In the wake of recent hiring drama, an internal memo penned this week by OpenAI executive Fidji Simo confirmed that former Facebook technology executive Vijaye Raji will lead the development of the company’s ad product for ChatGPT.
The Information’s Stephanie Palazzolo and Erin Woo reported:
“Vijaye Raji, OpenAI’s CTO of applications who joined the company after his startup Statsig was acquired by OpenAI in September and who formerly spent more than 10 years at Meta, will lead advertising, according to the memo. Simo, who joined OpenAI after serving as CEO of Instacart for four years, also spent more than a decade at Facebook.”
Read more in The Information. (January 21)
Mr. Raji had been appointed “CTO of Apps” (Ms. Simo is CEO of “Apps”) only a month ago according to his LinkedIn post in December.
In the early 2010s at Meta (then Facebook), Mr. Raji’s purview included Facebook Audience Network and “Mobile App Install Ads”, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Related: OpenAI’s affiliate marketing strategy is bubbling — “ChatGPT Checkouts to Take 4% Cut of Shopify Merchant Sales” – The Information (subscription)
From tipsheet: Mr. Raji is to OpenAI as Gokul Rajaram was to Facebook in its ad tech development.
LLMs & CHATBOTS
Developments
- Personal Intelligence in AI Mode in Search: Help that’s uniquely yours (January 22) – Google’s The Keyword blog
- Yelp To Acquire AI Lead-Management Firm For More Than $270M (January 22) – MediaPost
- How Claude Code Is Reshaping Software—and Anthropic (January 22) – Wired (subscription)
CONNECTED TV
Performance Max’s shoppable CTV ads
New shoppable (or shopping) CTV ad inventory is available in Google’s Performance Max, DV360 and Demand Gen campaigns, according to AdExchanger’s Victoria McNally.
An evolution of the ad products revealed last spring at Google’s Brandcast event, McNally reported:
“The shopping CTV ads pull images and product data from an advertiser’s Google Merchant Center (GMC) product feed, and then turn them into a clickable carousel with QR codes that link to each individual item.
YouTube started with GMC advertisers first because they already have robust product catalogs that can be easily converted from desktop and mobile into carousels for CTV, said [Romana Pawar, senior director of product management for YouTube Ads].
Similarly, although YouTube’s original Brandcast mockups showed examples of video creative, the only requirements Google has for these ads so far are that the product images be 500 x 500 pixels or larger, and that advertisers opt in to targeting audiences on TV screens.”
Read more in AdExchanger. (January 22)
From tipsheet: By adding new inventory to Performance Max, Google is opening up CTV to more AI automation for ads.
SELL-SIDE
Measuring the chatbot wars
Earlier this week, eMarketer Chief Content Officer Vladimir Hanzlik shared a graphic quantifying how far Google has come with website usage of its Gemini chatbot versus OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
But, the graphic also shows a lead OpenAI still firmly holds — the mobile app chatbot.
Mr. Hanzlik explained:
“Nano Banana (launched in August) got a lot of people excited to try Gemini, and the momentum has been on Gemini’s side since then. This allowed Gemini to close a big part of the gap to ChatGPT’s site visits and start chipping away at ChatGPT’s substantial lead on mobile app users, per Similarweb’s data on monthly active users. Now the question is how quickly Gemini can translate its web momentum into closing the mobile app gap.”
Read more on LinkedIn. (January 20)
From tipsheet: Half a billion mobile app users for OpenAI should yield some healthy ad revenues in time. I’m sure AppLovin or Meta would be willing to assist if Mr. Raji needs help.
SELL-SIDE
Comparison: AI deals for publishers
A review of publishers’ opportunity with AI platforms was the subject of the latest episode of the Digiday podcast.
The Digiday editorial team dissected each AI company’s deals and interactions with the sell-side over the past couple of years to come up with a “Top 8” as follows:
- Microsoft
- OpenAI
- Meta
- Amazon
- Perplexity
- ProRata
- Anthropic
Microsoft’s Publisher Content Marketplace (PCM) has attracted publishers’ AI interests since news of the product first leaked out in September.
Also noteworthy on the list is the least known — ProRata — which Digiday’s Tim Peterson described in the podcast: “They’re helping publishers to power search on the publishers properties, which is a need a lot of publishers have and [it’s] helpful that there’s also money involved with that.”
See ProRata’s website and a press release on their product from last March.
Hear more on The Digiday Podcast. (January 20)
AGENCIES
Comparison: Agency (AI) Operating Systems
“After Stagwell announced The Machine, we at Ad Age decided we had to know more about these platforms in ad land. Compare and contrast them, and get behind the strategy…”
source: Garett Sloane, Ad Age via LinkedInMore: “How AI is transforming agencies from creative partners into tech-fueled vendors” (January 21) – Ad Age
Related: “Today I am thrilled to announce the launch of WPP Production – our new global content creation powerhouse.” (January 22) – WPP CEO Cindy Rose on LinkedIn
LLMs & CHATBOTS
Netflix co-CEO on ad strategy evolution
On the Stratechery podcast, analyst Ben Thompson hosted Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters for a wide-ranging interview after Netflix’s latest quarterly earnings report this week.
A discussion on Netflix advertising between Thompson and Peters wasn’t explicitly about how OpenAI will develop ads, but it did speak to the “test and learn” phase required in building a scaled ad platform.
From the podcast:
BEN THOMPSON: ”How has the ad revenue growth done relative to your expectations when you started advertising like three or four years ago, versus a year ago when you reset everything, your own ad server and things along those lines?”
GREG PETERS: ”I think of that trajectory as being a very common trajectory that I’ve seen in launching new things at Netflix, which is that you start with a good first principles argument, like, ‘This all makes sense’, you launch it and then you realize that there’s 20 things that you got wrong or that were harder than you expected and such, and then you start working those problems. Maybe it’s a little slower at the beginning, and I think about like launching Latin America or the first time we were really going ex-US, there’s a lot of problems we ran into that we didn’t anticipate. And then, you start working those problems, then all of a sudden you start to get to a faster trajectory than you actually anticipated because then you start to build optimizations.”
BEN THOMPSON: ”You get all the catch-up…”
GREG PETERS: ”Well, not only catch-up, but there’s optimizations that you hadn’t really built into the model from the beginning that you’re now applying to it. And so, as is usually the case, the map is not the territory, the model is not reality and you initially under-predict, or you fail to catch all the things you have to go do, but then you also fail to catch the things that you can do that are better.”
Hear more on Stratechery. (January 22)
From tipsheet: The message (if there was a message) from Netflix about ads in ChatGPT — OpenAI will likely not hit the ground running with an efficient ad product. It will take time.
And the media spotlight OpenAI will battle will be more intense than anything ever seen in advertising.
STARTUPS
Gamers target agentic marketing tech
A San Francisco-based ad tech startup with gaming and Playstation roots came out of stealth yesterday.
Called GIGR (d/b/a Playad[dot]ai), the company describes itself as “a multi-agent AI platform for marketing, starting with an AI-native creative workflow that makes interactive ads practical – while enabling iteration across image, video, and interactive formats in one system.”
Fueled by $5.4 million in pre-seed capital and 7 co-founders, GIGR is lead by CEO Jaeyeon Cho, formerly of South Korean-based AI gaming studio Bagelcode.
Mr. Cho discussed a bit of his entrepreneurial journey on LinkedIn recently. (January 21)
Related: “…Agents, not Ads, are the future — and what we think of as advertising is about to take a great leap forward.” – Jonathan Heller, co-CEO, Firsthand on LinkedIn
Read: “GIGR(Playad[dot]ai) Raises $5.4M Pre-Seed to Build Multi-Agent AI Marketing Workflows” – press release
FINANCE
Money flows
- Blackstone invests in marketing tech startup Applecart at $700 million valuation (January 21) – Bloomberg (subscription)
- “This S.F. startup (Liftoff Mobile) nearly fell apart last decade. Now it’s headed for an IPO” (January 20) – SF Business Times (subscription)
MORE
- Rainmaker: An AI marketing agency responding to global and Middle Eastern market shifts (January 21) – The Jerusalem Post
- Opinion: “OpenAI’s Ad Offering Is a Last Resort, and It Still Won’t Save the Company” – Mark Ritson on Adweek
- “Letters to the Editor: AI can be helpful for many industries, but advertising isn’t one of them” (January 22) – LA Times (subscription)
- South Korea launches landmark laws to regulate AI, startups warn of compliance burdens (January 21) – Reuters (subscription)
- Opinion: “The Argument for Retail Media Isn’t ‘Performance’—It’s Marketing Effectiveness” – Analyst Andrew Lipsman on Media, Ads + Commerce Substack