David Zelniker

🔎 4 S's: Streaming, scrolling, searching and shopping — the way people consume media has fundamentally reshaped how audiences discover and engage with brands. 💡 Just as consumers don’t act in silos, neither does Google Marketing Platform. By running integrated campaigns across the full customer journey, advertisers can unlock significant incremental value. In fact, advertisers who added an extra Google Marketing Platform product to their mix saw a 76% lift in ROAS. 📸 In this new reality, the ability to act on customer insights in real time and convert them into high-value results is the ultimate competitive edge. 👉 Find out more: https://lnkd.in/dEVVpsMs

20

Adcore (TSX: ADCO) Partners with Criteo to Expand Access to Performance-Driven Advertising Solutions in North America Adcore Inc. (the "Company" or "Adcore") (TSX:ADCO)(OTCQX:ADCOF)(FSE:ADQ), a global leader in marketing technology empowering businesses to maximize their digital marketing potential with the Company's innovative AI-powered platform ("Marketing Cloud"), today announced1 a strategic partnership with Criteo (NASDAQ: CRTO), the global platform connecting the commerce ecosystem for brands, agencies, retailers and media owners, in North America effective throughout 2025. Omri Brill Roy Nevo Nick Campbell, CFA Martijn van den Bemd https://lnkd.in/dxGheFEx

7

1 Comment

Don’t mix two worlds: price efficiency vs. product innovation. After working across startups, scale-ups, and massive orgs, I’ve seen this over and over: There are only two real strategies: 1. Compete on price 2. Compete on differentiation Each requires a completely different operating system. ⸻ 💰 If you’re playing the price game, Your culture must run like a Swiss watch: • Maximize output, minimize error • Low tolerance for surprises • Tight controls, process, predictability One slip, and margin is gone. Precision wins. Think: Walmart, Amazon (logistics), Shein ⸻ 🚀 If you’re playing the innovation game, You need a culture of speed, autonomy, and risk-taking: • Small empowered teams • Clear context over rigid control • Fast decisions, quick learnings Innovation thrives when people are trusted, not micromanaged. 📖 Netflix nails it: “In a loosely coupled org where talent density is high and innovation is the goal, a traditional control-oriented approach doesn’t work. Set clear context, align on the North Star, and give the informed captain the freedom to decide.” ⸻ 🧨 But here’s where companies blow up: They say they want innovation, but run the org like a cost-control machine: • Endless approvals • Alignment over action • Cross-team dependencies • Decision-by-committee It kills speed. It kills morale. And it quietly kills innovation. Remember Intel? It pivoted beautifully from memory to microprocessors… but couldn’t make the leap to AI fast enough. Why? Because it tried to play both games — and got stuck in the middle. ⸻ The lesson: You can’t build an Apple product with Walmart operations. You can’t ask for “move fast and break things” while requiring 6 alignment meetings and 14 signoffs. You have to choose. ✅ Align your vision, product strategy, and culture. Otherwise, you’re just confusing the system—and your people. #Leadership #ProductStrategy #OrgDesign #CompanyCulture #Innovation #Execution #DecisionMaking #PMInsights #GrowthLeadership

5

4 Comments

Really excited about what we are doing here at Guideline!!! Now that we have added #ModelContextProtocol to our capability set, we are ready to plug into our clients’ #agentic workflows, unlocking more transparency and efficiency throughought the media planning process. Tim Peters, HBA, MBA, CM, iGP Vincent Mifsud Vivian Herron Alberto Leyes David Hong Gina Mabry Carol Stocks Hallie Ban Reuben Tozman Kodi Terry Joseph J. Berger Michael Laxineta Laura Fres Kaela Coppinger #AdTech #AI #AgenticAI #MediaPlanning #AdvertisingTechnology #MarTech #Programmatic #GuidelineAI #ChatGPT #Claude #MCP #MediaPlanManagement #AIAgents

43

2 Comments

Here is a must-read! The Retail Media Leader’s Guide to AI-powered Ads Personalization, is your definitive playbook for unlocking onsite growth while delivering customer experiences that truly convert. It was authored by my wonderful US based colleagues Jon Flugstad and Surbhi Maheshwari.

9

💸 This Week in Pricing & Packaging 💸 Amazon's Alexa early-access is ending soon. Non-Prime users will owe $19.99 / mo for Alexa Plus, while Prime members keep it “free.” Ads and even pricier tiers are already on the roadmap. ElevenLabs has added a new Eleven Music add-on at a flat $0.50 per finished minute, bringing simple, per-minute pricing to AI-generated music under the Business plan. Retell AI has cut pricing on its premium Cartesia voices from $0.08 to $0.07 per agent-minute, marking a 12.5% drop as the voice agent market heats up. echowin has gone fully transparent with pricing: $49.99 / mo gets 1,600 credits (~100 call-minutes), with overages at $0.16/min. Commitments bring that down to as low as $0.07/min. Spotted something interesting? Drop a link and we’ll dig in for next week’s roundup.

29

2 Comments

I truly believe that AI is not going to replace marketers, but make marketers who know how to use AI the most strategic they've ever been. 🦾 We can run faster, do more, and amplify output quickly with AI. And we still need a human expert, the marketer, to shape and review the work generated from the AI tools they use. 🧠 Certain skill sets, like those of a product marketer, are well suited to molding AI outputs to what they need. ✍ In our most recent blog post, we explore what makes a great prompt and why PMMs are so well suited to this task. Give it a read. Even cooler would be if you could share some of the best prompts you've used - I love hearing what works well for others!

22

1 Comment

New Research: The e-commerce experience is set to change . Disrupted by GenAI platforms the landing page is becoming the product page and on-site search and discovery needs to take over from there. We need a new human-centric UI, and it's emerging: a mashup of conversational and visual elements, and I think (finally) its likely to fundamentally evolve a web design that's remained pretty much the same for 25 years. Summary only here - Gartner clients can log in for the full document: https://lnkd.in/ekd9P5xu (and yes, I am delibrately ignoring 'agentic commerce' for this one!) #digitalcommerce #searchandproductdiscovery

73

12 Comments

Understanding audiences is key to maximising advertising revenue for premium publishers like The Guardian. Hear what Sara Badler has to say about their collaboration with ID5.io in our Cannes "Industry Insights" interview series 📽️ https://lnkd.in/eJArjY8J

17

Atheon Tuesday News day Following the deployment of the new intent-to-ads matching algorithm and integration optimization, after one week of live testing, we observed an increase in our relevancy accuracy (from 64% → 78%) and a reduction in ad integration latency (from 4.7s → 2.9s). Recently, one of our publishers; an AI legal assistance tool, onboarded six legal service firms onto Atheon as Advertisers, resulting in a projected additional $24,000 in quarterly revenue for them, nearly doubling their revenue through our ad support. This represents the largest non-SaaS advertiser onboarded to Atheon so far. In the past 11 days, we’ve met and pitched 10 YC AI-focused companies, and the results are in: -7 out of 10 expressed interest in buying ads within other LLM responses through our network. -5 have expressed interest in using our product to host ads within their own LLMs to better monetize their users. -9 out 10 of them were pretty cool, would recommend hanging out again. Also if you're an AI company or start up, and youre in SF or LA for tech week reach out, we'll buy you the best coffee in the city for a chat.

9

Today, we’re launching early access to Variants: the new way to generate fully on-brand video at extreme scale. Earlier this year, HubSpot’s creative team came to us with an interesting challenge: “We need to produce 20x more video ads with the same headcount.” We got excited. For the last few years at Capsule, we’ve been quietly building an ultra-fast, cloud-based dynamic video engine for exactly this purpose. We were just waiting for the right moment to open it up. Working directly with HubSpot’s video team, we opened access to our rendering API and shipped a spreadsheet-powered video creation system called Variants. It let them: • Use their motion design system in Capsule to build templates • Define the variables inside those templates • Connect their content and data • Generate thousands of variations in minutes After working with HubSpot, we quickly realized this wasn’t just a performance marketing problem. There were a bunch of other use cases for this type of at-scale media creation. —— We heard from sales leaders who wanted to enable their sellers to create video that was faster and better than writing an email. —— We heard from learning and development leaders who wanted to scale training video using content they already developed in other formats like text and images. —— We heard from product leaders who wanted to integrate dynamic video creation right into their apps using our API.    Since then, Variants has only been available to a small group of design partners. Today, we’re opening the beta to the next wave of customers who want to help shape what comes next, with a broader release planned for early 2025. If you run performance marketing, creative, sales, success, product—any function where you need your branded video output to scale into the hundreds or thousands. . . Drop a comment or hit the link at the end of the video. --- Shout out to our early design partners at HubSpot (Oscar Eduardo Estrada, Stephen Fiske), ServiceNow (Alex Marston, Brad DeHaven), Instacart (Robert Paige), and Brandlive (Eli Ackerman, Sam Kolbert-Hyle) for helping shape Variants. btw these are real reactions from Andy Orsow, Dmitry Shamis, Jess Cook, and Travis Tyler when they saw their first demo of Variants. Maybe yours will be similar? :)

212

58 Comments

Proud to back BluePill AI as they help brands get real consumer insights instantly. Huge congrats to Ankit and team on their $6M seed round! BluePill builds AI consumers — digital twins of real audiences trained on real-world behavioral, social, and survey data — so brands can test product, marketing and GTM ideas instantly, replacing slow and expensive market research like surveys and focus groups, at a fraction of the cost. https://lnkd.in/djd2F_KP

19

3 Comments

🔎 Google + Criteo: A Defining Moment for Retail Media 📖 According to a recent article in Practical Ecommerce, Google’s integration of Search Ads 360 with Criteo’s 200+ retailer network (Best Buy, Costco, Target, and more) is more than a partnership — it represents a fundamental reshaping of the retail media landscape. 💰 Retail media is already a $165B global market, growing 20% annually in the U.S. For brands investing at scale, this deal has powerful implications. For years, Amazon’s retail media flywheel has set the benchmark: closed-loop attribution, unrivaled first-party data, and a dominant share of ad spend. With this move, Google signals its intent to redefine the competitive landscape: ✨ From walled gardens → open ecosystems: Expanding access and “democratizing” placements. 🛒 From traffic → in-market influence: Moving from guiding shoppers to retailer sites to influencing decisions on them. 📊 From fragmented → unified measurement: Creating efficiency, scale, and closed-loop insights. 💡 Practical Ecommerce highlights what this expansion means for brands: ✅ Diversified investment beyond a single ecosystem. ✅ Closer proximity to purchase, driving awareness + conversion. ✅ Smarter spend allocation with unified, ROI-driven data. ✅ Deeper retailer collaboration through scalable partnerships. The key question remains: 👉 Will this unlock a true alternative to Amazon’s dominance, or simply expand the pie? Either way, the next phase of retail media will be driven not by closed ecosystems, but by partnerships, integrations, and data-driven openness. #RetailMedia #DigitalAdvertising #EcommerceStrategy #MarketingInnovation #DigitalTransformation #AdTech #Google #Criteo #MarTech #MediaStrategy #BrandGrowth #RetailTrends https://lnkd.in/ggZ3K5Af

55

24 Comments

Roku just handed Amazon Ads exclusive DSP access to its CTV inventory and identity graph. This isn’t just a partnership — it’s the closest thing to an acquisition you can get without calling the FTC. 😅 Think of it like this: a fast-growing startup with valuable real estate just gave the keys to a trillion-dollar tenant… who now controls how customers enter the building, what they see, and how the rent gets collected. Roku needs scale and performance. Roku gets: 🟢 Massive demand from retail advertisers 🟢 Precision targeting via first-party shopper data 🟢 Technical muscle to activate that data across CTV In return, Amazon gets: 🟢 Exclusive control over Roku’s authenticated inventory 🟢 A deterministic ID graph linked to ~80 million households 🟢 CTV dominance without tripping regulatory wires This is a power play — clean, quiet, and extremely effective. For independent ad tech players? The moat just got deeper, and the performance gap is widening. I’ve spent years building DSP platforms and reporting tools — and deals like this always look clean on the outside. But there are always technical hurdles: mis-estimated audience overlap, fragmented measurement, and cultural misalignment between orgs. Best wishes to the product people who have to overcome that. 🤞 Conclusion: CTV is no longer just TV with better pipes. It’s becoming a closed loop performance channel, ruled by those who own identity, inventory, and demand. Roku placed its biggest bet yet — and Amazon didn’t even have to call Legal.

31

6 Comments

for the marketers out there wondering which @claudeai product to use, here's the rough mental model I keep coming back to: need to think? → Claude chat need a deliverable? → Claude Cowork need a tool? → Claude Code Austin Lau

4

1 Comment

Welcome to the new frontier of consumer commerce! Im sure there are a long list of incumbent companies preparing and talking to OpenAI to integrate with this - there is a already a big amount of discovery happening in AI chats - now it moves to transactions in the same place.

2

Yesterday, OpenAI announced a game-changer: You can now shop directly inside ChatGPT. With Instant Checkout and the new Agentic Commerce Protocol, conversations become commerce — turning chat into a seamless buying experience. 🛒 Picture this: you’re exploring ideas, ChatGPT suggests a product, and you buy it instantly — no tab-switching, no friction. For businesses, this means brand-new customer touchpoints and sales channels — with full control over payments, fulfillment, and the customer relationship. 👉 Read more about how OpenAI and Stripe are laying the foundation for “agentic commerce”: https://lnkd.in/duRShYDn #AI #Commerce #ChatGPT #Innovation #DigitalBusiness

13

1 Comment

🚀 Google Ads vs. Meta Ads for Childcare — Which Fills Your Spots Faster? Just published on the ECE Leaders Blog: a breakdown of which ad platform works best for immediate enrollments vs. long-term growth (and when to use both). 🔗 Read here:https://lnkd.in/gEKRhwFh

1