November 7th-November 13th // Estimated Reading Time: xx minutes

Amazon Unifies Ad Platform With AI Agents🔒
Source: Digiday
November 12th, 2025

Summary: Amazon announced a major overhaul of its advertising tools at its Unboxed event this week, unifying its DSP and Sponsored Ads console into a single Campaign Manager powered by two AI agents. Ads Agent handles campaign planning and targeting through natural language prompts (like "build an audience of first-time purchasers who watch Major League Baseball but haven't bought anything else after 30 days"), while Creative Agent manages asset production across video, audio, and image. The Ads Agent also helps advertisers maximize Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) for measurement and analytics, and can review thousands of audience segments to recommend precise targeting.

Opinion: Amazon’s ad platform UIs were never all that user-friendly anyways. Agents to the rescue!

Amazon is positioning the tools as an "AI companion" rather than an agency replacement as it goes after the long tail of advertisers. Amazon says it's targeting small advertisers who have never hired agencies before, but the tool (and AI in general) will inevitably make clients question what they're paying agencies to do.

Google Launches Gemini-Powered AI Agents for Advertising and Analytics🔒
Source: ADWEEK
November 12th, 2025

Summary: Google also rolled out two AI agents of its own! Ads Advisor, embedded in Google Ads, analyzes campaign data and business goals to generate personalized recommendations. Marketers can ask how to optimize their campaigns to meet a specific goal and the agent provides suggestions before implementing changes with advertiser consent. Ads Advisor can also use existing assets and website context to generate entire Search or Performance Max campaigns. Analytics Advisor lives inside Google Analytics and answers queries about an advertiser's customers to surface trend reports and competitive insights. Both agents "show their work" by explaining the reasoning behind their recommendations. 

Opinion: Google and Amazon launching competing AI ad agents within 48 hours signals the ad platform wars have entered a new phase—automation supremacy. Both tout efficiency and transparency, but each faces the same challenge: convincing advertisers that AI actually improves campaign performance rather than just increasing platform margin.

Hightouch's New AI Agents Help Marketers Work 10x Faster

What It Does: Hightouch Agents connect to all your marketing tools—like CRM, ad platforms, and data warehouses—and act like a marketing assistant that can answer questions, analyze campaigns, plan strategies, and automate reporting. The agents are pre-trained with marketing expertise like building customer segments and analyzing creative performance across channels. Hightouch says the platform can help marketers move 10x faster through workflows and save 5-10 hours per week on routine tasks like data gathering and reporting.

Quick Take: The direct integration with your marketing stack and customer data means these agents will actually know your brand, campaigns, and customers, without much of a lift or training. Which is a pretty cool value prop, if it actually works.

New Google Ad Manager, AdSense, and AdMob Updates for Publishers

What It Does: Google gave publishers three AI tools: a brand safety system that learns ad preferences and automatically blocks unwanted ads; a gen-AI assistant that creates custom reports in response to natural language questions; and an AI help chatbot for instant troubleshooting. Google also introduced a CTV Live-biddable solution to help advertisers target ads to high-value live event audiences in real time.

Quick Take: Google's automated brand safety alone could free publishers from the tedium of manual ad reviews. Hopefully, it doesn't get overly aggressive and block good inventory too.

Innovid Orchestrator Connects Advertising's AI Agents

What It Does: Innovid calls Orchestrator a “superagent” that links AI agents through an orchestration layer that sits on top of existing marketing tech stacks and aligns advertising workflows into one cohesive system. Innovid also released a suite of specialized AI agents that automate ad creative, delivery, measurement, and optimization. Or, brands can plug in their own AI agents.

Quick Take: Just like Hightouch, this could tackle an emerging problem with marketing AI: Everyone's deploying agents but they don't always talk to each other and they’re not always fully knowledgeable about a marketer’s business and tech stack.

AP Intelligence Packages Its 180 Years of Journalism Into AI-Accessible Data

What It Does: The Associated Press has launched AP Intelligence, which transforms its global news archive into structured data for training AI models or developing AI systems. The platform includes real-time and archival content across text, photos, video, and audio from 230 locations in 100 countries—5,000 pieces of distinct content daily. Finance companies are already using it🔒. This builds on AP's existing partnerships with OpenAI, Google Gemini, and Microsoft.

Quick Take: Finally, a company that’s creating the data layer for training AI. Not just another AI wrapper. This is the important stuff, the hard work, the defensible asset in the AI era.

The Setup: The Original Tamale Company in LA wanted to experiment with using AI to create a marketing video that could be distributed across social media. 

The AI Solution: The restaurant used AI to partially create the video and narrator's voice, and ChatGPT wrote the script. The video depicts a man falling from an airplane with no parachute. As he's falling, the narrator offers advice for where he should land (not water—it'll hurt!), finally suggesting that he land at the family-owned restaurant. The creation process took 10 minutes. 

The Results: The video went viral, generating 22M views in less than three weeks, 1.2M likes, and a significant increase in business at the restaurant, including people who visited specifically after seeing the ad.

Why This Matters: In the age of AI, creativity trumps production speed and quality. A tamale shop can execute a successful falling-from-the-sky concept in 10 minutes using free tools! The 22M views came from an authentic, unexpected idea that cut through the feed. AI democratizes production, which means the only defensible advantage is creativity. That’s a good thing!

Your Action: Run a "concept sprint" with your team: Generate 10 unexpected angles for your next campaign in 30 minutes, prioritizing ideas that would make someone stop scrolling (absurdist, emotionally authentic, or culturally specific). Pick the strongest concept and use AI tools (e.g. Sora, Veo) to execute a rough version in under an hour. Test whether a great idea with rough AI execution outperforms a mediocre concept with polished production.

ElevenLabs Launches Marketplace for AI-Generated Celebrity Voices, Adds Matthew McConaughey as Investor🔒- Brands can use the Iconic Voice Marketplace to license the voices of Michael Caine, Maya Angelou, and other famous people.

AI Marketing Startup Alembic Secures $145M From Accenture, Katzenberg🔒- Alembic is now worth $645M. Their goal is to help companies use AI-driven analytics to connect brand marketing to outcomes.

Ad Tech Founders Raise $30M to Automate Mobile Ads for Publishers🔒- Former MoPub and MAX executives have launched CloudX, a platform that uses Claude AI agents to connect mobile publishers to buy-side and sell-side partners, choose ad units, and test pricing.

The IAB Tech Lab Releases Its First Framework For Agentic Ad Buying Standards - The Agentic RTB Framework aims to create the foundational protocol for an efficient agentic media buying marketplace.

Nextdoor Gives Its Local Ad Platform An AI-Powered Upgrade - Nextdoor is trying to give local advertisers an easy button with automated campaign optimization, weather-based ad targeting, AI-powered creative, and other tools. 

AirOps Raises $40M to Redefine How Brands Compete in the Era of AI Search - AirOps analyzes content performance and identifies what to update to help brands generate, refine, and publish content that shows up in AI search.

Why tech giants are offering premium AI tools to millions of Indians for free - Google, OpenAI, and Perplexity have partnered with Indian mobile companies to let users access their AI tools for free, potentially getting them "hooked" before requiring them to pay. 

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