Last week, Adam Singolda announced NBCUniversal selected Taboola and its performance advertising platform Realize as the exclusive reseller of programmatic display advertising across NBC News digital properties, including NBC News and Today.
“For Taboola, this is the first time Realize will power native and programmatic display advertising sitewide, exclusively for a publisher,” Singolda said Wednesday.
Reviewing the deal Friday on the AdTech AdTalk podcast, Gamera CEO Gareth Glaser saw several trends converging:
- Paying up for exclusive supply: Glaser speculated NBCU could receive roughly a 65% revenue share, considerably more than it might otherwise capture through traditional programmatic channels.
- Closing the optimization loop: Glaser argued that exclusive access gives Taboola more direct performance data from those placements, with that learning potentially feeding Realize as it expands among open web advertisers, particularly SMBs.
- A shrinking gap? Glaser contrasted Taboola’s $476 million in quarterly revenue with The Trade Desk’s $715 million, suggesting the relative scale of the businesses deserves more attention.
For context: Today, Taboola’s market cap is about $1 billion, versus $6.1 billion for The Trade Desk.
Listen: “Rock Bottom = Good News” (August 21) – AdTech AdTalk podcast on YouTube
From tipsheet: The raw revenue comparison is intriguing, though it may obscure more than it reveals. Taboola reports most revenue before publisher traffic acquisition costs, while The Trade Desk generally reports revenue net of media and data costs. Headline growth was nearly identical in Q2: 2.4% for Taboola and 3% for The Trade Desk. But Taboola’s ex-TAC gross profit grew 11.8% and adjusted EBITDA 22.8%, with management pointing to a higher-margin mix and the continued scaling of Realize.
Is Realize making Taboola a better business before it makes it a bigger one?
AGENTS
Agentic buying pilot cuts out the SSP?
Podcast advertisers have an agentic option, too.
Independent agency Butler/Till and publisher iHeartMedia revealed an agentic media buying pilot that connected an agency directly to a publisher, without an SSP mediating the transaction.
The companies ran a four-week streaming audio and podcast campaign using two AI agents, one developed by Butler/Till and one by iHeartMedia, connected through an MCP server. A human planner supplied the campaign brief, then the buyer agent took it to the publisher’s agent.
That’s different from Butler/Till’s earlier agentic tests, which involved intermediaries including PubMatic (See December and March). Here, the agents connected directly while iHeartMedia, which operates its own integrated audio ad-tech infrastructure, controlled the inventory.
The test was small, with just under $10,000 in media spend, but Butler/Till said CPMs were 42% lower than the client’s benchmark for direct buying. Premium non-skippable mid-roll placements represented 48% of podcast impressions, versus an estimated 33% under the traditional plan.
Read more in Digiday. (August 20)
Also: Unmentioned in the press release and article is iHeartMedia’s audio ad technology subsidiary Triton Digital, acquired in 2021. Triton is also a member of the consortium supporting Ad Context Protocol (AdCP). Neither source says whether Triton or AdCP played a role in this pilot.
More: Butler/Till and iHeartMedia Launch Agentic Streaming Audio Media Campaign (August 20) – iHeartMedia
From tipsheet: $10,000 does not make a trend. But the experiment hints at a different division of labor: agents could reduce the need for intermediaries while leaving the infrastructure underneath them very much intact.
MEASUREMENT
You have more video views today
As we covered last week, YouTube changes the way it counts video views today.
Agentio CEO Arthur Leopold predicted the impact: “We crunched the numbers across 35,800 creator videos, and on Monday, we expect view counts on YouTube to jump ~30% overnight…”
Read more on LinkedIn. (August 21)
From tipsheet: Feels like we’re setting the clock back an hour. Same audience, different measurement. Someone tell AI.
STRATEGY
Human judgment becomes big AI business
AI data startup Micro1 has increased its gross annual run rate from $100 million to $500 million in eight months, TechCrunch reported Thursday. The company recruits domain experts including lawyers, doctors and financial professionals to help train frontier AI models.
What are the AI companies buying? Human judgment.
That kind of expertise isn’t something AI companies can simply scrape from the web. AdExchanger unpacked Micro1’s business and described experts reviewing LLM responses, identifying mistakes and creating rubrics that explain not only what went wrong, but how important the correction is and the consequences of getting it wrong.
And Micro1 sees plenty of demand for it. Director of Data Partnerships Sydney Levin: “While there’s few top players in frontier AI labs, the demand and the budget that they have to spend on data training is billions and billions of dollars.”
Read:
- “Micro1 Wants Human Domain Experts To Profit From AI And LLMs” (August 21) – AdExchanger
- “AI data startup Micro1 reaches $500M gross run rate amid AI training boom” (August 20) – TechCrunch
From tipsheet: Advertising agents will need this kind of expertise, too. If AI executes the campaign brief, experienced media buyers, strategists and creatives can help teach those systems what good decisions look like.
Imagine an agency holding company turning decades of employee expertise into proprietary training data for advertising agents. If they don’t capture that knowledge, someone else will.
CREATIVE
AI meets the trust signal
Video platform Higgsfield’s $400 million funding round last week caught the eye of Marketecture’s Ari Paparo. Paparo noted that former Perplexity AI ads chief Taz Patel landed at the startup in an advertising leadership role.
Paparo used Higgsfield’s momentum to make a broader observation: “AI is coming for image and video generation very rapidly, much faster than I thought it would happen in advertising, and it’s like the influencer and vertical video people are getting it first.”
Listen: “Episode 187: Jack Raines Trolls LinkedIn and Ends Up with a Book Deal” (August 21) – Marketecture
From tipsheet: That creates an interesting inversion for influencer advertising. The creator can remain the trust signal even as AI increasingly does the creating.
LLMs & CHATBOTS
OpenAI puts more of ads on autopilot
OpenAI rolled out another batch of ChatGPT Ads tools last Thursday:
- Automated bidding: A new Maximize results strategy lets ChatGPT Ads “automatically set and adjust bids on your behalf,” optimizing toward an advertiser’s selected campaign goal.
- View-through attribution: Ads Manager now reports one-day view-through conversions, expanding how OpenAI measures the impact of an ad beyond the click.
- More conversion signals: A new WorkMagic integration lets advertisers view performance alongside other channels and “send conversion signals back to OpenAI through the Conversions API.”
- Platform targeting: Advertisers can now control whether campaigns run across iOS, Android or Web.
From tipsheet: Two weeks ago, OpenAI was building the conversion plumbing and now it’s starting to automate the decisions that plumbing enables.
“iOS, Android or Web”: When does AppLovin make a move here? Its Adjust integration is ready.
LLMs & CHATBOTS
Developments
- Anthropic’s best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive (August 23) – Financial Times (subscription)
- “We’re dropping API and credit pricing of GPT-5.6 Sol by over 20% for the next 3 months.” (August 21) – OpenAI on X
- Inherent, founded by DeepMind alumni, says its AI ‘teammate’ just outperformed Anthropic and OpenAI at replicating research (August 22) – TechCrunch
CREATIVE
Adobe targets audio with GenAI
Mike Polner, VP/GM, Product Marketing – Creators, Adobe on LinkedIn last week:
“Today we’re launching new production-ready AI audio capabilities in Adobe Firefly… Generate Music, Generate Speech, and Generate Sound Effects.”
“We’re also expanding access to our Firefly AI Assistant… and continuing to deliver on what creators consistently ask us for – more choice, with more industry-leading models like Google Omni.”
Read: Adobe Firefly expands its creative AI studio: generate music, speech, and sound effects in one place (August 20) – Mike Polner on Adobe’s blog
From tipsheet: Adobe built its last creative empire around a suite of applications. It is trying to build the AI version around a suite of models and modalities.
PLATFORMS
Coming soon
- See image: “I can’t wait to share what we’ve been working on all summer. Launching one month from today: September 22, 2026.” – Brian O’Kelley, CEO, Scope3 on LinkedIn
MORE
- Meta Fights FTC Bid To Revive Monopoly Charges (August 21) – MediaPost
- Podcast: Mikey Garcia, VP of Advertising Engineering at AppLovin’s streaming ad platform Wurl, discusses contextual intelligence, server-side ad insertion and CTV (August 19) – Marketecture’s AdTechGod Pod (sponsored)
- AI made creative abundant. Now marketers are rediscovering quality (August 18) – The Trade Desk’s The Current
- Americans Aren’t Sold on Businesses Using AI in Advertising (August 19) – Gallup