BRANDS
AI ‘taking root’ in programmatic advertising
In Ad Age, reporter Garett Sloane takes a deeper look at how AI is ‘taking root’ in programmatic advertising.
Sloane digs in at AI ad platform (and services) firm, MiQ:
“Ciaran Slattery starts his mornings like most media buyers—checking how campaigns are pacing and performing across channels and whether bids are right. But instead of juggling dashboards and spreadsheets, MiQ’s senior VP of trading now asks Sigma, the agency’s new AI hub powered by the same large language models behind ChatGPT. With a simple prompt, its trading agent pulls performance data across platforms into a single conversation.”
Read more in Ad Age. (September 18)
On LinkedIn, Mr. Sloane teased his Ad Age article and added:
“The AI wiring is happening from the agencies, buy side and sell side. PubMatic just launched an AI for yield management for publishers, and noted ‘MCP’, which is apparently the word of the week.”
Read more on LinkedIn. (September 18)
BRANDS
Creativity loves AI
- Palo Alto Networks Unveils AI-Generated Ad Campaign, Showcasing Secure Innovation in Action (September 17) – press release
- Runway’s Cristóbal Valenzuela, co-founder of the first AI platform to partner with a Hollywood studio on video generation, talks about the company’s work on ‘world models’ and their impact on the entertainment industry (September 18) – Financial Times (subscription)
- Qualcomm Taps Adobe GenStudio to Optimize Content Supply Chain with Generative AI (September 18) – press release
- The top 5 AI marketing activations to know about right now (September 18) – Ad Age (subscription)
BRANDS
Video content is the new SEO (GEO) lever
Stephanie Wallace of Atlanta-based agency Nebo believes that one of the keys of search engine optimization (SEO) in the age of AI today involves video content.
In an op-ed in Search Engine Land, Ms. Wallace explained:
“With the rise of AI Overviews, Google is pulling from a broader set of content than ever before, including video. And not just video hosted on owned-and-operated platforms like YouTube. Increasingly, user-generated content from platforms like TikTok, Reddit, and YouTube are shaping Google search results. The line between search and social is blurring even faster than many brands realize.”
Read more in Search Engine Land. (September 18)
From tipsheet: Makes sense to me. At a minimum, AI can easily turn video into text-based, indexable content. If you’re educating by using video, for example, answer engines and search engines are going to want to ingest the knowledge.
Related: SEO at a crossroads: 9 experts on how AI is changing everything (September 18) – Search Engine Land
BRANDS
CMOs on AI
- Dentsu report shows CMOs divided on AI’s role in marketing (September 16) – Campaign
- Dentsu Creative CMO Report 2025 (September 16) – Dentsu
LLMs & CHATBOTS
3–8% of Google’s scale
Search engine optimization firm SEO Clarity said its new research shows how far OpenAI’s ChatGPT has come, and how far it has to go, in comparison to Google Search.
“Our original analysis was the first attempt to put numbers to ChatGPT’s search activity. With the new data, we can now refine that benchmark: ~1.0B daily search-like tasks, or 3–8% of Google’s scale.”
Read more on SEO Clarity’s website. (September 18)
More: SEO Clarity VP Chris Sachs discussed the study on LinkedIn. (September 18)
From tipsheet: SEO Clarity said that ChatGPT is currently about the same size as Microsoft’s Bing. OpenAI will most likely not be using that quote in its marketing literature.
LLMs & CHATBOTS
Claude Code: Google Ads creative
In a document titled, “How Anthropic teams use Claude Code,” Anthropic’s growth marketing team for Claude shared how its uses the agentic coding tool to support its answer engine, Claude.
An advertising use case focused on creative:
“Automated Google Ads creative generation
The team built an agentic workflow that processes CSV files containing hundreds of existing ads with performance metrics, identifies underperforming ads for iteration, and generates new variations that meet strict character limits (30 characters for headlines, 90 for descriptions). Using two specialized sub-agents (one for headlines, one for descriptions), the system can generate hundreds of new ads in minutes instead of requiring manual creation across multiple campaigns. This has enabled them to test and iterate at scale, something that would have taken a significant amount of time to achieve previously…”
Get the Anthropic document published in July. (PDF)
From tipsheet: OpenAI has an open “Growth Marketing” role in New York City which lists as one of the requirements: “Build AI-first creative systems, collaborating with design to rapidly prototype and test high-performing assets.” One would assume this means building with OpenAI’s agentic coding tool, Codex.
LLMs & CHATBOTS
Developments
- Is OpenAI the ‘Amazon of AI’? Or the AOL? (September 18) – Henry Blodget, Regenerator
- Google Injects Gemini Into Chrome as AI Browsers Go Mainstream – Wired
- Oakley Meta Vanguard: The Next Era for Performance AI Glasses (September 17) – Meta
- Anthropic launches first brand campaign for Claude (September 18) – Axios
AGENCIES
Agency plaudits for Amazon Ads AI
“Want to give credit to Amazon – what they’re doing this year with their DSP is impressive. Just this week they launched a new agentic AI creative tool that can build entire campaigns end-to-end: research, concepts, storyboards, video, audio, and display. It’s free to use with an Amazon Ads account, taps into shopping data for personalization, and early adopters are already reporting stronger results. And that’s only one part of the story. Amazon has been steadily expanding inventory and features across the platform…”
“I think this push is largely driven by competition with TTD. As a buyer, I’d love to see more of this from all platforms (looking at you, DV360). More features, more transparency, more inventory integrations – all of this helps deliver stronger results for advertisers…”
Read more from Mr. Chubakov on LinkedIn yesterday.
SELL-SIDE
Delivering ad impressions to AI agent traffic?
Reacting to a Digiday WTF article on ‘headless browsing,’ Peter Barry, a VP at SSP Pubmatic, was concerned for publishers in a post on LinkedIn yesterday:
“Headless browsing is quietly becoming a serious problem for digital publishers. AI agents are increasingly using headless browsers to scrape and consume web content. These tools simulate a real browser session, but without rendering pages visually or executing client-side scripts like ads and analytics.
The result? Publishers see what looks like normal traffic in their logs, but there are no monetizable impressions, no user engagement, and no value exchanged.”
Mr. Barry asked of publishers, “How are you auditing your traffic for non-human behaviour?” Read more from Barry on LinkedIn. (September 17)
Co-founder of ecommerce platform Simon Knapp picked up the baton from Barry on LinkedIn and took it a step further. He began by quoting a publisher in the article:
“If [an AI agent is] triggering an actual ad serving call… multiply that by a million and it can basically be… unbelievable scale ad fraud,” the business publishing exec said, who added that this has the potential to drive down CPMs.”
Then, Mr. Knapp expressed concern that some publishers could potentially be getting paid for ad impressions by non-human AI agents.
“It is becoming increasingly difficult for publishers to claim ignorance on this matter. Those who continue to implement ad settings that trigger calls knowingly directed at non-human entities are, in effect, complicit in the fraud.”
Read more from Mr. Knapp on LinkedIn. (September 18)
The article that started it all:
-
“WTF is headless browsing, and how are AI agents fueling it?” (September 17) – Digiday (subscription)
TECH
Yahoo DSP and ‘take rates’
Yahoo DSP is nipping at The Trade Desk’s heels as the AI-enabled buying platforms go head-to-head in service to marketers according to Adweek’s Trishla Ostwal.
She previews her article on LinkedIn:
“Yahoo’s DSP is regaining mojo as brands look past Google DV360 & The Trade Desk. Why? Take rates. Yahoo takes ~10%, skips ad serving fees. TTD rates run ~30%. In a cost-conscious market, that pitch resonates—even if Yahoo isn’t in the same league as the big three.”
Read: “Yahoo Is Luring Customers From The Trade Desk With Lower Fees” (September 18) – Adweek (subscription)
More: “Why Shipt, The Target-Owned Same-Day Delivery Service, Added Yahoo As Its DSP” (September 18) – AdExchanger
From tipsheet: With The Trade Desk’s next quarterly earnings report likely more than month away, it will be difficult to have the opportunity to silence critics, and the competition, in the interim.
TECH
Podcast: AI making ad tech agnostic
The Open Market podcast discussed the recent acquisition of AI-powered video ad platform streamr by sell-side platform Magnite with guests Adam Soroca, Magnite’s chief product officer, and Jonathan Moffie, streamr CEO and co-founder.
Mr. Moffie discussed how one of streamr’s products will be targeting agencies:
“A great example of a really awesome synergy [between streamr and Magnite] that started coming together as we got acquired is our new “Storyboard” product for agencies.
So it started as an internal tool for our Gen AI Labs team. They work with agencies mainly to polish a creative with another level of polish. And that was an internal tool we built where they can quickly generate ads with Veo 3 and with the other tools we use. And then we productized that and got agency feedback.”
Listen on the Apple Podcasts app. (September 17)
From tipsheet: Streamr’s product line straddles the buy and sell sides, similar to how Magnite has dipped into the buy side with its ClearLine product which gives direct access to inventory for agencies.
Is AI bringing buy and sell side tools and services together? In that marketers are increasingly publishers and vice versa, an agnostic (or holistic) ad tech company approach makes sense.
PROMPT
How will headless browsing in advertising evolve in the next 5 years?
Response from Meta.ai:
In the next 5 years, headless browsing is expected to become more mainstream, with more organizations adopting this approach to improve their digital advertising efforts. However, some are concerned about the complexity of implementation and the potential for increased costs . Others are excited about the potential for improved personalization and user experience, and are exploring ways to leverage headless browsing to create more effective and engaging advertising campaigns…
MORE
- Meta Approaches Media Companies About AI Content-Licensing Deals (September 18) – The Wall Street Journal (subscription)
- “Next week, a federal court is kicking off a trial that could reshape the open web – and the future of digital publishing and advertising. The court has already ruled that Google exercised anticompetitive…” (September 18) – Bill Ready, CEO, Pinterest on LinkedIn
- Marketers warm to AI, but creative challenges and legal risks still loom (September 18) – Digiday
- Opinion: The Perils of Using AI to Replace Entry-Level Jobs (September 16) – Harvard Business Review
- Business Insider and the Bots (September 16) – Status