Google Ad Manager will serve programmatic and reserved ads as part of email newsletter inventory (it’s in beta). This will be an additional revenue source for newsletters that had previously only sold direct buy ad placements. Also, of course, it doesn’t rely on cookies.
Instacart will extend its first-party retail media data to YouTube powering instant shoppable experiences for its advertisers. Shoppable video campaigns from partners like Clorox and Publicis will leverage Instacart data to target high intent consumers. Viewers will be able to click directly from the videos to an Instacart product page.
Advertising on websites known for misinformation is pervasive across companies in a range of industries, a new study by Nature finds. Taking a sample of around 5,500 such websites, the study found over 40,000 companies engaged in advertising on them with well over nine million instances of ads. A survey of decision-makers showed them largely unaware of their brands advertising on such websites, with 62% saying they were “surprised.”
Disney has agreed to license more than 200 characters, costumes, and environments (but not voices or talent likenesses) to OpenAI for Sora, its gen AI video platform. This is highly unusual for Disney, which generally sues AI models for copyright infringement; in fact, it sued Google for that a day before announcing the OpenAI deal. Disney will also invest $1 billion in OpenAI, nicely illustrating how very eager they are to join the AI party.