Creator marketing has a new audience: AI.
Creator marketing agency Influencer and AI marketing platform Profound launched Creator-First AEO, using Profound to identify which creators and content are influencing answers from ChatGPT and other LLMs, then applying that intelligence to creator campaigns.
Influencer co-founder and CEO Ben Jeffries explained the loop on LinkedIn: “Understand what AI is saying about your brand. Then create the evidence that helps shape what it says next.” Read more. (August 26)
The Wall Street Journal reports that Profound will repeatedly measure which creators appear in LLM results, potentially influencing everything from which creators brands hire to the titles and captions on their videos.
Read: Creator-First Answer Engine Optimization Takes the Stage (August 26) – The Wall Street Journal (subscription)
This isn’t a one-off:
- Influencer platform Later introduced Creator AEO in May.
- Creator platform Agentio was talking about the GEO opportunity earlier this month. Read tipsheet.
From tipsheet: So, brands may now commission creator content not only for the humans who see it, but for the models that use it as evidence. What are the “ads to agents” haters going to say about this?
LLMs & CHATBOTS
Seufert: Chatbot advertising is a new class
Mobile Dev Memo analyst Eric Seufert argues that chatbot advertising belongs in a category of its own, with the potential to combine the strengths of search and social.
Seufert writes:
“In effect, chatbot advertising has the potential to marry the commercial characteristics of social media display and search: it can present an ad that’s relevant to context when that context is motivated by commercial intent, and it can revert to the off-platform behavioral data it receives to serve ads that are wholly unrelated to context when a conversation isn’t commercially grounded.”
And notably, an OpenAI monetization executive agrees with the framing.
Responding to Seufert’s post, Asad Awan, one of the lead monetization execs at OpenAI, wrote on LinkedIn yesterday:
“Chatbot advertising is a wholly new and separate class from search or social ads. It combines intent and personalization in a novel way to create more delightful ads for users and ROI for advertisers.”
Read: The privileged position of chatbot advertising (August 26) – Analyst Eric Seufert on Mobile Dev Memo (subscription)
From tipsheet: To Seufert’s point:
- Search built an advertising empire around intent.
- Social built one around personalization.
- OpenAI thinks conversational advertising can combine the two.
And the loop goes further: OpenAI can use advertising to improve its core AI product.
AGENTS
Runable raises $21 million for agentic advertising
Bengaluru-based AI agent startup Runable raised a $21 million Series A co-led by Susquehanna Venture Capital and Nexus Venture Partners. The all-equity round valued the company at $65 million post-money.
tl;dr: Runable is like Manus. Remember Manus?
Co-founder and CEO Umesh Kumar discussed his company’s positioning with TechCrunch yesterday:
“In the end, a business doesn’t require Codex or Claude Code or anything. They require real outcomes. If I am paying an agency $10,000 to run my Google Ads, can someone come in and do it for me for a lower price? That’s where Runable comes in.”
Kumar’s LinkedIn post announced the funding and the company’s new product, Runable Grow:
“Runable Grow handles GTM end-to-end:
- Runs ads on Meta, Google, and ChatGPT without any account, fully managed by Runable → Cold calls + cold emails from a real phone number and your business inbox
- Generates and qualifies leads
- Social listening → SEO + AEO optimization
Not a dashboard. Not a ‘copilot.’ An agent that does the work.”
TechCrunch took the platform for a test-drive:
“In a brief test of Runable, TechCrunch asked the agent to build and deploy a website for a fictional coffee subscription business, set up analytics, and then attract its first 100 visitors with an advertising budget of $25. Runable built the site and prepared an ad campaign, but stopped short of running it, saying an advertising account first needed to be connected.”
Read: Runable hits $21M to bet AI agents can go from building businesses to growing them (August 26) – TechCrunch
Runable appeared in an a16z benchmark report last September as a “horizontal do-it-all agent” and in the same expertise quadrant as Manus.
From tipsheet: Runable is trying to compress the campaign workflow into an outcome: give the agent a budget and customer target, and let it handle the rest.
But the test shows where control still sits:
- The agent can build the campaign.
- The platforms still decide whether it can spend.
AGENTS
The Trade Desk moves Koa Agents into beta
Four months after The Trade Desk introduced Koa Agents in alpha with agency partner Stagwell, Koa Agents are moving into closed beta.
A leaked product roadmap obtained by Adweek’s Trishla Ostwal shows “Ask Koa,” a conversational interface that routes buyers to specialized agents, moving “from alpha to closed beta this week.” Agents currently cover campaign creation, insights, troubleshooting and help/search, with audience building planned.
The Trade Desk describes the campaign creation agent this way on a Koa Agents resource page:
“Upload a media plan in the format you already use, and Koa can help build out your campaign structure. It can ask clarifying questions, flag potential errors or inconsistencies, and keep review and approval in your hands before anything moves forward.”
Read: “Exclusive: Leaked Deck Outlines The Trade Desk’s Agentic Plans for H2 2026” (August 26) — Adweek (subscription)
From tipsheet: The low-hanging fruit for advertising agents continues to be planning and labor-intensive campaign operations.
LLMs & CHATBOTS
ChatGPT Ads carves out unwanted convos
Previewing her latest scoop on X, Adweek’s Trishla Ostwal reported yesterday:
- “OpenAI confirms it’s testing exclusion targeting for ChatGPT ads—new ways for advertisers to flag conversations they don’t want ads next to. Meanwhile, buyers say relevance is still a problem: 1 in 7 ChatGPT ads studied had no connection to the query.”
Read: OpenAI Is Testing Exclusion Targeting for ChatGPT Ads (August 26) – Adweek (subscription)
From tipsheet: Agencies rejoice. You have more busy work to attend to.
The irony is that conversational AI should eventually make exclusion lists obsolete. If ChatGPT understands what a conversation is about well enough to match an ad to it, it should understand when an advertiser doesn’t belong there too.
For now, though, advertiser control wins. Giving marketers a familiar lever is probably more important to OpenAI than proving AI can pull it for them.
MEASUREMENT
DoubleVerify sketches the Nielsen combination
DoubleVerify is starting to tell customers what its combination with Nielsen will look like.
In a presentation filed with the SEC Tuesday, DV describes the combination as bringing together Nielsen’s audience signals across linear and digital with DV’s media quality and performance data, creating “end-to-end actionable, independent, cross-platform digital measurement and transparency.”
And notably, DV says the combined offering will be “powered by AI and agentic workflows.”
From the deck:
DoubleVerify says it expects its deal with Nielsen to close in Q1 2027.
From tipsheet: Nielsen + DV is being positioned as an independent intelligence layer. The days of ad verification being front-and-center are over.
PLATFORMS
Settlement: Meta puts spotlight on competitors
From The New York Times yesterday:
- “In a dramatic capitulation, the owner of Facebook and Instagram agreed to the financial penalties for violating federal child privacy and states’ consumer protection laws, the states announced. Meta also agreed to limit how long teenagers can spend on its platforms and to bans on features that stoke mental health issues, striking at the heart of the company’s business of engagement for advertising.”
Read: Meta to Pay Up to $17.1 Billion in Landmark Settlement Over Social Media Addiction Claims (August 26) – The New York Times
From Meta:
- “Our agreement includes strict daily time limits teens can’t turn off, default blocks from our apps at night, muted notifications during school hours, and new controls for parents. We want to ensure teens benefit from this new industry standard, but we cannot do it alone. These protections will only be truly effective if we work with our peers — TikTok and YouTube — to put the same measures in place.”
More: Our Agreement With Bipartisan Attorneys General: Calling on TikTok and YouTube to Join Us in Supporting Teens (August 26) – Meta
The WSJ reports that the “deal contains broad new safeguards for underage users but only pays out in full if TikTok and YouTube make similar concessions.”
From tipsheet: Meta is using the settlement to push for the same restrictions across TikTok and YouTube, with the size of its financial penalty now partly tied to whether its competitors make similar concessions. That could turn a constraint on Meta’s engagement business into an industry-wide standard.
Related: The Great Meta Migration (August 26) – AdExchanger
LLMs & CHATBOTS
Developments
- Intelligent transcription with Gemini 3.5 Transcribe (August 26) – Google
- Nvidia earnings takeaways: Huang forecasts 70% fiscal 2028 revenue growth, far above estimates (August 26) – CNBC
- Build with Muse Image: generate, edit, and compose images on Meta Model API (August 25) – Meta Developer blog
MORE
- NFL v. Nielsen: “At times the relationship between TV’s biggest player and the researcher is colored by ‘hostility’ and league execs aren’t sure Nielsen is up to the task” (August 25) – Mike Shields on his Next in Media Substack
- A new upfront: “We are one week out from Showcase, the first Retail + Commerce Media Upfront.” (August 26) – Dr. Mark Grether, SVP/GM, PayPal Ads on LinkedIn
- Tuck-in: “Perion Acquires PRN, a Leading In-Store Retail Media Company with Exclusive Multi-year Partnerships Across Some of North America’s Largest Retailers” (August 26) – Perion
- Agencies Are Pitching AI Backwards (August 26) – Adam Epstein, CEO, Gigi on Gigi’s blog
- How Newell Brands’ global head of media is building a unified cross-channel operation (August 26) – Ad Age (subscription)