Yesterday in The Washington Post, reporter Shira Ovide took a critical look at the advertising opportunity in AI chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
She reported hesitation coming from AI companies including Google as they consider the proper rollout for “ads in a chatbot.”
Ms. Ovide wrote:
“Nate Elliott, an analyst with the research firm eMarketer, said that AI companies are walking a tightrope with advertising. The $1 trillion yearly global spending on advertising could help fund the whopping costs of AI. He also said it’s not an accident that AI companies are not saying much publicly about their advertising plans.
‘They need to start making money from these investments, but to run ads — which people generally don’t want to see — creates the risk of scaring people away,’ Elliott said.
AI ads might not be much different from the online ads you’re used to. We’ll see.”
Read: Here comes the advertising in AI chatbots (January 13) – The Washington Post (subscription)
Related: Robots come for advertising (January 13) – Axios (subscription)
From tipsheet: Without question the big AI companies appear to be moving slowly considering the ad technology that is readily available today. But, zooming out, this will be a blip in 1-2 years. Formats need to be discovered, infrastructure needs to be put in place – and AI-enabled chatbots need to move beyond subscription.
LLMS & CHATBOTS
Developments
- Introducing Anthropic Labs (January 13) – Anthropic
- Veo 3.1 Ingredients to Video: More consistency, creativity and control (January 13) – Ricky Wong, DeepMind on Google’s The Keyword blog
- OpenAI Set to Run Another Super Bowl Ad as Chatbot Competition Heats Up (January 12) – The Wall Street Journal (subscription)
PLATFORMS
Jivox rebrands for agentic commerce
On Monday, ad tech platform Jivox announced a new round of funding and rebranded as DaVinci Commerce. According to its website, the company positions its platform as “agentic commerce marketing.”
DaVinci Commerce’s CEO Diaz Nesamoney explained on Linkedin:
“This is more than a name change—it reflects a three-year strategic journey positioning us at the forefront of the intersection between Creative, Commerce, and AI. As Commerce Media and Agentic Commerce transform the way consumers buy, DaVinci commerce is helping some of the world’s largest brands and retailers scale commerce marketing.
Over those 3 years, we rebuilt our platform as an agentic AI solution, leveraging first-party retail data and LLMs to orchestrate and activate commerce campaigns and content at scale. DaVinci Commerce’s AI capabilities are rapidly transforming Commerce Marketing and Agentic Commerce. DaVinci’s AI-powered Agents can now automate the entire closed loop commerce flow, from creating personalized ads and content to engaging and acquiring customers.
Launched in 2023, DaVinci Commerce already constitutes over 60% of our revenue and is growing at over 40% YoY…”
Read more on LinkedIn. (January 12)
More: “Jivox Raises Strategic Financing, Rebrands As DaVinci Commerce To Power The New Era Of Agentic Commerce Marketing” (January 12) – press release
From tipsheet: The company has morphed itself from a creative ad platform to an agentic commerce marketing platform. In that AI has been a part of creative optimization for years, Jivox’s re-positioning is a trend among ad tech companies looking for new growth opportunities likely enabled by the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs).
According to a ChatGPT search and Pitchbook, Jivox was founded in 2007 and has raised $46.4 million across 7 rounds of funding. See more from Pitchbook and Tracxn.
LLMs & CHATBOTS
New GEO startup gets funding, gives tips
Co-founders Will Jack and Keller Maloney of Y Combinator startup Unusual talked to AdExchanger about their company’s recent $3.8 million raise and how the startup will compete in the crowded generative engine optimization (GEO) space.
Along the way, AdExchanger’s Joanna Gerber reported on the startup founders’ tips for clients:
“Large language models typically favor informational rather than promotional language, said Jack, ‘almost like a scientific research paper.’ With that in mind, one tip Unusual often shares with clients is to ‘give some kudos to their competitors’ to highlight their own strengths by comparison.
Not only are LLMs unpersuaded by flowery language; they actually call it out when providing results…”
Mr. Jack said that GEO isn’t just about visibility, “It’s about being the clear recommendation.”
Read:
- “This Startup Says Good Isn’t Good Enough To Win The AI Search Game” (January 12) – AdExchanger
- “Unusual Raises $3.6M to Help Brands Change How AI Talks About Them” (January 2) – press release
Related: How brands can respond to misleading Google AI Overview (January 13) – Search Engine Land
From tipsheet #1: Unusual appears to have pivoted from its AI-generated websites (landing page optimization?) positioning in early 2025.
Also… it’s getting competitive in GEO-land. Check it out…
GEO startup Profound thinks highly enough of Unusual that it’s buying the competitor’s domain in its pay-per-click advertising. From a search yesterday…
From tipsheet #2: Are LLMs ingesting PPC text ads yet? How about just plain ‘ol digital ads?
Why wouldn’t they unless their AI bot crawler is blocked by Google or similar?
BRANDS
Marketers’ ‘virtue signaling’ trend about AI
The very recent trend of marketers using AI as a foil in which they can claim the high ground of authenticity was reviewed yesterday by Adweek’s Brittaney Kiefer.
She explained:
“In the first weeks of this year, brands including Equinox and Almond Breeze have directly called out AI slop and tech gimmicks in their ad campaigns. As anxieties around the technology grow, these advertisers are positioning themselves as genuine antidotes to AI’s fakery.
While Dove came out early against AI’s inauthenticity in 2024, others like BMW and Aerie continued the trend last year. The anti-AI sentiment now seems to be accelerating, with even louder virtue signaling from brands across sectors.”
Read: “In 2026, Brands Are Virtue Signaling About AI” (January 13) – Adweek (subscription)
From tipsheet: AI and AI-generated content is not going back in the bottle. Marketers will adapt.
TECH
Investing in hardware for ads/marketing AI
CEO Christopher Paquette of healthcare demand-side platform DeepIntent announced yesterday that his company is making investments in hardware to support its AI-enabled advertising services.
Mr. Paquette shared on LinkedIn:
Today, DeepIntent began the buildout of AEGIS 1, our new multi-million-dollar data center environment supporting the next phase of healthcare marketing and advertising.AEGIS 1 is purpose-built for AI-driven decisioning at scale. It contains dedicated GPUs and all the compute necessary to support millisecond-level inferences across millions of live ad opportunities per second, including peak demand from concurrent live streaming environments.
Read more. (January 13)
DeepIntent received a $637 million investment by private firm equity firm Vitruvian in September.
From tipsheet: Advertising companies in healthcare have heightened concerns around privacy and control of their customers’ data. “On-premises” may make sense in that they don’t want to run afoul of government regulators looking for healthcare-related data malfeasance.
Longer term, the “on-prem” bet by DeepIntent may also allow it to better defend itself against competitors as AI in advertising becomes more powerful.
LLMs & CHATBOTS
Podcast: Open web advertising opportunity
“Some crazy stats from this week’s Adtech Adtalk episode:Facebook does $130 billion/year in display revenue
– Programmatic does $30b/year with the entire open web
– The open web has 4x the traffic that Facebook has
– FB does 4x the revenue with 1/4th the traffic.
This isn’t that surprising as we have all seen for years how fraught programmatic is with fraud, unviewable impressions, placements on terrible sites, bs performance metrics…”
Hear: AdTech AdTalk podcast for January 9 – YouTube
MORE
- Reimagine brand experience management for the agentic web (January 13) – Adobe for Business
- What the Perplexity-Amazon lawsuit could mean for digital advertising (January 12) – Marketing Brew
- How AI is reshaping connected TV ad buying and creative (January 9) – Ad Age (subscription)
- Apple, Gemini, and the value of on-device AI (January 13) – Eric Seufert on Mobile Dev Memo (subscription)
- New biddable capabilities for live sports with Display & Video 360 (January 12) – Google Marketing Platform blog