WPP moves up the value chain

Agencies want a bigger piece of AI transformation.

As WPP evolves beyond the ad agency holding company model, it is pursuing a larger share of enterprise AI transformation budgets alongside its marketing services business.

WPP CEO Cindy Rose OBE wrote on Linkedin yesterday:

“Proud to announce a major step forward in WPP’s growth strategy. Today, we’re expanding WPP Enterprise Solutions, our global business unit dedicated to powering our clients’ growth in the era of AI.

This is all about making it easier for our clients to access the full power of WPP to help them win. Whether that’s AI transformation consulting, intelligent content automation or maximizing customer lifetime value, WPP Enterprise Solutions is the trusted growth partner who can connect the dots, remove the friction and unlock growth for our clients.”

WPP’s Jeff Geheb is helming the 12,000-strong Enterprise group which is now one of the company’s four core businesses alongside Media, Creative and Production.

LLMs & CHATBOTS

Developments

Redeploying Fable 5 (June 30) – Anthropic
Meta makes cloud push to sell excess AI compute power capacity (July 1) – CNBC
Venice AI becomes a unicorn with $65M Series A as its privacy-first AI platform takes off (July 1) – TechCrunch

LLMs & CHATBOTS

ChatGPT ads and AI visibility

ChatGPT ads are blurring the line between paid media and AI visibility.

Technology and AI Editor Garett Sloane previews an Ad Age article on LinkedIn:

“Brand hijacking. Conquesting. All the old favorites from search have a new twist to them in AI settings, where conversational advertising is making brand messaging even more difficult. This week, Ad Age’s Asa Hiken looks at what these tactics look like on ChatGPT.

Advertisers can describe their ideal customer to OpenAI’s ad manager in plain language — down to specific pain points and buying hesitations. That’s a different animal than keyword bidding. Hiken spoke with Tim de Rosen, CEO of AIVO Standard, about research the firm conducted into how paid ads influence consumers on ChatGPT. (…)

The bigger signal: as OpenAI scales its ads business ahead of a potential IPO, GEO and paid media strategy are no longer separate disciplines. Brands treating them independently are leaving the door open…”

TECH

Speedrunning AI

In a recent note to investors, New Street Research analyst Dan Salmon covers the “LLMs for Recommendation Systems Forum” hosted by Meta on June 3. The event brought together recommendation system engineers from Meta, Google, Amazon and other major platforms for a rare discussion about the future of AI-powered recommendation systems.

The forum concluded with a rapid-fire “speed answer” round. Here are the responses from Meta, Google and Amazon, according to Salmon:

Nature of RecSys systems in 2030?

Amazon: It will be AGI-native
Meta: still hybrid systems
Google: 2030 is too far away to predict, but expecting agentic systems by then

Would you rather have the best data or the best model?

Amazon: always data
Meta: always data
Google: always data

Biggest blocker of adoption?

Amazon: cost
Meta: evaluation is hard
Google: compute

From tipsheet: Three companies. Three different visions of AI. One point of agreement: data beats models.

AGENTS

Sell-side becoming agent-readable

Some of the web’s larger publishers are executing on an agentic strategy.

Digiday’s Sara Guaglione reports:

“As AI bots flood their sites, publishers are no longer just trying to keep them out – they’re starting to re-engineer content for them.

In doing so, publishers are preparing for an agentic web – a future in which AI agents make decisions and perform tasks on behalf of users. To stay visible in AI search, Time, The Economist and another major news publishers are already experimenting with parallel, agent-readable versions of their sites, stricter controls on which bots can crawl them and, in some cases, entirely new web standards.”

Read: “How Time and others are rebuilding parts of the web for AI agents” (July 1) – Digiday (subscription)

From tipsheet: The infrastructure for the agentic web is arriving before its economics. Discovery now. Monetization is still TBD.

LLMs & CHATBOTS

Optimizing AI visibility gets more nuanced

GEO/SEO firm Semrush — now owned by Adobe — published a new study suggesting AI visibility depends not only on whether ChatGPT can find your content, but also on how it reasons through a question.

Comparing ChatGPT’s “Instant” mode with “Thinking” mode, researchers found that only 25.6% of cited domains overlapped for the same prompts, indicating that deeper reasoning draws from a substantially different set of sources. Thinking mode also nearly doubled the average number of citations per response and ran 4.6x more internal research queries.

More findings include:

“Source types shift when reasoning turns on. Reddit and other user-generated content (UGC) sites lose roughly half their share of citations in Thinking mode compared to Instant mode, while government, academic, and official documentation sites gain ground.”
“Switching from minimal to high reasoning affects some industries far more than others. Citation rates for Finance content jump by 28 percentage points. Consumer Tech barely changes.”
“Top-of-funnel content has real value under high reasoning. Brands cited in a user’s early research questions tend to keep appearing in their later, more specific queries from the same conversation — but only with a high-reasoning mode.”

Read: “Only 25% of cited sources overlap between ChatGPT’s different reasoning modes” (June 30) – Semrush

Related: “Brands May Be Bankrolling the AI Misinformation Spreading About Them” (June 30) – Adweek

FINANCIAL

Bending Spoons’ acquisition engine

After its successful IPO yesterday, app acquisition company Bending Spoons plans to continue acquiring software companies as it scales its AI-enabled operating model across an expanding portfolio, CEO Luca Ferrari told Axios.

Not buying the SaaSpocalypse

Ferrari said the company has identified more than 1,000 potential acquisition targets and focuses on businesses with predictable customer demand rather than pursuing traditional acquisition synergies.

While advertising isn’t a major focus today, Ferrari noted it represents only a small part of the company’s portfolio:

Axios: “Do you want companies that complement others in the portfolio?”

Luca Ferrari: “No, we’re not thematic in that way and don’t really cross-sell our products. We’ve done consumer businesses, SME businesses, enterprise businesses. Mostly subscriptions, but we’ve done a little bit of advertising revenue too.”

Bending Spoons aims to improve operations through a standardized platform spanning engineering, product development, customer support, marketing and other functions.

Read: “Bending Spoons CEO says the company will keep acquiring software companies” (July 1) – Axios

Bending Spoons stock climbed nearly 40% on its first day of trading yesterday.

From tipsheet: The company isn’t acquiring apps as much as acquiring places to deploy its AI-enabled operating model.

Related: Why Media Mergers And Spin-Offs Don’t Always Keep Their Promises (July 1) – AdExchanger

PROTOCOLS

AdCP and Walmart-Vibe

The team behind Ad Context Protocol’s (AdCP) governance structure published a new blog post arguing that Walmart’s acquisition of Vibe reflects a broader shift toward integrated AI marketing platforms.

Randall Rothenberg, Matt Egol and John Frelinghuysen write:

“This is what we mean by Unified Marketing Intelligence, or UMI: It is a blueprint for how any entity can assemble a full-funnel marketing-advertising-media- measurement-analytics engine and execution capability (what we’ve previously referred to as a MAMMA). Unified Marketing Intelligence spans four layers of activity: Ground Truth Infrastructure (identity resolution and supply chain integrity); Sensor (independent behavioral measurement — attention, brand lift, emotional resonance, outcomes); Brain (optimization intelligence — media and marketing mix modeling, incrementality, attribution); and Hands (media execution and creative generation).”

Read: Walmart Bought Vibe[dot]co… and the Race for Unified Marketing Intelligence Just Accelerated” – Cre(ai)tive Revolution Substack

LLMs & CHATBOTS

ChatGPT ads continues global expansion

OpenAI’s Head of Global Ads Solutions David Dugan said on LinkedIn yesterday:

“ChatGPT ads are live in Japan and South Korea! Just days before Cannes, we launched our first non-English speaking markets, and are now live in Japan and South Korea.”

PEOPLE MOVES

Meta moves

“Today I’m excited to announce that I’m becoming Meta’s first Chief Data Officer. Over the last few years I’ve had the privilege of leading both Marketing and Analytics. As AI has accelerated…” (July 1) – Alex Schultz, CDO, Meta on LinkedIn
“I’ve been named Chief Marketing Officer of Meta. I’ve spent 17 years at Meta, starting out running email marketing and growth experiments…“ (July 1) – Denise Moreno, CMO, Meta on LinkedIn

MORE

“Agentic Commerce: Unlocking the emerging shopping experience” (see LinkedIn) – Publicis Sapient and Salesforce (PDF)
Autodesk CMO Dara Treseder says the best marketers will know when not to use AI (July 1) – Fast Company
AI Video Startup Higgsfield in Talks to Quadruple Valuation to $5 Billion (June 30) – The Information (subscription)
WPP’s CMI Media Group bridges gaps in pharma marketing tech with newly launched Ad Astra platform (June 30) – Fierce Pharma