U of Digital Newsletter - 5/29/25 (premium)

May 22nd-May 28th // Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes

Below is a roundup of last week’s notable industry news, with summaries and our opinions. Lighting round format this week, starting with a big AI acquisition!

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`Top Stories 👁️

Salesforce to acquire data management company Informatica in $8 billion deal - The AI arms race continues with this deal. Informatica is an AI-powered cloud platform that helps businesses ingest, transform, and share data across various cloud environments. By integrating Informatica’s strengths in metadata, data cataloging, integration, and governance with its own "Agentforce" AI platform, Salesforce wants to give its AI agents a more comprehensive understanding of data, leading to "smarter, safer, and more scalable outcomes." The move, funded by a mix of cash and new debt, is the latest in a long line of big buys for Salesforce, which previously snapped up Slack, Tableau, and MuleSoft to expand its enterprise offerings.

Opinion: Last year, Salesforce shelved talks with Informatica after the companies failed to agree on deal terms. What changed? Could be AI hysteria. Everyone is investing heavily in AI, but the trick here will be how seamlessly Salesforce can integrate Informatica into its complex ecosystem. Unfortunately, Salesforce has a mixed track record with mega-acquisitions. Since Informatica competes with MuleSoft, this deal could attract some regulatory scrutiny. 

Google pitches AI search and video to advertisers—5 takeaways for brands🔒- At the Google Marketing Live event last week, the tech giant detailed its vision for an AI-centric marketing landscape. Key new developments include expanded advertising within "AI Overviews" (into desktop search and other global markets; the "Veo 3" video-generating AI model will be available in Google Ads and Merchant Center; a “Smart Bidding Exploration” tool will recommend high-performing search queries; and new AI-driven analytics tools.

This suite of innovations within the ad suite signals a fundamental change in how Google believes consumers will discover things online, requiring marketers to adapt as Google's AI aims to anticipate user needs more deeply. However, the increasing reliance on AI also fuels "black box" concerns among publishers and marketers who fear losing even more control of their campaigns.

Opinion: With 1.5B people already using AI Overviews monthly, Google has already quietly engineered a massive change to search. And Google is obviously awesome at monetizing it through ads. So much for ChatGPT eating their lunch! Google's AI now decides what people see before they even know they want it. Big brands with deep pockets that can adapt quickly to AI Mode advertising and multimodal optimization will thrive, but it will be harder for anyone who built their strategies around traditional SEO. Time to evolve.

Publicis Deepens Influencer Marketing Push With Deal for Captiv8🔒- The French agency holding company is expanding its footprint in the booming influencer marketing category with this $150M deal. Captive8's platform connects creators to brands that are increasingly courting influencers as consumer attention shifts from traditional media to social media. Publicis will combine Captive8's AI-powered tech, social commerce capabilities, and network of 15M creators with its 2024 purchase of Influential and its data arm, Epsilon. Influencer marketing spending has doubled since 2021 and is expected to grow 15% this year, reaching $10.52B, according to eMarketer. The deal follows Publicis’ deals for Lotame and sports and culture marketing agency Adopt.

Opinion: By integrating Captiv8's AI-powered influencer technology with Influential's scale and Epsilon's identity data, Publicis may be creating a powerful ecosystem that other players can't match. This is all part of Publicis' MO, which revolves around technology strategy, leadership, and deal-making, according to LUMA Partners' Terry Kawaja. That’s the secret sauce that has Publicis outperforming other agency holdcos..

True Buys: ANA Finds Programmatic Improvement, Unveils Terms For Yielding More - Two years ago, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) studied the digital advertising supply chain and found 15% of ad spend was flowing to low-quality "made-for-advertising" (MFA) sites. According to the ANA's most recent update, MFA sites are only receiving 0.4% of total programmatic spending, and the share of working media dollars has improved by 14%. Despite these gains, working media still only accounts for about 40 cents of every media dollar spent, with the rest consumed by overhead like transaction fees and fraudulent traffic. To help marketers better track and understand value, the ANA has introduced new metrics: "TrueAdSpend Index," which tracks working media dollars, and the "TrueCPM Index," which measures the price paid for real, quality ads.  (Reminder: Take the free course we built in partnership with the ANA to better understand programmatic supply quality issues, TrueAdSpend, TrueCPM, and other solutions!)

Opinion: Advertisers are still lighting $21.6B on fire due to invalid traffic, non-viewable ad impressions, and other types of lost media value. That represents a huge opportunity to make their media more effective with common-sense tactics such as reducing supply partners and tightening domain lists.

Amazon Pitch Deck Shows Prime Video Expanding Contextual Ad-Targeting Capabilities🔒- Prime Video is dramatically expanding beyond basic genre targeting with an AI-powered contextual ad system that will analyze content using 700 metadata tags based on transcripts, plot outlines, and synopses to create more sophisticated audience categories. This evolution could make Prime Video's vast content library more valuable to advertisers, particularly smaller brands without dedicated agencies, as it simplifies media planning while unlocking better contextual performance across long-tail content and FAST channels. At the same time, Amazon continues to develop its ad offerings, including a new dedicated Prebid adapter for publishers that promotes open standards and interoperability, and partnerships with companies like InfoSum and Magnite that make it easier to work with both advertisers and publishers.

Opinion: Amazon's global ad business hit $56B last year🔒, and it's growing faster than Google and Meta's. Making it easier for consumers to spend on its platform helped Amazon become one of the world's largest retailers, and it's been fascinating to watch the company apply some of the same principles to its ads business.

Ad tech platform MNTN valued at $1.6B in another sign of IPO markets comeback - MNTN's successful IPO raised $187.2M, with shares jumping 31% in their NYSE debut, opening at $21 compared to the $16 IPO price. MNTN specializes in performance TV marketing on CTV, with a customer count that grew 89% year over year in Q1. One third of MNTN employees are engineers, a proportion that will increase to 50% by the end of the year. MNTN's IPO follows the recent successful IPO of Israeli trading platform eToro.

Opinion: Not sure if two positive IPOs make a trend, especially when the broader market remains fundamentally constrained by political uncertainty and economic headwinds, but we’ll take it! Go ad tech!

OpenAI's bold vision for ChatGPT seems poised for a familiar business model: ads🔒- OpenAI paid $6.5B last week for io, the design firm launched by Jony Ive, the iPhone's creative visionary and chief architect. Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are now collaborating on a new AI companion device that is likely to push OpenAI closer to an ad model, according to Digiday. With OpenAI burning through cash, ads could help cover the costs to scale AI and hardware. Only a small fraction of ChatGPT's vast user base currently pays for subscriptions, making the remaining 96% a large audience for ad-supported services. The recent addition of former Meta executive Fidji Simo, the former Instacart CEO known for architecting Meta's ad monetization, further signals OpenAI's strategic move toward ads.

Opinion: First off, the Ive-Altman lovefest in this video was … lame. Especially because there was no actual product announcement! We watched till the very end, all nine minutes and twenty-one seconds, and got a whole lot of nothing. Ugh.

OpenAI expects to lose $44B before (hopefully) turning a profit in 2029. It's hard to see how the company makes it there without ads. As Digiday noted, you don't hire the person who helped build Facebook's ad empire unless you're planning to build your own.

Other Notable Headlines
(that you should know about too) 🤓 

LiveRamp earnings (👍): Revenue was up 10% to $189M, beating estimates. The company plans to prioritize making its platform faster and easier to use and help customers optimize ad spend. Shares rose by double digits.

Accenture Song CEO Droga Stepping Down - David Droga will take on a broader strategic role at Accenture, which bought his ad agency, Droga5, in 2019.

Instacart names Chris Rogers as CEO after Fidji Simo’s exit for OpenAI - Rogers joined Instacart in 2019 after an 11-year career with Apple.

'We're seeing an immense uplift in the scale': How generative AI is fueling the next wave of ad tech fraud🔒- Fraudsters are using AI to spoof ads.txt files and create more convincing fake websites, user traffic, and engagement.

Uber Will Sell In-Car Ads in New York City, Reversing a Longstanding Ban🔒- The ads will begin airing in June. Uber will give 25% of the ad revenue to drivers.

How flexibility could funnel more upfront dollars to Amazon & Netflix this year🔒- Amazon and Netflix let upfront advertisers cancel their commitments up to 14 days before a guaranteed deal is supposed to start running, which is pretty attractive to marketers in times of economic uncertainty.

Marketecture Media Acquires Serial Marketers and AI Marketers Guild Communities in Continued Expansion Into Brand Marketing - David Berkowitz, founder of both communities, will become Marketecture Media's chief community officer.

RedBird To Buy 'The Telegraph' For $674M - The American investment firm wants to boost The Telegraph’s digital operations and expand the brand internationally, especially in the US.

Comcast Advertising Introduces New AI Platform to Help Small and Local Businesses Create Cost Effective Commercials in Minutes - Comcast Advertising and AI pioneer Waymark want to help advertisers easily make TV-grade ads for a fraction of the cost.

Fortnite In Legal Trouble After Adding AI Darth Vader - The Screen Actors Guild is accusing Epic Games of going to the dark side for adding an AI-powered Darth Vader to Fortnite without communicating or bargaining with SAG-AFTRA first.

That’s It For This Week 👋

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