Charlie Weiss

Meta just confirmed what I've been arguing for months. In their Q4 earnings call, they explicitly stated that investments in GEM (Generative Engagement Models) are improving ad performance and attracting more ad dollars. [FULL QUOTE BELOW] Most marketers will hear this and think: "More AI hype." They're wrong. Meta has fundamentally re-engineered its ad platform at the technical level. It's invisible to most people: -Consumers just see better ads at the right time -Advertisers see the same campaign manager interface -Unless you've hit a scaling wall, you might not notice anything I wrote about this shift a few weeks ago (link in comments): Meta moved from interest-based targeting to predictive intent. From "show ads to people who like yoga" to "show ads to people our system predicts will buy yoga mats in the next 72 hours, regardless of their stated interests." That's not an incremental improvement. That's a different product. Here's what frustrates me about all the AI hype: everyone's trying to predict how this technology will change the world in 10 years. Meanwhile, the companies that invented this stuff—Google, Meta—are already using it. Not in some flashy consumer app. In their ad stacks. Because that's what drives their stock price. If you're still running Meta ads the same way you did two years ago—optimizing around interests, testing endless creative variations, obsessing over attribution—you're putting the same gas you use for your Corolla into a rocket ship. The platform has changed. Your strategy needs to change with it. What does that mean practically? Feed the algorithm more signals. Give it conversion data. Give it the creative diversity it needs to learn what works. Let it find your customers instead of you trying to define them. Trust the predictive engine you're paying to access. The marketers who adapt to this shift will scale. The ones who don't will keep hitting walls they can't explain. --- Susan Li, CFO "In Q4, we doubled the number of GPUs we used to train our GEM model for ads ranking. We also adopted a new sequence learning model architecture, which is capable of using longer sequences of user behavior and processing much richer information about each piece of content. The GEM and sequence learning improvements together drove a 3.5% lift in ad clicks on Facebook and a more than 1% gain in conversions on Instagram in Q4. This new sequence learning architecture is significantly more efficient than our prior architectures, which should enable us to further scale up the data, complexity and compute we use in our future ranking models to deliver performance gains. As we scale up our foundational ads models like GEM, we are also developing more advanced models to use downstream of them at run-time for ads inference. In Q4, we launched a new runtime model across Instagram Feed, Stories, and Reels, resulting in a 3% increase in conversion rates in Q4."

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Permutive's Joe Root and his team entered the advertising ecosystem with a simple premise: the system was failing everyone. “Consumers disliked the ad experience. Advertisers struggled to reach audiences effectively. Publishers faced declining revenue. Privacy concerns were intensifying.” Root’s answer was radical at the time but increasingly obvious today. Tim Spengler Desta Wondirad MediaVillage.org Acast Greg Glenday https://lnkd.in/g2qNx3sA

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In August, Outsell, Inc. released findings from the 2026 B2B Buyers Study. In this study, we interviewed 226 buyers/audience members across a number of key B2B vertical sectors. The study provided some great insights into the role AI has in the vendor selection process and the impact AI is having on the overall purchase funnel. Hint: it's significant. But for my colleagues working in B2B media, the takeaways can help us all breathe a sigh of relief. For the past few years, brands have seen diminishing traffic as AI tools like ChatGPT took hold. That's where those of us in media have struggled to understand our new role in the AI age. There's good news. In the study, buyers said AI is the primary driver of vendor selection. But, as my co-author Rebecca Kitchens rightly points out, not one buyer solely relies on AI for purchasing. In fact, 99% said that, while AI is a starting point, they need to verify. And in that verification process, media has a home. Let's look at some of the study results to support this case. While AI is a vital tool, it falls short in providing all the insights that buyers need. B2B buyers pointed to consistency, currency, and depth as key shortfalls in the process. When you look at open responses, B2B buyers talk about AI missing areas like real-life implementation, compliance, and timing required for rollout as key limitations. So how do buyers fill this gap? They turn to third-party sources to provide content and insights that AI is not equipped to provide. 54% of respondents pointed to side-by-side comparisons of providers across key product attributes as a valuable tool. Additionally, 54% pointed to user-generated reviews, and 38% pointed to directories as tools they look to for help. For media brands, the more telling story lies in their reliance on industry media. In the study, 42% of respondents increased their use of industry media at this point in the purchase process. Note the phrase "point in the process." Buyers are not looking to media brands to provide content at the top of the purchase funnel. At that point, AI is at its strongest and is winning the battle. The need is further down the purchase funnel, where detailed evaluation and hard decisions are being made. For media brands, this will require an engagement model shift. Living at the top of the funnel with news and overview/market outlook content will not win the game. The focus needs to shift to developing content that helps buyers/audience members validate and decide. This is the area where peer reviews and product comparisons live — all key needs shown in the Outsell 2026 B2B Buyers Study. So the picture is brighter for B2B media. But the media brands that survive will need to change the content — both live and online — they produce. The ones that don’t will face a tough road ahead. If you're a B2B operator or media brand and want to learn more about the study, let's talk. Send me a DM.

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I used to find the media industry to be boring, slow moving, and lacking innovation. Too rooted in questionable data, mirky attribution, an over-emphasis on performance, and not enough in emotion or passion or creativity. Sorry, just being honest. But as I've gotten deeper into it over the past couple of years, it feels like a lot of big industry dinosaurs looking up at the meteor and think they know what's coming, but have no idea. (Now THAT is exciting!) 2026 won't just be another year in media. I genuinely think it’s the year media changes shape pretty significantly. Forget incremental tweaks. Media in 2026 means AI moving from tool to strategist, planner, creator, optimizer. Content distributed where attention already lives in the moment, and video as the anchor of every experience. We’ve become a world where short-form should be everywhere and contextual relevance will trump identity signals... and where consumer trust, human-first storytelling, and creator collaboration drive actual outcomes. Brands that master agentic AI workflows, curated media quality, and micro-audience precision will win. The focus shifts from reach and attention... to intention: engineered, measured, and earned. 2026 will reward those who build layers of relevance, not relic channels. So let's have an HONEST conversation where media actually works. 🚀

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As suggested last week, we have a few more partnerships to proudly announce at PMG. This one is really exciting, it demonstrates our expertise in #FinancialServices and ability to retain great people (customers or rather friends of PMG) in Ciara Cox MCIM 🤝 Whilst the market trends down, we continue to push up. Always focused on and investing in the future - Tech & Talent. Never one or the other.

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we've posted a couple of reports in the past - but I think that this one is the BEST and most interesting one we published (...so far...) this is a true comparison of "attribution" vs. incrementality - comparing the actual aggregated, weighted, and indexed results based for the clients who share attribution data with INCRMNTAL Super interesting - get it below!

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Retail media's Wild West chapter is officially closing. The industry must align on incrementality and measurement. Now. That is David Cohen's message as IAB CEO. April 14. The IAB launches "Building a More Competitive Commerce Media Ecosystem." The shift: from growth mode to maturity mode. The agenda: in-store media, cross-channel activation, new org structures, and AI-driven commerce. The goal: alignment on measurement and impact.   Is operational discipline the real driver of retail media's next phase, or just a polite way of saying growth is stalling? Full article in the first comment

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A former WPP executive has filed a lawsuit alleging he faced retaliatory termination after he repeatedly raised concerns about the agency's vendor kickbacks and incentive deals. For years, I've spoken about the problems with the acceleration of principal trading and opaque incentive deals by agency holding companies, and how it's detrimental to advertisers and publishers alike. One may observe that there are some interesting similarities between Mr. Foster's complaint and the op-ed I wrote when I left Interpublic Group (IPG)'s UM Worldwide. The complaint reads: "Although WPP publicly touts a 'client-first' ethos and claims 'zero tolerance' for corrupt and unethical practices, in reality a significant share of its profits comes from leveraging client spend to extract rebates, media inventory, and other financial incentives that benefit WPP at the expense of the very clients whose funds make them possible. To protect this hidden profit stream, WPP punishes those who 'speak up' and threaten the culture of client abuse and improper behavior of many senior executives." h/t to Business Insider's Lara O'Reilly, as always, for the incredible reporting. Link is in the comments to the story, and to the complaint.

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Netflix and Roku launched Conversion APIs this week. Not for measurement. For competition. Here's what happened: Performance advertisers have been treating streaming video as brand awareness media while dumping their conversion budgets into Meta and Google. The platforms couldn't prove direct ROI, so they got the leftover branding dollars. Now Netflix can track conversions just like Facebook. Roku can optimize for purchases just like Google Ads. The $38 billion performance TV market isn't theoretical anymore. It's happening. And every streaming platform that can't prove conversions is about to lose their performance budgets to the ones that can. Publishers sitting on premium video inventory have 12 months to implement conversion tracking or watch their most profitable advertisers shift spend to Netflix's advertising tier. The measurement gap between streaming and digital just closed. Your competition isn't other publishers anymore, it's every platform that can prove ROI. Performance TV isn't coming. It's here.

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