April 10th-April 16th // Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes
In This Edition!
OpenAI wants $100B from advertisers
Every company is an AI company (even a sneaker company)
Seats Are Filling Up For The May AI Accelerator!
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Top Headlines🔥
OpenAI targets $100B in 2030 ad revenue as it builds out the infrastructure
Sources: Axios, Digiday, Ad Age
April 10th-16th, 2026
Summary: OpenAI launched its ad business in February and reached $100 million in annualized revenue within two months. The company is now projecting $2.5 billion in ad revenue this year, growing to $100 billion by 2030. That would represent roughly 8% of the global digital ad market. Analysts have called that goal "extremely aggressive," especially since it's still building out its ad infrastructure. It added StackAdapt 🔒 to its stable of ad tech partners, which includes Criteo and Smartly. OpenAI is rolling out conversion tracking 🔒 so advertisers can see if their ads led to a sale. Cost-per-click (CPC) bidding, the standard way search advertisers buy ads, is expected before the end of April. Early results show engagement with ChatGPT ads is on par with brand search on Google, which is the highest-intent category. Advertisers are also finding audiences they can't reach on Google. The main constraint right now is supply: Some advertisers who committed more than $200,000 to the pilot have only been able to spend $2,000 because there are so few opportunities to run ads. CPMs are coming down from a high of $60.
Opinion: OpenAI's $100B ad revenue target will require 2.75B ChatGPT users by 2030. But … ChatGPT's user growth has stalled.
Okay, let’s assume they get there. Getting to $100B in ad revenue still means nailing ad formats, pricing, performance, and infrastructure. That's where their ad tech partner list gets interesting. StackAdapt is programmatic mid-market demand. Criteo is retail and commerce demand. Smartly is social creative formats. OpenAI is handpicking ad tech specialists to quickly build up a version of the Google Ads ecosystem, but through partnerships.
$100B is aggressive, but we think they have a shot at it.
As Google's AI Max comes out of beta, search campaigns will never be the same 🔒
Source: Digiday
April 15th, 2026
Summary: Google AI Max is a new way to run AI-powered search campaigns that replaces keyword targeting with intent targeting, meaning Google's AI decides which searches to match your ads to, writes the ad copy, and picks the landing page. Google has moved AI Max out of beta. Three campaign types are being automatically migrated over, including Dynamic Search Ads, automatically created assets (ACA), and the campaign-level broad match setting. In September, those campaign types will be retired entirely, just before the holiday shopping season. Google claims a 7% conversion lift from AI Max. Marketers are grumbling less than they did about Google pushing their display and video campaigns to Performance Max, largely because AI Max offers more reporting and controls.
Opinion: Just more of the walled gardens pushing customers towards AI-automated campaign tools. Of course it makes sense for them. And on paper, it makes sense for marketers too. Easier execution, better results, what’s not to like? But it’s like making a deal with the devil. You become increasingly beholden to the walled gardens, you don’t know what’s actually working and what’s not, and your brand may be compromised.
Check out this episode of the AI Edge Podcast with former Cadillac CMO Melissa Grady Dias, in which she talks about the brand safety risks posed by black box AI marketing tools.
New Products & Features 🚀
What It Does: Opus 4.7 is better than Opus 4.6 at software engineering, following instructions, and long-running tasks. Anthropic deliberately dialed back its cybersecurity capabilities during training and added automatic blocks on high-risk use cases. The goal is to learn what works and what’s too risky before eventually putting something as powerful as Mythos into the world.
Quick Take: Opus 4.7 is here. Mythos remains … a myth.
What It Does: Moloco Ads for Performance CTV lets mobile app marketers run performance ads on streaming TV. So instead of paying for views, advertisers can use Moloco’s AIoptimization engine to drive outcomes like app downloads, with the same real-time tracking they use on mobile. Early numbers from Moloco show a 1.5x better return compared to mobile alone, with most installs happening within six hours of someone seeing the ad.
Quick Take: Performance CTV is hot. And clearly growing into new areas. We haven’t seen it used for mobile app downloads until now!
AI Use Case of The Week💡
How Zillow used AI to stop wasting ad spend on window shoppers
The Setup: Zillow gets millions of web visitors a day, but most of them are browsing, not buying. That makes programmatic advertising expensive and inefficient. Paying to reach someone daydreaming about a house is very different from reaching someone ready to schedule a tour. Zillow needed a way to tell the difference at scale.
The AI Solution: Zillow worked with Chalice to build a custom AI model around Zillow's specific goals. It evaluated every ad impression in real time to predict whether the user behind the impression was likely to take a real action. It also made sure those ads only appeared in premium editorial environments relevant to home buying, in order to maximize relevancy and performance.
The Results:
• Zillow identified 78% of its traffic as low-intent. That insight allowed it to focus spend on the remaining 22%.
• Cost per lead dropped 28%.
• Home tours scheduled increased 36%.
• Zillow achieved these results even though the premium inventory Chalice targeted cost four times more. The combination of audience quality and premium inventory more than made up for the higher price.
Why It Matters: Instead of optimizing for reach, as most marketers do, Zillow optimized for the right kind of reach. Spending more to reach fewer, better-qualified people outperformed spreading budget across a larger, less interested audience.
Your Action: Pull your last 90 days of conversion data and identify your top 20% of converters. Look at behavioral signals: pages visited before converting, number of sessions, search terms, time on site. Build a short brief from those patterns (5-6 bullets is fine). Then take it to a DSP or data partner that supports custom audience modeling — The Trade Desk, DV360, or a Chalice-style custom bidder — and ask them to build a lookalike or custom intent segment from it. Test and iterate.
Other Notable Headlines📌
AI to help Meta surpass Google in digital ad revenues for first time ever - Analysts attribute the shift largely to AI: Meta's automated ad tools and AI-generated creative are delivering better results for advertisers. AI is also shifting users away from traditional search, Google’s advertising bread and butter.
source: EMARKETER
Anthropic is fielding investor offers at an $800B valuation 🔒- Investors are circling Anthropic with new funding offers that would more than double its $350B valuation from just two months ago. Anthropic has so far pushed back on the offers, and no deal is confirmed.
Anthropic is exploring building its own AI chips - Currently, Anthropic relies on chips from Google and Amazon to run Claude. Designing its own chips would reduce that dependence and help address the broader shortage of AI computing power.
Hightouch hits $100M in annual revenue from AI marketing tools - The customer data platform has launched a product called ad studio that enables marketers to create on-brand, data-driven ads and personalized campaigns without the need for design teams or agencies.
Hightouch is sponsoring U of Digital’s May AI Accelerator. Hightouch will be demo’ing Ad Studio in one of the deep-dive sessions and all learners will get sandbox access. Enroll now!
Bluefish raises $43M to help brands manage how AI talks about them - When someone asks ChatGPT or Gemini about a product, brands have little say in what comes back. GEO platform Bluefish monitors those responses and helps brands influence them.
Dentsu overhauls its AI platform to automate the marketing cycle 🔒 - The updated Dentsu.Connect is designed to connect and automate workflows across media planning, audience building, and campaign measurement. It also lets clients plug in their own tools and data.
Snap is cutting 1K jobs, roughly 16% of its workforce, citing AI as the reason - CEO Evan Spiegel says AI is reducing the need for repetitive work, allowing the company to do more with fewer people. The cuts are expected to save over $500M annually.
Allbirds says it's ditching footwear and pivoting to become an AI company - The shoe company that famously went from $4B to $39M in 5 years is rebranding itself as NewBird AI, an “AI compute infrastructure” company. The stock jumped 600% on the news.
That’s It For This Week 👋
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