WPP announced on Friday that marketing leader Anne-Isabelle Choueiri will lead the agency holding company as Chief Transformation Officer.
Ms. Choueiri comes from Estée Lauder where “she led the transformation and redesign of Enterprise Technology teams and served as a core member of the company’s AI taskforce,” according to a statement.
WPP emphasized that Choueiri will be in charge of the operational elements of the company’s Elevate28 strategy meant to fully integrate AI and “transitioning from a holding company structure to a single company” by 2028.
Read: “WPP appoints Anne-Isabelle Choueiri as Chief Transformation Officer” (April 10) – WPP
What is Elevate 28?: “Strategy Update: Elevate28” (February 26) – WPP
From tipsheet: To be clear, WPP CEO Cindy Rose OBE still retains overall responsibility for WPP’s AI transformation.
LLMs & CHATBOTS
Developments
- Apple AI Glasses Will Rival Meta’s With Several Styles, Oval Cameras (April 12) – Bloomberg (subscription)
- CoreWeave Announces Multi-Year Agreement With Anthropic (April 10) – CoreWeave
- Vibe check from inside one of AI industry’s main events: ‘Claude mania’ (April 11) – CNBC
LLMs & CHATBOTS
Self-serve ChatGPT ads
More details have emerged on OpenAI’s self-serve ad manager for ChatGPT ads. Digiday reported on Friday:
“The tool — described by those with access as serviceable and broadly similar in layout to Google Ads — is a test within a test accessible to only a handful of advertisers. But it represents a meaningful step in OpenAI’s fast-expanding advertising business: for the first time, advertisers can monitor performance in real-time and optimize against impressions and clicks directly, without going back to OpenAI or an agency intermediary.”
Read: OpenAI has quietly launched its ads manager as it races to build out its ads business (April 10) – Digiday (subscription)
In a LinkedIn post previewing the article, Digiday’s Krystal Scanlon reported: “And that’s not all. While initial pilot testers were expected to drop between $200,000 and $250,000 as a minimum commitment, as of last week, that minimum threshold has been dropped to $50,000.”
Read more on LinkedIn. (April 10)
Industry on ChatGPT ads
Also on Friday, in response to a tweet from former Triggit CEO Zach Coelius, OpenAds CEO Steven Liss tweeted his own thoughts — and pulling from his own experience — on how ChatGPT can achieve ads success:
“To distill the lessons from running ads on 100M AI chats:
– OpenAI needs long tail performance advertiser demand. Bootstrap with MSFT ads partnership, enable SMB self-service ASAP
– Chat is a distinct mode of attention vs searching google or scrolling social. Experiment aggressively with generative creative copy and UI”
Related: (Video) “How OpenAI’s reported ad plans could change the AI business model” (April 10) – Tech Editor Dan Howley on Yahoo Finance
EVENT
IAB Connected Commerce event tomorrow
The IAB’s Connected Commerce event is tomorrow, April 14, in New York City and offers attendees a full day of content focused on how AI and autonomous agents will affect commerce and retail media, in particular.
The retail media industry remains concerned that their profitable ad business could disappear in a world where agents do the shopping. A panel titled, “Will Retail Media Be the Casualty of AI-Driven Commerce?,” led by IAB VP of AI and Innovation Caroline Giegerich promises to get to the bottom of it.
From tipsheet: No direct “walled garden” participation in this conference. All RMNs and related ad tech vendors as well as marketer Ryan Verklin from Bayer. Verklin joined the IAB’s Commerce Board of Directors earlier this year.
Related: “Get ready for NAB! Here’s an overview of sessions where Googlers will be collaborating with industry leaders on topics key to every media business: AI, production, distribution, engagement, and transformation” (April 10) – Albert Lai, Global Strategic Industries Director for Telco, Media & Technology, Google Cloud on LinkedIn
PLATFORMS
Meta’s MRI for ads
Meta’s new TRIBE v2 model caught the eye of practitioners on the most recent episode of the Marketecture Podcast.
The podcast team of Ari Paparo, Aperiam’s Eric Franchi and guest John Hoctor, CEO of Newton Research, saw implications for ad targeting.
Meta defined the open-sourced model’s capabilities:
“…we leverage a massive dataset of more than 700 healthy volunteers who were presented with a wide variety of media, including images, podcasts, videos, and text. TRIBE v2 reliably predicts high-resolution fMRI brain activity — enabling zero-shot predictions for new subjects, languages, and tasks — and consistently outperforms standard modeling approaches.”
On the podcast, Mr. Paparo was fascinated by the possibilities for testing creative: “So take your video straight out of the AI from Higgsfield, then analyze it using the virtual MRI machine, and then optimize and figure out how your ad could be better, even before it runs. I’m really into this.”
Expressing some skepticism, Mr. Hoctor wanted more: “I want to see the data from these 700 people. I want to see — did people get excited? — did they have emotions? Oftentimes, emotions are not indicative of actually going and purchasing something. There’s a lot of false negatives out there when you go down the route of these kind of intermediate signals on the path to purchase.”
Eric Franchi encouraged listeners to view the 30-second video demo and see the MRI in action.
Listen: “Episode 168: A Guide for Using AI Agents in Media Analytics, with Newton Research’s John Hoctor” (April 10) – Marketecture Podcast
More:
- “Introducing TRIBE v2: A Predictive Foundation Model Trained to Understand How the Human Brain Processes Complex Stimuli” (March 26) – Meta AI blog
- The Paper – A foundation model of vision, audition, and language for in-silico neuroscience (March 26) – Meta AI
- facebookresearch/tribev2 – GitHub
Related:
- “Meta AI is currently ranked #3 on the US App Store’s Top Downloaded chart — behind ChatGPT but ahead of Claude and Gemini.” (April 12) – Mobile Dev Memo analyst Eric Seufert on LinkedIn
- Regarding Muse Spark LLM launch: “Meta Strikes Back!” (April 11) – MBI Deep Dives
RETAIL MEDIA
Agents will lead to in-store ‘moat’
In an article originally published on The Drum, retail media + ads analyst Andrew Lipsman and Sonder co-founder Jonathan Hopkins co-author an argument suggesting that as agentic commerce expands into levels of autonomy, in-store may be the ultimate “moat” for retail.
Insights from the duo include:
- Strong executive sponsorship has been critical for retailers such as Walmart looking to break through barriers at individual stores.
- “Owned media can be a unifying force inside retail orgs because it’s a shared asset with multiple use cases and overlapping responsibilities across departments like media, marketing, merchandising, category, and loyalty teams.”
- “The irony of merchandising and media tension is that the teams have the exact same objective: to increase receipts. RMNs’ ability to attract more ad spend depends on proving that their media drives brand sales. But they’ll need to do more than that to get merchant buy-in.”
- “Whether agentic commerce constitutes a real threat remains to be seen, but either way RMNs’ long-term growth depends on their ability to leverage their most valuable owned media asset—the physical store.”
Read: “RMNs Own their Destiny with In-Store Retail Media” (April 10) – Andrew Lipsman’s on his Media, Ads + Commerce Substack
MEASUREMENT
AI loves Reddit threads
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“We just shipped a way to see which Reddit threads AI models are consistently citing for your brand, and engage where it counts.” (April 10) – Rishabh Jain, CEO and co-founder, Fermat Commerce on LinkedIn
COMMERCE MEDIA
MCP proliferates with Skai
Skai (formerly Kenshoo) announced the launch of Model Context Protocol (MCP) powered by Skai’s Data Hub for its omnichannel marketing platform.
In a statement last week, Skai said it “has already demonstrated this model in practice. Its AI agent, Celeste, is used by more than 1,300 users across 170+ organizations to analyze performance, identify opportunities, and automate workflows across 300+ publishers and retail media networks. MCP extends this capability beyond a single agent, opening the platform to an ecosystem of AI systems.”
Read the release. (April 9)
EVENT
Manus webinar coming April 23
Manus, the agentic AI startup Meta acquired in December, is offering a webinar “for builders across the globe” on Thursday, April 23. Registration is here.
In its announcement on Friday, Manus — which is already bringing agentic workflow changes to Meta’s ad platform — promises to deliver the following to webinar attendees:
- “Vibe coding 101 — what it is and how to do it well“
- “Prompting better to get stronger build results“
- “Database setup for your apps and workflows“
- “Custom domains for a more polished launch“
- “Building mobile apps and testing them on iOS and Android“
- “Creating apps locally with Manus Desktop“
- “Showcasing different apps that we can build“
From tipsheet: Still no word on the status of Manus co-founders Xiao Hong and Ji Yichao, who were barred in late March from “leaving the country (China) amid a regulatory review” related to the sale of the company to Meta.
SEARCH
Paid search descending, AI search ascending
Pulling together data from various sources such as eMarketer as well as his own prediction instincts, Mediaocean CMO Aaron Goldman thinks “paid search” growth will hit a climax as “agentic AI” advertising (i.e. ads in a chatbot) starts to dominate.
“With OpenAI exploring advertising and Perplexity already experimenting with it, it’s only a matter of time before agentic AI becomes the fastest growing – and most profitable – ad format in the history of the universe, stealing share from a number of sources but primarily paid search.There are, of course, other factors in play that could lead to a decline in search advertising. With Google devoting more real estate to AI on the SERP (search engine results page), there’s simply less space for paid search listings.”
Read: “Prediction: This will be the last decade of growth for paid search advertising” (April 12) – Mediaocean CMO Aaron Goldman on LinkedIn
PEOPLE MOVES
Now hiring
- Former Quantum Path CEO Jeff Hirsch joins video monetization platform JWX as GM, Advertising (April 10) – LinkedIn
- Former Meta product manager Andrew Pierce moves to Duolingo, becomes Staff Product Manager of Ads (April 10) – LinkedIn
MORE
- Why Snowflake is no longer just a data warehouse with CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy (April 8) – TechCrunch Equity podcast
- Local Ad Spend Forecast To Grow 8.1% This Year (April 9) – BIA Advisory Services
- How can ChatGPT reach $100BN in advertising revenue? – Analyst Eric Seufert on Mobile Dev Memo (subscription)
- How Amazon Ads partners are navigating the shifting advertising landscape in 2026 (March 25) – Amazon Ads
- Haast Raises $12M to Scale AI-Powered Enterprise Compliance Platform (April 10) – citybiz