“There are no exchanges.” Jeff Green, CEO, The Trade Desk
On Friday, The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green joined the AdTech AdTalk podcast for a wide-ranging discussion with ChaliceAI’s Adam Heimlich and Gamera’s Gareth Glaser.
Mr. Green did not mince any words about what he sees as the critical need for market efficiency in the digital advertising industry. Core to this is the company’s recently announced OpenAds initiative and its effort to achieve more transparency within supply side inventory for the buy side.
Read an overview on OpenPath and OpenAds on AdExchanger. (October 6)
JEFF GREEN, THE TRADE DESK: “If your paradigm is more around we need the open internet to compete with walled gardens, we have got to get more efficient in that regard. There isn’t room for the level of corruption you just described. No one has won in the open internet that way.
The only companies that have one in digital ads are those who have a cost of goods sold of zero —or near zero. And we are the first that are trying to compete at large scale without that. Meaning, that I would argue, that the ads business, whether you’re talking about Google, Facebook or Amazon or even Applovin to some extent – is largely built on inventory where the cost of goods sold is extremely low… where we’re focused on rewarding premium. (…)
We think that [premium] ecosystem has to survive if, for no other reason is, to preserve great content and that includes the journalism you were talking about…”
The Trade Desk’s AI-enabled Kokai platform remains one of the important demand-side platforms (DSP) for the open web and CTV and faces strong competition from Amazon DSP as well as others.
From tipsheet: Within the walled gardens, AI is fed in part by the supply path transparency of the walled gardens’ own owned & operated properties. From here, The Trade Desk, and Mr. Green, believe they need similar transparency on the open web to compete.
Mr. Green will make his case to a sell-side-focused audience at the Prebid Summit on Wednesday.
LLMs & CHATBOTS
TBPN: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on ads
On Friday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made an appearance on streaming show TBPN. TBPN hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays didn’t hold back on asking about ads – specifically in OpenAI’s new Sora 2 video app. Mr. Altman responded:
“This is like a 10-day-old product, right? Like, it’s hard to get anything to work at all. And we don’t assume success. We have to go ‘hard earn’ success and then we can think about monetization for it. But this is like… it’s gone great so far. It’s still very early and there’s still a lot of work to build something that a lot of people are gonna love first.”
From tipsheet: No news on ads is par for the course at OpenAI. This will change within a year – likely led by OpenAI CEO of Applications Fidji Simo and the Statsig team, which was acquired in early September.
SELL-SIDE
Gannett adds Perplexity answer engine
In an op-ed on Friday that was mirrored across Gannett publishing properties, Kristin Roberts, President of Gannett Media, wrote to readers of the Detroit Free Press about why her company has chosen to integrate AI answer engine Perplexity into websites such as the Free Press.
“As part of the USA TODAY Network, the Free Press has announced a partnership with Perplexity, an AI-powered search and answer engine that combines large language models with real-time web search. What does that mean? It means Perplexity’s search results and AI-curated answers will be based on the credible journalism created by your local newsroom…”
More: Welcoming Gannett to the Perplexity Publisher Program – Perplexity (July 25)
From tipsheet: Answer engines publicized by any publisher as a messenger of credibility seems like a step forward for AI companies. Aside from some meaningful licensing deals for AI bot crawling, AI companies have been accused by publishers of stealing content and siphoning away search referrals and users.
LLMS & CHATBOTS
Developments
Microsoft, Anthropic Hire Former British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak (October 10) – The Wall Street Journal (subscription)
Europe should pump defence cash into its own AI, urges Mistral CEO (October 9) – Euractiv
Music Publishers Can’t Add Lyric Piracy Claims to Anthropic AI Training Lawsuit (October 9) – Billboard
Perplexity’s 31-year-old CEO horrified after seeing a student using his free AI browser to cheat: ‘Absolutely don’t do this’ (October 10) – Fortune (subscription)
SEARCH
Podcast: AI and Google’s ‘stateful’ transition
The Wall Street Journal’s Christopher Mims and Tim Higgins interviewed Google VP, head of Google Search, Liz Reid, for the latest 30-minute episode of the WSJ’s Bold Names podcast. The episode focused on Google’s transformation of search in the age of AI.
Messrs. Mims and Higgins brought up what they called “chat AI” (AI chatbots). In her response, Ms. Reid referenced the word “stateful,” which spoke to Google’s transformation as well as Ms. Reid’s own engineering background.
“CHRISTOPHER MIMS, WSJ: I think that Open AI and these other startups are painting a vision for the future where a chat AI is the way people find information and learn about information. I have to imagine that you see it slightly different, and I’m wondering what you think is Google’s edge with its own platform in this kind of AI future.
LIZ REID, GOOGLE: Yeah, so I think there’s a few aspects of it. I do think this ability to have more conversational, ‘stateful’ interactions will continue in the future. I think that’s very powerful when you’re talking to people.
CHRISTOPHER MIMS, WSJ: Sorry, could you define stateful for our non-geek listeners.
LIZ REID, GOOGLE: Sure. ‘Do we understand what you just said three minutes ago and what you said yesterday and what you said last month?’ If you have a human relationship, you don’t feel like every time you meet someone, you’re meeting someone for the first time.
That’s exciting on the tech. But on the other hand, I would say some of these will paint this picture that your future information is only just talk to a model. You’re just going to interact with this AI bot and that’s all at once.
What we’ve seen and what we believe in is, there’s this great mix of pulling AI to make that information easier to enable these things, but also people still want to hear from other people. They’re not ready to delegate all their fashion advice, all of the things they would previously go to influencers or trusted editorial just to a model. Not just based on the accuracy of the data, but also on what makes us human, that this is special to hear from somebody that you connect to, that you relate to – their unique take on something.
So we think about using AI to enhance search, to enable you to get the quick answers, but also to dig deeper around the web. So we think that’s really an important part with search, that you can continue to actually hear from other people, to hear from other sites and publishers you trust, and trying to figure out how we best bridge them together…”
Ms. Reid indirectly addresses publisher referral traffic by discussing Google search ad revenue and AI Overviews: “So actually the revenue with AI overviews has been relatively stable, accordingly. And the way to think about that is some queries may get less clicks on ads, but also it grows overall queries. So people do more searches…”
Related: The Competition and Markets Authority confirms Google has strategic market status in search services (October 10) – Gov.UK
SEARCH
Podcast: Google’s AI Mode & AI Overviews
Robby Stein, who is VP of Product at Google and oversees the core products of Google Search, appeared in an hour-long episode (see agenda on X) of Lenny Rachitsky’s podcast on product building last week.
Among the insights, Mr. Stein shared how he sees “AI Overviews” and “AI Mode” coming together:
“I think there’s an opportunity for these to come closer together. I think that’s what ‘AI Mode’ represents, at least for the core AI experiences. But I think of them as very complimentary to the core search product.
And so you should be able to not have to think about where you’re asking a question ultimately. You should just go to Google. And today, if you put in whatever you want, we’re actually starting to use much of the power behind ‘AI Mode’ right in ‘AI Overviews.’
You could put a five-sentence question right into Google search and then it should trigger AI at the top. It’s a preview, and you can go deeper into ‘AI Mode’ and have this back and forth. So that’s how these things connect.
Same for your camera. So if you take a picture of something, what’s this plant or how do I buy these shoes? It should take you to an AI preview.
And then if you go deeper, again, it’s powered by ‘AI Mode.’ You can have that back and forth. So you shouldn’t have to think about that.It should feel like a consistent, simple product experience, ultimately.”
On “cool” AI trends he’s seeing in his work, Mr. Stein said:
“I think one of the coolest trends ever is how AI is affecting multimodal visual and inspirational needs for people —and we’re early in this— and I think this is something that I’m actually working on as a project as well. But right now, if you think about what AI has done in large part, it was born and grew up in this text modality as chat.
So for a long time, if you were to ask it to help you, ‘What’s a cool way to redecorate your bookshelf behind you?’, it’s going to describe that to you in text because that’s what it knows.
But increasingly, AI is going to be liberated to help in every possible modality. This is something that we’ve seen a lot with this explosive use of Google Lens, our image search, image features, and with this deep understanding.
What I’m actually starting to use internally that we actually announced at Google I/O —and that we’re going to be building more of— was how AI can help with inspiration, how AI can help with shopping, and helping you really get things done that are more in the inspiring bucket of needs, versus these like core utilities, like code, math, homework kind-of-things.
And I’m really excited for things that are coming, where you can ask it for inspirational tasks. And it’s starting to do really fascinating things in terms of what I’m seeing, and hopefully we’ll share more on that soon.
But I think the one thing I can share is, there’s a visual version of ‘AI Mode’ that basically we talked about for at Google I/O, and so you can reference some of those keynotes, but that’s in the process of being rolled out.
And so you’re going to be able to now ask, ‘What’s a mid-century modern beautiful office design with dark themes?’
It’ll be able to produce this image board that’s inspirational, and you can do multi-turn with it. And so you’ll be able to go and say, ‘Actually I want more of like a light theme, more creamy, more California, more coastal vibe.’ And it’ll do that…”
More: “This week, we took a huge step forward in Google Search’s transformation with the expansion of AI Mode, bringing it now to 200+ markets and 40+ languages total…” (October 12) – Nick Fox, SVP of Knowledge & Information, Google on LinkedIn
From tipsheet: Google is publicly playing offense regarding AI with its engineering and product leaders. Interactions such as Mr. Stein’s and Ms. Reid’s appear to say that Google Search is changing (to AI), but it isn’t going away.
LEAD GEN
Lead gen for AI video ads
Late last week, the Los Angeles Times took a critical look at the use of AI in video ads and found a company that’s making a living at it called Case Connect AI. A lead generation firm focused on the legal field, “The company runs sponsored commercials on YouTube Shorts and Facebook, targeting people involved in car accidents and other personal injuries. It also uses AI to let users know how much they might be able to get out of a court case.”
Overall, Times reporter Nilesh Christopher painted a picture of not just AI “slop,” but of AI manipulation. Founder Vince Wingerter of lead-gen-for-law agency 4LegalLeads concluded, “The need for guardrails isn’t new… What’s new is that the technology is now more powerful and layered on top.” Read more. (October 8)
TECH
Podcast: Integrating AI and ‘in content’
Rembrand CEO Omar Tawakol appeared on the Marketecture podcast late last week. The experienced startup CEO discussed his AI-enabled virtual product placement company as well as recent acquisitions. Several interesting trends popped up in the discussion.
On Rembrand’s acquisition (or merger) of social ad tech company Spaceback, Mr. Tawakol said:
“The vision aligned really well with [Spaceback CEO Casey Saran] and team. They had a good go-to-market motion that they’ve tested over years, and they solved one problem that we forgot to solve. (…) And that is they only used videos that had already been approved. So then when you went to a media budget, that person didn’t need to have an extra friction step of getting approvals.
They could just run a campaign. We had the extra step because it was an influencer from our network, and we noticed that that was slowing down how long it took to launch a campaign. So we’re like, wow, and they solved the actual problem that we have.”
Later Mr. Tawakol provided his takeaways on Advertising Week New York last week including “the creative unit and ‘in content.’” He said:
“So everything we do is about placing ‘in content.’ But if you think about what’s going on in LLMs, it’s another variant of ‘in content,’ which is what would it mean for you to have a sponsored sentence? And what can you do even if you’re not sponsoring, just to make sure you’re influencing the sentence?”
From tipsheet: Mr. Tawakol’s first point underscores the challenges of working in the creator advertising space. Marketers can be reluctant to buy without seeing the end product first. And creators just want to create without approvals. With Rembrand’s video on-the-fly solutions using AI (my words), the company is trying to make everyone happy.
On “in content,” watch that phrase. Mr. Tawakol’s ruminations speak to OpenAI’s chatbot GPT. How could an advertising placement work in an answer engine? It will be something “in content…”
TECH
Podcast: Retail datasets for AI optimization
Founders CEO Max Snow and CTO Frank Portman of Yobi, which positions itself as an ad tech company building an AI agents and business communications platform, was the subject of the latest podcast by venture firm Aperiam (an investor in Yobi). Mr. Snow explained his ad tech firm is in the business of creating “predictive models for advertising optimization, specifically in programmatic and in CTV.”
Mr. Snow says that his company —which has been around for 6 years— has amassed unique datasets through retailers and banks. Hear the pitch on the Aperiam Podcast. (October 8)
SELL-SIDE
Ozone pitches sell-side collaboration on future
“Audience connection platform” Ozone continues to expand its footprint to include U.S. publishers (last week), and now the buy side, according to Digiday:
“What began as a pure inventory play in 2018 at launch with its four stakeholders The Guardian, News UK, The Telegraph and Reach, has since evolved into a broader audience-connection platform that can map audience content consumption patterns across the publishers to provide a stitched-together view of readers’ behavioral patterns.’“
On Friday, Ozone COO Danny Spears said on LinkedIn:
“The last 25 years of fragmentation handed too much power to the tech platforms.
The next 25 – defined by AI, audience data, and content licensing – gives publishers a rare chance to rebuild their power base.
That’s why publisher collaboration matters: means to shared infrastructure, scale, and leverage – the foundations of genuine influence in the digital media economy.
Collaboration isn’t defensive anymore. It’s a vehicle for industry-level strategy.”
From tipsheet: Ozone is led by CEO Damon Reeve, a digital advertising veteran. Back in the early days of programmatic, Mr. Reeve led Unanimis, a site rep firm which transitioned to a digital advertising network model wholly-owned by Orange France Telecom Group.
Related:
Why advertisers are quietly returning to news-driven media channels (October 9) – Digiday,
People Inc. Cuts 6% Of Its Workforce (October 8) – AdExchanger
EVENTS
IAB webinar
Webinar: “State of Data: Consent, AI and Emotion in Advertising” – IAB, November 10, 2025. Sign up.
“Session 1: Governance for the AI-first enterprise”
“Session 2: The Attention Advantage: Unlocking Scalable Results With Contextual Intelligence”
MORE
Explainer: “How to make sense of Meta’s growing AI-powered advertising machine” (October 10) – Fast Company
