LLMs & CHATBOTS
xAI’s Grok to get ads says Musk
During a “Spaces” meeting with advertisers on Wednesday (listen here), X CEO Elon Musk announced that X’s and xAI’s chatbot known as Grok will soon have ads.
The Times of India covered the news:
“Musk also outlined broader plans to leverage xAI’s technology to transform X’s advertising infrastructure. The goal is to automate the advertising process for brands and significantly improve ad targeting. This comes after X’s ad tech team reportedly faced challenges in effectively reaching its intended audience.”
Read more on The Times of India’s website. (August 7)
On the Spaces, Head of ads engineering at xAI, Roman Grachev, explained the tl;dr on how there would be incentives to bring “good” ads:
“Create beautiful ads which leads to engaging landing pages, and you will get better performance because we will be boosting you in the auction. Conversely, if your ad is ugly, or if you add leads you somewhere that the user is like, ‘Oh my god, what is this?’ And they quickly press the ‘back’ button, in which case your cost in the auction will become more expensive. So, there’s going to be this economic incentive to move towards better user experience, which is by the way, also will lead to better performance for advertisers.”
More: Elon Musk to introduce ads to X’s AI chatbot (August 7) – Financial Times
From tipsheet: Grok could be the first to offer AI chatbot ads at scale if it successfully launches. Competitors will no doubt be watching X, xAI and Grok as the company tests and learns. To date, only Perplexity’s chatbot has offered a sponsored ad unit. The brand safety concerns that many advertisers have had with X should go away in the chatbot GUI of Grok. But, will large advertisers be inclined to spend after losing faith in X? An effective self-serve platform which services smaller advertisers with the Grok opportunity could be essential.
LLMs & CHATBOTS
OpenAI free tier gets GPT-5
From tipsheet: “Free users” is the ad-supported tier of the future. Once Fidji Simo arrives later this month, I will guess the roadmap will include an “ads tier” test within the next few months to a year. Part of Ms. Simo’s mission is to appreciably move the needle on revenue. Playing into this will be the need for catalysts leading to an eventual IPO for OpenAI as well as paying the costs on OpenAI’s data centers and cloud infrastructure.
LLMs & CHATBOTS
Hubspot and OpenAI
OpenAI is openly advertising its integration with marketing automation platform Hubspot.
“Last week, we rolled out the new HubSpot deep research connector in beta for ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Team, and Enterprise users. With this connector, deep research can read, reason over, and cite data from your HubSpot CRM – alongside information from the web to generate comprehensive, fully cited reports.”
A demo shows the connector in action which allows teams to “make faster, more informed decisions by surfacing and analyzing HubSpot data directly within ChatGPT.”
See it on LinkedIn. (August 7)
BRANDS
Customer data platform and AI decisioning
Hightouch’s customer data platform was in focus yesterday on AdExchanger as AI helped drive Petsmart’s digital marketing activities.
According to AdExchanger’s Joanna Gerber:
“PetSmart was drawn to Hightouch’s CDP offering and also adopted its AI decisioning product because the tech comes to the data, rather than the brand having to move its data around. ‘Instead of shipping [our data] somewhere else,’ said Bradley Breuer, PetSmart’s VP of marketing, ‘we really wanted a solution that would allow us to install it within our environment.’”
Read more on AdExchanger. (August 7)
BRANDS
More creative due to LLM integrations
Digiday covered the Mobile Marketing Association’s CMO & CEO summit in July and found that AI is scaling creative executions—or “operationalizing creative”—for marketers like never before.
Unilever’s Selina Sykes, who is the Global VP and Head of Marketing Transformation—Beauty & Wellbeing, shared that AI enabled her division’s campaigns and that meant an average of 20 assets per campaign to 400 due to the use of “multiple large language models (LLMs) and direct integration with platforms like Meta and TikTok.”
Read more on Digiday. (August 7)
BRANDS
Is the CMO role going away?
Ed See, Chief Growth Officer of AI-enabled marketing cloud company Zeta Global, joined Martech’s “Playbook Broken” show and, fittingly, talked through the evolution of the marketing playbook as AI both enables and disrupts.
Regarding the CMO’s evolution and whether the role gets automated away by AI, Mr. See was adamant, “Marketing as-a-business-leader needs to stay in place delivering the profitable customers. They will still be operating, but will they be operating with a high degree of automation supporting them and allowing to deliver more profitable customers? I think that’s where we’re at. The marketer-as-operator will still be in play. They’ll just have a different set of tools, a different supply chain to manage.”
Among other highlights, Mr. See said the marketer’s relationship with traditional agencies will help inform strategy for the coming world of AI agents.
Hear more. (August 6)
AGENCIES
WPP: Slashing costs, banking on AI
Before new CEO Cindy Rose takes over in September, WPP CEO Mark Read delivered one more dose of bad news as the company released interim results yesterday.
Clearly, WPP is banking on AI as a saving grace amid the cost cutting as it outlined its strategic priorities:
“Cost discipline enabling investment in WPP Open, AI and data – In addition to the annualisation of structural cost savings and a continued focus on back-office efficiency, we are also taking a proactive approach to managing our flexible cost base. Headcount since the start of the year was down 3.7%, broadly in line with the LFL revenue decline and we expect the severance action taken in the second quarter alone to generate £150m+ of annualised gross cost savings from 2026. We continue to prioritise investment in WPP Open, AI and data including the integration of new AI tools into WPP Open, driving day-to-day productivity improvements for our people.”
Mercer Island Group founder Steve Boehler, a marketer, was dumbfounded by the latest news coming from WPP and asked, rhetorically, yesterday on LinkedIn:
“How can WPP turn around its ability to compete if it is slashing bonus compensation? Cindy Rose doesn’t start until September. How should investors and clients think/feel about this lack of urgency, and the resulting uncertainty of the road ahead? What is going on at the Board level? Is the plan to simply break up the Holdco and sell off parts to Accenture, Publicis and/or private equity?”
More: “WPP slashes bonuses and dividend; incoming CEO Cindy Rose to review strategy” (August 7) – Campaign
Related: Opinion – “Forget big data. The future belongs to large marketing models” (August 6) – InfoSum’s Richard Knott on Marketing Week (InfoSum is WPP’s data clean room)
From tipsheet: AI strategy at WPP will need people – that would appear to be the holding company’s biggest challenge.
TECH
Open web believer: Adam Singolda
On his company’s Q2 2025 earnings call with analysts, CEO Adam Singolda of native advertising platform Taboola discussed why he believes the open web will survive and thrive given the changes brought about by generative AI and LLM chatbots.
Mr. Singolda told analysts (lightly edited for clarity):
“Overall, for us as a company, we have seen a minimal impact to date from LLM-driven search changes. I spoke about 5% of our US traffic comes from search – Google Search, specifically. And the decline we’ve seen [due to generative AI and chatbots] is in the mid single digits. So as of now, it’s not material.
I think where it’s going is very exciting. While search traffic may go down and will reduce page views to publishers from that perspective, there is a kind of birth of a new type of traffic that will go up. And that is LLMs on publisher sites. (…)
To me, for the first time, publishers that have trust with consumers could capitalize on offering LLMs to consumers and create a new touchpoint and a new interaction with consumers that may be worth a lot more than the search traffic they lose.
If I’m a national website with a travel section, and there’s someone talking on my site about travel they’re considering taking using an LLM on my site—which is a behavior they’re used to on ChatGPT—this will be worth a fortune in my opinion.
So I think the consumer behavior is: you start with LLM answer engines, but you then spend a lot of time reviewing, reading, getting curious and educated before you make a decision. And that’s where the open web shines. There’s a huge opportunity for LLMs thriving on the open web in ways that we have not seen yet.”
- Read the Taboola Q2 2025 earnings call transcript – Investing (August 6)
- Taboola Reports Strong Q2 2025 Financial Results, Surpassing High-End of Guidance (August 6) – Taboola
- Taboola[dot]com Second Quarter 2025 Earnings: Revenues Beat Expectations, EPS Lags (August 7) – Simply Wall St on Yahoo! Finance
TECH
Open web believer: Mark Zagorski
On digital media measurement analytics company DoubleVerify’s Q2 2025 earnings call with Wall Street analysts on Tuesday, CEO Mark Zagorski was adamant that the open web was not dead.
But unlike Taboola CEO Adam Singolda, Mr. Zagorski saw the open web thriving due to social, CTV and retail media.
He told analysts (lightly edited for clarity):
“I think the reports of the death of the open web ‘has been greatly exaggerated.’
When we looked at our programmatic growth in the first half of the year, much of it comes from the open web. There is still traffic and traction to be had there, even as it evolves over time in AI… and generative AI tools start to eat away at engagement.
That being said, as we’ve noted, even coming into this year, that transition of consumer engagement from open web into proprietary platforms does form the basis of our longterm thesis for our business: doubling down on social, CTV and areas like retail media where —although much of it is open web—it’s created its own kind of quasi-walled garden by pulling together premium publishers and data in one place.
So I think that where we’re focused on and investing: areas where consumers are engaged and that continues to be social. And if you look at the success of platforms like Reddit and TikTok – it’s not only the big guys all the time. There are emerging social platforms that we are engaged with that continue to grow. And CTV, which is rapidly becoming democratized from being a premium-only, brand-only substitute for television to being more broadly distributed. Generative AI tools are enabling lots of smaller advertisers to be part of that universe…”
- DoubleVerify Q2 2025 earnings call transcript – DoubleVerify. (August 5)
- DoubleVerify Reports Second Quarter 2025 Financial Results (August 5) – press release
- DoubleVerify Holdings (DV) Misses Q2 Earnings Estimates (August 5) – Zacks on Yahoo! Finance
PROMPT
What is the future of real-time bidding in five years given the advancement of AI?
Response from xAI’s Grok:
“Challenges: AI’s complexity could widen the gap between large players with robust AI infrastructure and smaller firms. Energy consumption from training large models may raise sustainability concerns. Regulatory pressure on data use and AI ethics will demand constant adaptation…”
MORE
- The top 5 AI marketing activations to know about right now (August 7) – Ad Age (subscription)
- Podcast Audiences Are Prime for AI Marketing and Innovation (August 6) – Media Village
- Event: Boston AI Week, September 26-30 – AIweek.Boston
- ‘Sweating the information harder’: How AI is making its mark on market research (August 7) – Marketing Week (subscription)