Gemini ads possible, says Google SVP Nick Fox

In a Wired interview, Google SVP of Knowledge and Information Nick Fox said ads may be a part of Google’s Gemini chatbot after all.

Wired reported yesterday:

“Nick Fox, says the tech giant is ‘not ruling them out.’

‘I would expect that the learnings that we get from ads in AI Mode would likely carry over to what we might want to do in the Gemini app down the road,’ says Fox. ‘It’s an odd thing to say, but our research shows that users actually like ads within the context of Search. Over time, we’ll figure out what makes sense in the Gemini app.’”

To date, Google has pushed back on any suggestion that the chatbot will see ads despite industry sources saying otherwise. (December)

Later, Mr. Fox said a bit more about ads in his company’s chatbot:

“From an advertising point of view, there are no ads in the Gemini app at this point. Within AI Mode, we’re still working through it. We don’t sell data to advertisers. All this stuff is very nascent, but probably what we’ll figure out is how to make sure that an ad can be targeted and relevant to the context in a query. Maybe in this case, it could have known the specific brand of goggles.

We’ll need to figure out how the targeting of the ads can be consistent with the organic response and to make sure it all fits together. But we’ll make sure that your private information remains private and isn’t shared with advertisers.”

Read: “Google Is Not Ruling Out Ads in Gemini” (March 12) – Wired (subscription)

LLMs & CHATBOTS

Developments

• Claude now creates interactive charts, diagrams and visualizations (March 12) – Anthropic
• Introducing Copilot Health (March 12) – Microsoft AI
• How we’re reimagining Maps with Gemini (March 12) – Google’s The Keyword blog

TECH

Viant earnings: Beyond the walled gardens

Viant released its financial results for Q4 2025, and the AI ad platform company beat Wall Street’s expectations to close out the year.

AdExchanger’s Jame Hercher reported:

“Net income last year was $24.1 million, almost double the total in 2024. Full-year 2025 revenue, meanwhile, grew by 22% to $110 million. CEO Tim Vanderhook told investors that revenue would have grown 28% without the effect of the prior year’s election cycle, which boosted 2024 political ad sales and created tougher comps.

Viant shares jumped by more than 10% on Thursday.”

Read: “Viant Had A Good Q4, But Still Needs To Punch Up At Bigger Platforms” (March 12) – AdExchanger

According to the earnings call transcript with Wall Street, Laura Martin, an analyst with Needham & Company, asked Viant executives about possible share-shift:

“…When we look at [Google’s] DV360, their third-party was down 2%. The Trade Desk up 13% in net revenue. You guys up 19% in net revenue. Really big size difference. Like, you guys are tiny compared to those two. My question is, are you taking share from these? You just said you were taking share from these bigger companies, but how much of this is sustainable over time? Because I sort of feel like Wall Street thinks globally scaled, large footprints have competitive advantage over smaller companies.”

After Viant COO Chris Vanderhook detailed product momentum (particularly with its IRIS TV platform), Viant CEO Tim Vanderhook responded to Martin’s comment (edited):

“It’s really the combination of all of this that’s driving better efficiency when you work with Viant relative to — you mentioned Google, The Trade Desk and Amazon. Amazon has a different type of perspective, where they’re really good at subsidizing businesses in the near term. I think you’re seeing that with their 1% fees that they’ve been out in the marketplace or bundling of the products of AWS plus subsidization. In the end, Google and Amazon, the two very large platforms that we compete with, platforms sell media. We help the buyers of that media allocate their budgets appropriately across. We’re only on their side of the table, we’re not on the other side of the table…”

More:

• “Viant Technology Announces Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Financial Results” (March 11) – press release

• Earnings call transcript: Viant Technology Q4 2025 earnings beat expectations – Investing[dot]com

From tipsheet: Viant closed the day with a market cap of nearly $800 million yesterday.

AGENCIES

Publicis tucks in creative analytics startup

“Publicis Groupe has acquired Israel-based predictive creative analytics platform AdgeAI for an undisclosed sum, tapping into the $970 million deal budget it has earmarked for 2026.

The platform, which has worked with clients including Google and Underoutfit, uses machine learning to forecast which creative elements (whether it’s video, images, text or GIFs) are most likely to drive engagement and business outcomes for brands.”

Read: “AdgeAI Is the Latest Acquisition in Publicis’ AI Shopping Spree” (March 12) – Adweek

More: “Publicis doubles down on predictive measurement with the acquisition of AdgeAI” – Publicis (March 12)

Related: “As Stagwell posts 2025 growth, Mark Penn says its ‘Goldilocks size’ rounds out new big 4” (March 10) – The Drum

From tipsheet: According to his LinkedIn, AdgeAI CEO and co-founder Ayal Ben Shalom has gone from aviation firm Boeing to gaming, then to creative analytics, and now to Publicis in the space of 10 years. What a ride.

CONNECTED TV

Olyzon and Mediaocean’s Innovid target CTV

After naming Innovid CEO and founder Zvika Netter its chief innovation officer in early February, the Mediaocean-owned AI-enabled ad platform is expanding its footprint in connected TV via a new partnership with Olyzon, which positions itself as an “agentic AI platform for CTV advertising.“

Olyzon CEO Jules Minvielle and Innovid’s VP of Enterprise Sales, Patrick Rubin, discuss more in the press release. Read it. (March 12)

From tipsheet: Innovid is picking up the drumbeat of new partnerships since announcing its own “agentic AI advertising solution” known as “Orchestrator” last November.

In mid-February, the company announced integration of Reddit’s ads API into Innovid’s Social Ads Manager.

Across its Prisma back-office platform, digital ad platform Innovid and ad verification solution Protected, Mediaocean is pitching itself as a “vertical advertising software” company today.

See CEO Bill Wise’s LinkedIn post. (January 5)

SELL-SIDE

CDN Cloudflare has a crawler, too

A new crawler launched this week from content delivery network Cloudflare has some sell-side advocates crying foul.

Last year, Cloudflare had positioned itself as a protector of content owners by raising alarm over AI bot crawling and blocking AI bots “by default” on CDN client websites.

But now, Cloudflare has a crawler too — and that’s “the rub” for some.

The offending new product, or product feature, is covered here: “Crawl entire websites with a single API call using Browser Rendering” (March 10) – Cloudflare

Media analyst Thomas Baekdel set up a test and reported on LinkedIn:

“…I use Cloudflare on my site, I have AI Crawl Control enabled, managed bots, and my robots.txt file is managed automatically by Cloudflare. So, by default, my site should be blocking this.

But, when I go into my settings, there are no crawlers under the Cloudflare name. In my robots.txt file (which should be automatically updated by Cloudflare), there is again, nothing that prevents Cloudflare’s own crawler from accessing my site…”

Baekdal tags Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince and implores him to look into the new practice.

Read more on LinkedIn. (March 12)

Related: “Amazon’s Win Against Perplexity Kicks AI Shopping Wars Into High Gear” (March 11) – The Wall Street Journal (subscription)

From tipsheet: Cloudflare has noticeably backed away from this public stance of “protector of content publishers”. In an interview on CNBC (March 3), Cramer tries to bring it up, but Prince quickly changes the subject. See video. (subscription)

LLMs & CHATBOTS

Research: Citation trends in LLMs

In a new report titled, “AI Citation Trends Report Q1 2026“, performance marketing agency Tinuiti and GEO firm Profound have come together to share their latest insights at the intersection of generative engine optimization (GEO) and large language models (LLMs).

On LinkedIn, Tinuiti’s Jen Cornwell offered her top takeaways including:

“Strategic blocking is reshaping e-commerce visibility. Amazon’s aggressive move to block AI crawlers (restricting nearly 50 user agents by late January) has allowed Walmart to take the lead in ChatGPT citations.

Between October 2025 and January 2026, social media citations grew by 9% across all platforms. Reddit is the clear powerhouse here, nearly doubling its citation share in just four months.”

The Platform Split: Reddit accounts for 24% of all citations on Perplexity, but remains under 1% on Google Gemini. Visibility on one platform does not guarantee presence on another…”

Read Ms. Cornwell on LinkedIn. (March 12)

More: “AI Citation Trends Report Q1 2026” (March) – Tinuiti (PII required)

PROTOCOLS

Optable & PubMatic’s AdCP partnership

Data collaboration company Optable announced that it’s plugging into sell-side platform (SSP) PubMatic’s AgenticOS to assist publishers with “agentic audience discovery.”

For the buy side, Optable explained on LinkedIn that the integration can help with first-party data matching “across identity, context, and audience from multiple publishers, then moving straight to campaign activation, all within the same workflow.”

Optable continued:

“The partnership is early proof of the Advertising Context Protocol (AdCP) in action, showing how Agentic Collaboration can work across platforms, enabling interoperable infrastructure while keeping publishers in control of their data.”

Read more on LinkedIn. (March 12)

Vlad Stesin, CEO of Optable, and Kyle Dozeman, Chief Revenue Officer, Americas at PubMatic, discuss more in the press release. Read it. (March 12)

Related: Opinion: “Ad Tech’s Agentic Arms Race Is Solving the Wrong Problem” (March 12) – Consultant Alanna Laforet on ExchangeWire

From tipsheet: Optable and PubMatic are founding members of the consortium which launched Ad Context Protocol last October.

SELL-SIDE

Taboola CEO talks chatbot ad network

At NASDAQ MarketSite this week, Taboola CEO Adam Singolda discussed his company’s AI-enabled performance advertising platform, Realize (“Meta for the open web” says Singolda), and DeeperDive, a chatbot ad network product which delivers both the chatbot and the ads to publishers.

He previewed this week’s interview in a post on LinkedIn saying:

“We talked about what I believe is the beginning of a new internet, where people don’t just scroll and search anymore, they ask. That shift is changing how information is discovered, and why we launched Realize and DeeperDive to help advertisers participate in this new world of LLM-driven web.

We also discussed what this moment means for publishers. While direct-to-consumer AI engines are becoming incredibly powerful, there is a huge opportunity for the open web. People want trusted content, be part of a community, and brands they know. AI will change how we access information, and increase the value we get from publishers who create it.”

Read more from Mr. Singolda on LinkedIn. (March 12)

Video: “Taboola” (March 10) – NASDAQ

From tipsheet: In the interview, Singolda shows his inner-entrepreneur and admits that DeeperDive is the company he would start if he wasn’t at Taboola.

A year from now, Singolda predicted that AI in advertising will move from ‘revolution’ buzz to verifiable outcomes.

EVENTS

Marketecture Live ‘AI’ takeaways

This week’s Marketecture Live event in New York City is now in the rear view mirror as energized attendees reflected on their takeaways.

Here are a few selections:

• “While many focus on the disruption that AI and other challenges may bring to the marketing industry, my key takeaway is quite different: this moment presents an incredible opportunity to define the next era of marketing, driven by unprecedented technical and human capabilities…” (March 12) – Marketing consultant Brendan Moorcroft on LinkedIn
• “[The Trade Desk CEO] Jeff Green also teased that TTD users will ‘soon’ be able to buy chatbot inventory – a not-so-subtle nod to rumors that OpenAI may be exploring The Trade Desk as a sales partner for ChatGPT. But he also issued a warning: the industry couldn’t just use a ‘warmed-over AdWords clone’ for conversational AI. Instead, the industry needed an entirely new ad model.” (March 12) – Analyst Karsten Weide on W Media Research’s blog
• “Time to market matters. AI helps. Michael Beebe & Dan Larkman got into one of the most practical uses of AI: reducing the time it takes to build & activate audience packages. Moving from 72 hours to 24 hours is a big deal when consumer intent moves that quickly. We’ve seen the same value using AI to assemble packaging from briefs.” (March 12) – Mike Caprio, SVP, GM of Global Advertising, JWX on LinkedIn
• “Biggest lessons: 1) AI is a force multiplier for employees. Do not resist. 2) Open Path is not meant to protect publisher yield, but its concept is meant to reward the highest quality signals and those it “trusts” the most. 3) If it bleeds, it leads: my “drama” post got over 20K impressions (8x-12x “normal”). Not sure what to make of that. 4) If you do a session on AI, it must include a demo or at least screenshots (PubMatic MiQ well done)” (March 12) – Sell-side consultant Scott Messer on LinkedIn

MORE

• U of Digital Launches the AI Literacy Alliance to Advance AI Knowledge Across Marketing and Advertising (March 11) – press release
• Your AI Multiplier Is Dying in the Silo (March 10) – CDO Trends
• Not that AI: “Forget Influencers. Welcome to the World of the ‘Alternatively Influential.’” (March 12) – The Wall Street Journal (subscription)
• “Beyond Automation: How AI Is Rewiring Control In The Ad Tech Stack” (March 12) – Dennis Buchheim of Snowflake on AdExchanger
• DPG Media continues to innovate: new AI-driven ‘Audience Discovery Agent’ brings greater efficiency to manual target group selection (March 10) – press release