Meta targets ad workflow with Manus

After acquiring the company in late December, Meta is taking steps to incorporate Manus AI and its agents into Meta’s ad products.

Social Media Today covered the news and showed a screenshot of Manus being offered in Meta’s ad manager.

The Manus value proposition appears to target workflow automation. The screenshot reads:

“Manus is your new Al work partner that can automate tasks for your business like analyzing data, generating reports and more.

Just describe what you need and let Manus handle the rest.

– Uncover new insights through research
– Generate reports with in-depth analysis
– Schedule recurring tasks to save time”

Social Media Today’s Andrew Hutchinson clarified, “…all Meta advertisers can now access Manus within the ‘Tools’ listing in Ads Manager. But Meta is looking to highlight the option to more businesses, as it continues to integrate Manus into its systems, and maximize its functionality within the Meta Ads system.”

Read: “Meta Launches Manus AI Integration in Ads Manager” (February 16) – Social Media Today

From tipsheet: The Manus integration is in service to the B2B customer and dovetails with Meta’s consumer-facing Business AI “chatbot” announced in October: “Launching Business AI, a turnkey sales concierge: Guide your customers from discovery to purchase with a personalized AI agent on Meta ads, messaging threads, and now on websites.” Read more from tipsheet. (October 7)

LLMs & CHATBOTS

Developments

Introducing EVMbench: “Making smart contracts safer by evaluating AI agents’ ability to detect, patch, and exploit vulnerabilities in blockchain environments.” (February 18) – OpenAI
A new way to express yourself: Gemini can now create music (February 18) – Google’s The Keyword
Microsoft pledges $50 billion to tackle AI inequality as it warns of a ‘growing divide’ (February 18) – CNN

BRANDS

AI is moving faster than marketers

“Something counterintuitive is happening in advertising: AI is moving fast. Marketers are not.

That mismatch — speed in the systems, drag in the humans — has quietly become one of the defining patterns of the year so far. For most marketers, AI still sits closer to an assistant on probation than an operator with authority.” – Digiday (February 18)

Read: “‘Agentic with a small a’: CMOs are adopting AI more slowly than it’s evolving” – Digiday (subscription)

From tipsheet: “agentic with a small a” is meant to refer to marketers using “AI as an assistant or tool to support tasks” versus something more autonomous.

AI has evolved a lot faster than corporate structures can handle. It’s going to be sloppy for a few years.

BRANDS

Survey: AI and the job of marketing

B2B market research firm NewtonX shared new data with Adweek about how AI is transforming the workplace for marketers. It’s not eliminating jobs but it is making them more difficult, says NewtonX.

Adweek’s Mark Stenberg previewed the findings on LinkedIn:

“67% of respondents said AI had eliminated either no roles or just 1% to 5% of positions”
“31% of respondents said expectations have moved toward more complex, higher-value tasks”
“54% said they feel positively about increased workload expectations.”
“50%+ reported satisfaction with their career progression, and 53% said they are unlikely to change employers in the next 12 months.”

LLMs & CHATBOTS

AI chatbots drive valuable visitors

Martech reporter Danny Goodwin reviewed the transcript of Airbnb’s earnings call from last week where CEO Brian Chesky’s commented that AI chatbots were driving conversions for his travel tech firm.

To be clear, this wasn’t about ads in a chatbot. It was a comment on the visitor coming from a chatbot — it’s a valuable visitor.

Goodwin quoted Mr. Chesky:

“…what we see is that traffic that comes from chatbots convert at a higher rate than traffic that comes from Google,” Chesky said.

He did not share specific conversion rates. Airbnb also didn’t quantify how much traffic is coming from chatbots or name the platforms that are driving the bulk of it. But the signal is hard to ignore. (…)

Chesky referenced ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude and other models in broader remarks about AI platform availability. The implication is that users arriving from AI assistants may be further along in their journey than someone typing a broad query into Google.

That aligns with what Google and Microsoft have been arguing for months. AI search may drive lower overall click volume, but the traffic it does send could be more qualified.”

SELL-SIDE

WebMCP and the publisher opportunity

Google Chrome’s announcement last week regarding WebMCP, a protocol which helps websites connect with agents, has begun to catch the eye of advertising and marketing tech professionals on the sell-side.

Mike Caprio, SVP, GM of Global Advertising at video monetization platform JWX, summarized the importance of the new protocol to publishers saying, in part:

“[WebMCP is] about future-proofing for frictionless automation:

• lower abandonment
• fewer support tickets (‘did it book?’ ‘why did the price change?’)
• more reliable handoffs between discovery → decision → transaction
• and eventually: agents that can execute with your rules and your permissions, not by hacking around your UI

Do you need to do this immediately? No. It is (very) early. This is not a fire drill.

But it is a ‘put it on the innovation roadmap’ moment—especially if your business relies on complex transactional flows.”

In a separate post on LinkedIn last week, Ryan May, SVP, Publishing of acquisition marketing platform System1, said Chrome’s WebMCP announcement was the leading edge of transformation brought about by agents:

“The significance is straightforward: the world’s dominant browser is formally acknowledging agents as legitimate users of the open web.

This didn’t come out of nowhere. Agents were already here, reading, summarizing, acting, transacting. What changed is that this behaviour has now been acknowledged, with first-class support proposed at the browser and standards level.

Historically, that’s the moment when a shift stops being theoretical and starts reshaping the web itself.”

Read his LinkedIn post. (February 11)

Aram Zucker-Scharff, a software engineer on The Washington Post’s ads team, commented on Mr. May’s post on LinkedIn, “We’ve been involved in the standards work around this and it is quite exciting. I think there are big opportunities for publishers and others who provide factual content to play around with this as a major service to both readers and advertisers.”

Erin Bruinsma, co-founder of Newsifier, an AI-powered Content Management System (CMS), also commented, “For news publishers, this is worth paying attention to, when agents start interacting with sites through structured interfaces rather than scraping, the quality of your site architecture directly affects how your content gets discovered and distributed. Publishers who’ve already invested in clean structure and semantics are quietly building an advantage here.”

MARKETING

Kana unveiled with “suite of AI agents”

AI marketing technology startup Kana came out of stealth yesterday with $15 million in funding.

Led by former Krux and Habu startup founders Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaidya, the new company — which comes out of the duo’s startup incubator, superset — promises a “suite of AI agents that can do data analysis, audience targeting, campaign management, customer engagement, media planning, and optimizing for AI chatbots.”

TechCrunch reporter Ram Iyer explained:

“The solution, as Kana pitches it, involves ‘loosely coupled’ AI agents that can be tailored ‘on the fly,’ integrated into legacy marketing software, and can simultaneously work on different operations. So a marketer could, for example, upload a media brief that Kana’s agents would analyze to figure out the campaign goals, search for the audience to target, and pull in data from inventory and market research to further tweak the plan. The platform bakes in autonomous campaign tracking, optimization, and reporting.”

Read: “Kana emerges from stealth with $15M to build flexible AI agents for marketers” – TechCrunch

LLMs & CHATBOTS

Perplexity rejects ads, for now

Perplexity’s chatbot will not see advertising any time soon due to concerns around hurting “user trust” with the chatbot, according to Financial Times’ sources.

Financial Times reported yesterday:

“‘We are in the accuracy business, and the business is giving the truth, the right answers,” said (a) Perplexity executive. Although it could revisit advertising in the future, the executive said it was ‘misaligned with what the users want’ and it might ‘never ever need to do ads’.”

Read: Perplexity drops advertising as it warns it will hurt trust in AI (February 18) – Financial Times (subscription)

From tipsheet #1: No surprise.

Despite a prominent blog post in November 2024 titled, “Why we’re experimenting with advertising,” Perplexity’s own ads test always felt a bit half-hearted. I can’t imagine them trying again without significant investment in the product, first.

As you may recall, the ad product’s format was met with pushback (See Eric Seufert’s commentary) as was its lack of reach. Also, Perplexity’s “publisher program” — which was supposed to share chatbot ad revenue with publishers (announced in July) — intended to fuel the ad business, appeared to be stymied.

In August, Perplexity let go of (or parted ways with) its advertising leader, Taz Patel, who didn’t last a year.

And then in October, publisher partner exec Jessica Chan announced at Advertising Week that it had paused development of its ad platform.

Wow. That was quick — 11 months.

From tipsheet #2: LiveRamp CEO Scott Howe had suggested in January that Perplexity, a LiveRamp partner, would roll out an ads “alpha” in Q1. This FT news would appear to say otherwise, but who knows? It still could happen given Perplexity’s track record of pivoting its strategy on a dime.

Remember “Perplexity Makes Longshot $34.5 Billion Offer for Chrome” last June?

For now, Perplexity’s thinking appears to be, “Might as well take a shot at our larger competitor, OpenAI, and play the ‘user trust’ card.”

MARKETING

AMP: Agentic marketing platform

Customer data platform (CDP) Hightouch — which raised $80 million a year ago for a composable agentic marketing platform (AMP) called “AI Decisioning” — appears to be taking a step forward with its product line.

On LinkedIn, Hightouch CEO Tejas Manojar (a Twilio/Segment alum) shared a new feature for his AMP (or CDP) called “Content Assembly.”

He explained how it works:

“When a marketer requests a campaign to be created, we search the thousands or millions of creative assets you already have (Figma, Adobe, DAMs, Google Drive, etc.) to find the perfect ones and package them up into a ready-to-go asset like an email or ad.

This wasn’t possible before LLMs. With vision models, AI can look at every single image and answer very nuanced questions (“find me a picture of a small dog playing with this exact toy”). We built intelligent caching and indexing on top of this to make it scalable to millions of assets and so that generating and editing campaigns is fast for marketers.

Content Assembly is a huge unlock for marketers since design resources are scarce and creating new campaigns from scratch often means waiting 3-5 weeks…”

IDEAS

Thinking AI

“The Shift from SEO to GEO: Why History is Repeating Itself” – Bostjan Spetic, Head of Supply Labs, Teads, on his personal blog
Presentation: The State of Video Gaming in 2026 – Early Access Edition (February 16) – Matthew Ball on his persona blog (email required)
“Why AI Agents Like Gigi Won’t Use Amazon’s MCP Server (Yet)” – Adam Epstein, CEO, Gigi on Substack

PEOPLE MOVES

Now hiring

“I am thrilled to join Taboola as the company’s first Chief Business Officer. In this role, I will lead global sales and partnerships across Taboola’s entire product portfolio, including…” (February 18) – Former Amazon and NBCU exec Krishan Bhatia on LinkedIn
OpenAI hires Instagram’s “Celebrity Whisperer” Charles Porch as VP of global creative partnerships (February 18) – Vanity Fair

Google Search Console AI-powered configuration rolling out (February 17) – Search Engine Land
AI ads debate is more about culture war than business decision (February 18) – Semafor
How SmartNews powers real-time ad performance dashboards with AI database company ClickHouse (February 17) – ClickHouse blog
“AppLovin Q4: Market Is Focused On Competition; I’m Focused On ROAS From AppDiscovery” (February 16) – Seeking Alpha

Meta targets ad workflow with Manus

LLMs & CHATBOTS

Developments

BRANDS

AI is moving faster than marketers

BRANDS

Survey: AI and the job of marketing

LLMs & CHATBOTS

AI chatbots drive valuable visitors

SELL-SIDE

WebMCP and the publisher opportunity

MARKETING

Kana unveiled with “suite of AI agents”

LLMs & CHATBOTS

Perplexity rejects ads, for now

MARKETING

AMP: Agentic marketing platform

IDEAS

Thinking AI

PEOPLE MOVES

Now hiring

MORE