Intro
Leaning into large language models (LLMs)
LLMs are changing how users interact with the digital world. For many brands the first instinct is to hide and protect against genAI value erosion. I think that’s the wrong take. Consider how SEO changed consumer preference: to hide from SEO makes you invisible to modern customer discovery. LLMs represent an opportunity for discovery in a new medium.
Wikipedia— a product many would consider the most at risk from the compressed knowledge of an LLM— is demonstrating this by leaning into data availability, making it easier for machines to access their data.
You don’t want to be invisible to an incredibly fast growing channel — one growing at 40% per month. Bain gives excellent advice-- takeaways that won’t be foreign to any marketer: measure, optimize, and iterate to take advantage of the new medium.
Industry Buzz
Advertising budgets in a recession [✓ seen: 2022]
Like most economic news lately, any “state of the market” publication is out of date the instant it’s published. That said, you can tell a lot about the financial market outlook by looking at the titles of advertising thought leadership pieces being produced. “Advertising strategy in a recession” titles are eerily familiar, I’m coming across a lot of purple links from a couple of years ago. The tl;dr: advertising dollars fall during a recession, performance ads are more resilient, and demand consolidates and flocks to the large aggregated platforms.
Luma’s quarterly missive on the market gives a summary on the ad and martech markets. Their tl;dr: companies are acquiring more, but public ad and martech indices are down, and (surprisingly) funding at a two-year high, (unsurprisingly) mostly driven by AI.
Walled Gardens
Anti-monopoly verdicts coming fast, years too late
A federal court ruled Google’s AdX (Exchange) and DFP (SSP) created a monopoly and will seek to require selling off their third party advertising Network business. This ruling might have been a big deal 20 years ago when users spent most of their time on the open web and Google made 46% of their ad revenue came through the third party Network (source paywall) but as online usage has moved to logged-in “Content Fortresses”, the Network business has degraded in performance (and margin). Today Google makes closer to 10% from this business. Google will still appeal, but it’s probably a moot point.
This comes at the same time the DoJ is trying to force Google to sell off Chrome four years after they succeeded in a court claim Google has a search monopoly.
Chasing another bold verdict in the very same courtroom — also years too late — the Federal Trade Commission is (FTC) revisiting its 2019 revisitation of its 2012 approval of Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram. Even though Zuck has offered the court a cool billion to settle, the case is projected to fail, in the words of Ben Thompson: “The government is making a case from the late 2010s, using evidence from the early 2010s, that Meta is a monopoly in the 2020s, and thus should have to divest acquisitions made over a decade ago.”
Amazon and Apple aren't immune to the punitive scrutiny.
That said the FTC is making some helpful rulings that are right on time: such as forcing Airbnb to display full prices (looking at you $250 cleaning fee) and dinging Uber for falsely claiming “savings of $25 a month” for subscriptions to Uber One, then telling users to contact customer service to cancel, but giving them no way to do so.
Privacy & Security
So....cookies aren't going away?
Six years later, after a slew of new technology acronyms, and too many news articles to count, Google is pulling an about-face and keeping cookies as-is for Chrome. Meaning: third-party cookies are allowed, and end users can manage their preferences through Chrome's existing browser settings.
This represents a boon for the existing online advertising ecosystem-- where third-party cookies are incredibly important for user identification and retargeting-- because Chrome still represents more than half of the browser market share. To quantify how "incredibly important" cookies are for ads, Safari-- which has deprecated cookies-- attracts 60% lower CPM rates, due to less effective performance.
Looking at the macro-climate, it's not hard to see why. The groundswell movement of privacy reform and the removal of third-party tracking has lost the urgency and clamor it once had. Headlines lauding federal privacy inquiries of big tech have given way to some of the very same people voicing concerns that privacy-controlled data leads to monopoly behavior. Public sentiment has shifted, where once the public would have applauded, if Google took away cookies today, it would likely land them in court.
This is not an idle quip: last month, France slapped Apple's wrist with a 162 million-dollar fine for "an antitrust violation disguised as privacy reform." But a slap might be overstating it, $162 million to Apple is the equivalent of $25 for the average American household.
It just goes to show that history is a pendulum, not a straight line, and if there's a personal lesson involved, it's I can't help feel jealous of all the people who just ignored Google Privacy Sandbox until it went away.
Amanda's Take
What AI-native means for mobile devs
AI isn't just showing up in chatbots and headshots anymore—it's becoming the core of how a lot of modern apps are built. As Programming Insider puts it, “AI is no longer just a feature—it’s a standard.”
With the rise of AI-native apps, we’re seeing it show up in everything from virtual assistants to predictive latte orders. These mobile experiences are built with AI at the foundation, not as an afterthought. For developers, this means a new playbook—rethinking UX, automation, personalization, and even data architecture.
Done right, AI-native development delivers major value: task automation, improved security, and more personalized experiences. But it also comes with new technical and data complexity. Developers are encouraged to embrace AI-native approaches to stay competitive—so if you’re not already building with AI in mind, now’s the time to weigh the tradeoffs.
Related Reading: Ads Are Getting AI-Native Too
AI isn’t just reshaping how apps are built—it’s starting to influence how they’re monetized. Business Insider reports that adtech startup Nexad just raised $6M to power native ads within AI chat platforms. As AI-driven interfaces grow, so will new opportunities (and challenges) for user engagement and monetization.