And we’re giving it away for free. No software fees. No CPM charges. Any PayPal Ads commercial partner can use the ID across programmatic inventory — through Magnite, Rokt, Taboola, PubMatic, and more — at no cost.”

China reclaims Manus from Meta

LLMs & CHATBOTS

Developments

TECH

AI powers matching in the creator market

SELL-SIDE

Hershey asks agents for ‘green’ MMM

TECH

AppLovin CEO discusses AI, opportunity ahead

Engineers are now product managers

The LLM threat and staying lean

AppLovin becoming a trillion dollar business

AGENCIES

The new ‘Mad Men’ embrace AI

LLMs & CHATBOTS

Dappier serves ads in AI conversations

TECH

Trade Desk positions, coordinates for AI

LLMs & CHATBOTS

OpenAI monetization lead on ads

PLATFORMS

Sell-side platforms race to agentic future

TECH

PayPal turns payments into identity

MORE