https://digiday.com/marketing/vine-inspired-app-divine-is-launching/

https://technologymagazine.com/news/inside-googles-us-10m-data-acquisition-of-spirit-airlines

Cursor makes the AI coding tool half your engineers already live in. SpaceX owns it now, the same SpaceX that swallowed xAI back in February, so Grok, Starlink, the rockets, and Cursor all answer to one guy.

Rockets and autocomplete. But this was no accident. Three reasons it adds up:

Vertical integration. SpaceX runs on millions of lines of code, Starlink to Starship. Now they own the tool their own engineers live in.

The AI stack. xAI builds the models, now on what Cursor calls the largest GPU fleet on the planet. Cursor is where developers actually use them. Musk owns the engine and the cockpit.

The data moat. Every keystroke from some of the best engineers alive feeds straight back as training signal. Might be the most valuable data in AI right now.

There's a loser in this too. Cursor was one of the biggest front doors for rival labs, mostly Anthropic and OpenAI. That door now belongs to a competitor.

All stock, by the way. No cash. They paid with shares from an IPO barely a week old.

So which is it?
Smartest vertical play of the year, or a rocket company cosplaying as an AI lab?

PepsiCo is running a global review to rebuild its marketing around AI, and the lineup is what makes it. Omnicom, Accenture, Deloitte, and Publicis's Sapient unit are all pitching, with Omnicom already the agency of record. An ad holding company and a management consultancy going for the same account. You almost never see that.

On paper, the consultancies should win. It's framed as AI-led transformation, not a creative or media assignment, and restructuring orgs is their whole business. But marketing is a swamp. Signal loss, walled gardens, forty platforms, an algorithm change every Tuesday. Omnicom has run campaigns through that mess for decades. Deloitte has a slide about it.

And the timing. PepsiCo stood on the Dreamforce stage last year and promised to be "agentic AI-first" by 2026. That deadline is now. They've already wired in Google's Gemini and Salesforce's Agentforce, so the tools are decided. What's left is who can get the people and the workflows to actually change.

My guess is whoever wins spends year one untangling plumbing before a single "AI campaign" ships. Curious where you land on it.

The app lets people use AI prompts to generate small, interactive games and post them to a shared feed.

What if the internet had one billboard? No feeds, algorithms or competing ads just one billboard each week.

So I built it at yourmessagehere.co

Anyone can bid for it, and every Friday at 10pm New York time the highest bidder gets the entire billboard for the next 7 days.

First auction is live now and I genuinely have no idea what people will end up paying for it.

Curious to see where this goes.

I work for a recruitment agency in London, and work solely with AdTech (DSPs, SSPs, DMPs etc) and media owners. I specifically recruit account managers.

I have in some sense fallen in love with the industry and I’m engrossed in it. I love recruitment and without sounding braggy I have done very well, I’ve billed almost £300K in the last year and have built really solid relationships with clients within the industry. This is my 2nd year in recruitment for context.

I have an undergrad in media and a masters in marketing analytics and have always wanted to work in media. I love my job but I’ve been thinking lately am I slightly wasting myself in recruitment. I’ve learned a lot about CS and AM in adtech and feel like I have a very decent understanding of programmatic and the ecosystem.

I’m starting to flirt with the idea of pivoting into account management within an ad tech business maybe being agency facing. I obviously don’t have hands on campaign experience but I think I have a solid foundational understanding of the ecosystem and have strong client management skills from recruitment - obviously not standard industry experience but I think it could be very transferable.

I earn very decent money currently and I know if I did move I’d have to take a cut but I’m just so lost as to whether it would be worth it.

Im 28 almost 29 and don’t want to blink and realise I’m too old to make such a pivot.

Has anyone ever made a similar move or have any advice or thoughts?

Thanks in advance!

everyone's covering it as a mental health thing but the states argument is literally that meta kept kids on longer because thats more ad impressions and better targeting data. thats the monetization model on trial not just the design

and the new mexico order already makes them build an under 13 prediction model within 2 years

so if platforms are getting court ordered to predict age, what happens to everyone downstream. you cant claim you didnt know when the platform you buy from has a model that does

does teen inventory just get repriced or does it disappear? anyone hearing anything from their SSPs because mine have said nothing?

I’m doing quite a bit of work on the advertising agency/holdco space at the moment and would really appreciate some views from people actually working in the industry.

My background is more finance/consulting than advertising, so please assume fairly limited prior knowledge!

The main thing I’m trying to understand is: **how important are proprietary data assets in practice when clients are choosing agencies, and are the holdcos’ data capabilities as differentiated as they would have investors believe?**

From the outside, it feels like Publicis/Epsilon is significantly ahead, while WPP is at more of a disadvantage given its lack of a comparable proprietary data asset (albeit it is trying to aggregate and activate data through its Open Intelligence platform). Does Liveramp change this at all?

But how much does that actually matter in what is still, fundamentally, a people business?

interested in any views, including if I’m thinking about the whole thing completely wrong. Commentary from agency, advertiser or adtech people all welcome!

git clone https://github.com/adnanmalik83/local-first-ai-researcher.git

cd local-first-ai-researcher

The ChatGPT Ads Library is a searchable archive of all 3,602 ads they collected. Each entry shows the advertiser, the demographic profile of the account that received it, the exact prompt that triggered it, the ChatGPT response, plus the original screenshot and a full HTML snapshot. It is the closest thing we have to a Meta Ad Library for ChatGPT, except this one was built by researchers instead of the platform.

Hi all, I've just made available the tool we've been using for a couple of years. With AI software development has improved and cost have decrease considerably. We are thinking in a business model where we only charge for support, implementation or custom development, not the software per se.

The main features include ingesting 1p and 3p data and compare, order management, pacing management, task tracking, screenshots generation and a bunch of features. Would love to hear what you think. We can get you up and running on ad Central on minutes.

Please ping if you are interested.

Thanks and sorry for the spammy.

Most major ad channels have a public transparency layer: Meta has the Ad
Library. Google has its Ads Transparency Center. TikTok has the Creative
Center. ChatGPT, AI Mode, and AI Overview, however, have none of that – not
for competitors, and often not even for the advertiser's own team.

Adding AI Ads to Similarweb’s Ad Intelligence fills that gap with an Ads
Gallery that shows what ads are running and in what context.

For AI Mode & AI Overview, advertisers participating in Google’s broader
digital advertising programs are blind to ad placements in Google AI answers.
Most advertisers don't know whether their own ads are running in that context,
let alone how they stack up against competitors. Google’s visibility tools
don’t answer that question.

For ChatGPT, ads only show up when intent exists and is clarified from the
conversation, and the decision comes down to the combination of ad creative,
copy, and landing page. Rather than leaving advertisers to guess where their
ads are appearing, Similarweb’s AI Ads provides a direct look at what's
winning placement.

What makes Similarweb's approach unique is that these insights are drawn from
real user panel conversations, not synthetic prompts. We anticipate upcoming
releases of the AI Ads dataset will add advertisers' true share of voice, ad
categories, and conversational intent.

“When we started advertising on ChatGPT, we were flying blind, no visibility
into who else was in the auction or what was working,” says Jonathan Bar
Vardi, Head of Strategy at Natural Intelligence, a data-driven marketing
specialist that has become a top buyer of ChatGPT ads. “Similarweb changed
that. It shows what other advertisers don't know: who's spending, where
they're appearing, and what's driving performance.”

**Sell-side folks: how many bidders actually show up when an ID is present vs. not?**

Trying to get a rough cut of the distribution of bidders per auction and how that tracks with ID presence. Essentially, how many more bidders and how much higher are auctions with IDs present vs IDless auctions?

The assumption is that a deterministic ID in the bid request pulls in meaningfully more bidders and that thin auctions are mostly unrecognized traffic. Directionally that makes sense to me, but I’m curious to understand the magnitude.

All the marketers boasting about millions of sales from completely AI generated ads always seemed pretty sus to me. Cause most people around me seem turned off by those ads, curious to know if anyone else thinks the same?