u/u_of_digital

https://www.thedrum.com/news/unilever-tells-agencies-to-make-way-for-creators-we-don-t-need-the-big-idea

Publicis is buying LiveRamp, and at Cannes, the vendors lined up to pitch themselves as the successor, the new neutral party in the data ecosystem, the connective tissue every advertiser routes through, and no one owns. That was the pitch. Neutral was the word.

Then the industry sources explain that the role was never really about being neutral. LiveRamp's advantage was the number of connections and integrations it had built over time. The scale, not the disinterest. Neutral was what you called it in the deck.

Which leaves the successors selling something LiveRamp didn't have either.

Publicis is an advertising holding company. The neutral broker sitting in the middle of everyone's data is being bought by one of the parties it sat between. The neutrality, whatever it was, is not the thing changing hands.

Some challengers aren't trying to rebuild the network at all. Hightouch and others put the activation tools directly inside a client's own cloud warehouse. The data stays where it already lives, gets activated in place, never passes through a third-party ecosystem. Lower cost. More control over the sensitive data. No middle to sit in.

The rest of the field is expected to consolidate. Specialist identity vendors, ID5, MadConnect, get named as the acquisition targets, bought by companies trying to recreate what LiveRamp offered.

https://www.adexchanger.com/tv/advertisers-say-they-need-more-data-from-netflix

OpenAI says the rate at which users dismiss ads within ChatGPT has fallen by 50% since the company launched its advertising business in February. The company views ad dismissals as a proxy for relevance.

https://www.marketingbrew.com/stories/harris-poll-ai-fatigue-less-trust-ai-generated-ads-cannes-lions

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ad-tech-have-its-yard-sale-biggest-agencies-cannes-broke-brownstein-ztwge/

G2 asked software buyers what shapes their vendor decisions. Gen AI chatbots came first, at 17.1%. Peers and colleagues, sixth, at 8.9%. The salesperson, seventh.

The machine outranks the person who's already done the job.

Ad tech still tells itself it runs on relationships. So when you're sizing up a DSP or an SSP, who do you ask first: the chatbot, or someone who's actually used it?

The slide presented by WARC Insight Director Aditya Kishore was making the rounds at Cannes.
“What it's basically telling us is that brand is actually going to be more important in an AI era, not less.”

Starting in July, on publisher sites across the open web, you will see a display ad with a clickable question already written inside it. "Which hair type is this best for?" "How long does one bottle usually last?" The questions are AI-generated from the product page. You did not ask them. The ad asked them for you, on your behalf, in your voice, the curious shopper you had not yet decided to be.

Tap it, and you are taken into a conversation with Alexa for Shopping to browse, to ask more, to buy. A casual browsing moment, Amazon Advertising explains, becomes an actual purchase. That is the stated goal. That is the whole stated goal.

The format has run on Amazon's own properties since 2024. What's new is the leaving, the prompts going out onto other people's websites for the first time, and Amazon keeping the interaction afterward, retaining what you tapped and asked for the next time you turn up. The conversation follows you home.

The numbers Amazon shares are the ones that flatter. About 20% of shoppers who touch a prompt in the store go on to talk to Alexa. Seven of ten who buy after a Sponsored Brands prompt are new to the brand, meeting it for the first time through a question it wrote and attributed to them.

Off the site, the units sell on CPM, not by the click, which is the tell. You don't price awareness by the click. This is upper-funnel, the part of the funnel where you are not buying anything yet, only being shown the question you'll supposedly ask later.

Zeta is connecting its Data Cloud to Palantir's Foundry in a seven-year deal, announced at Cannes, which is where the advertising industry goes each June to drink rosé on yachts and discuss the future. Zeta says the arrangement will let it process client data with less lag than before. The data will arrive faster. That is the stated benefit, and it is the whole stated benefit.

CEO David Steinberg expects the relationship to bring in over $100 million a year, and plans to write it into every sale and RFP going forward—aimed at Palantir's commercial enterprise base, the commercial base being the part of Palantir you put in a client proposal. Existing Zeta clients, he says, will benefit automatically. They will not have to ask.

There is the other part. Palantir is the company known for government surveillance and immigration enforcement, the software behind the raids; on the commercial side its clients include Airbus and BP, which is the kind of client list that tells you what sort of company finds the platform congenial. Zeta is a marketing company that talks, in its own materials, about consumer data trust. The two will now share a stack.

Palantir's CEO Alex Karp, asked to characterize the union, said the two firms were using ontology to build a next-generation marketing environment. Ontology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of being. It is now also, apparently, a way to serve more ads and email.

The goal, Steinberg says, is to move clients from a six- or seven-times return on marketing spend toward ten. It's an odd pairing, everyone agrees, in the mild way the industry says odd when it means something else. Surveillance and consumer trust, on the same stack, processing the same data, for a better return.

Founded in 2011. $300 million raised in the thirteen years since. Then a billion-plus in a single round — the Series E — at a $2.7 billion valuation.

AppsFlyer measures whether the ad worked. Mobile, web, and the CTV screen. A brand spends, an install happens, or it doesn't, and AppsFlyer reads the signal and reports back.

The investors in this round: Google, Meta, Moloco, Unity. Each bought a minority stake. Four of the largest mobile ad platforms, funding the company whose job is to grade them.

Non-exclusive terms. No investor gets preferential treatment. AppsFlyer stays independent. The word does a lot of work here, and it shows up in every version of the story.

CEO Oren Kaniel says as AI takes over ad buying, the measurement signals feeding those systems become the most consequential infrastructure in the industry. The machines decide where the money goes. The signal is what they read first.

Google and Meta have spent years in antitrust fights, denying they grade their own homework.

Now they can say someone else does. They paid for someone else. The four companies that sell the ads now own a piece of the company that scores them.

Walmart is paying $1.4 billion for Vibe, a French self-serve platform where small brands can buy streaming TV ads without a media buyer, without the apparatus. Ease is the product.

It slots into Walmart Connect next to Vizio, bought in 2024 for $2.3 billion. Together, they make what gets called a full CTV stack: Vizio brings the viewership data and inventory, Vibe brings the self-serve tooling, and Walmart brings the purchase data that ties it together. The screen, the inventory, the receipt.

Last September, Vibe was valued at $410 million. Walmart paid $1.4 billion. Nine months, three times the price. You don't pay that for revenue. You pay it because you need what the company owns.

Small advertisers have mostly been kept out of streaming—priced out, or walled out by complexity. Tight budgets, so they want proof. Streaming has been slow to give it: only a quarter of streaming campaigns target lower-funnel goals, and that number hasn't budged in years. Walmart noticed.

Here's the part that doesn't make sense. Last year, Walmart ended exclusivity with The Trade Desk and signed deals with Yahoo, Magnite, and Google—pushing its data into other companies' platforms. If you're renting ad tech to grow, why buy ad tech?

Those platforms serve enterprise advertisers, who want transparency, high service, and low rates all at once. Walmart already has them. Winning the last sliver of that business wouldn't pay. The juice isn't worth the squeeze.

Small advertisers are the opposite—pure upside, a customer Walmart doesn't work with today. High margin, no pricing pressure, no service to render, because the platform serves itself. It's a wonderful business. Ask Google. Ask Meta.

It's only hard to scale. Which is why Walmart bought Vibe.

Add that CTV is the sector everyone's racing into, and the thing that didn't make sense starts to.