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AdTechGod Pod
The Refresh News: July 14 - Leadership Shakeups, Social Surges, and the AI Browser Wars: A Wild Week in Adland
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- [00:00]
Philo Ads Representative
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- [00:35]
Audiohook Representative
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- [01:21]
Kate from Marketexture
They say you can't have it all, but with this episode of the Refresh, we're going to try because there was a lot of news that flew through adlan last week that I don't want you to miss out on. I'm Kate with marketexture, and this is the Refresh, your weekly download on what went down in advertising. Today is Monday, July 14, and this week we're covering a series of industry shakeups that led to more than a few audible gasps, including leadership switch ups at X&WPP, WPP's shaky and unexpected H1 earnings call, social platforms revising their Playbooks, and an escalation of the browser wars between Perplexity, OpenAI and Google. Many thanks to our sponsor Freewheel for the continued support. Now, let's get into it. So starting things off with some major leadership shakeups across the industry, Linda Yakarino's departure from X probably takes the cake as the biggest shocker, both at the fact that she was finally leaving and at the fact that she didn't do it sooner. After a strong tenure at NBC Universal, she joined X in May of 2023 primarily to lead the crusade to regain advertiser trust after it had largely been torched by Elon Musk. Anyone who's been following X and Elon's antics know that Ms. Yakarina was fighting an ongoing uphill battle. But however you feel about her time at X, it's hard to say she didn't put up a pretty good fight, providing a positive attitude and stability in the middle of ongoing chaos. As far as what's next for X, well, that's not Linda's problem anymore, but her exit could very likely mean a continued decline in advertiser revenues, which might not matter too much, as it's also being speculated that Elon Musk may continue with a larger folding of X into XAI as a pipeline for training, data and more extensive AI services. While Linda Yaccarino stepped away as CEO, we saw two newcomers step up. The first was Brian Gleason, who was officially announced as CTAG's next CEO. CTAG is a neuro contextual advertising company that uses its proprietary AI known as liz, to understand not just the content of web pages and CTV or video streams, but more critically, the interest, emotion and intent behind that content in real time. Brian Gleason's resume includes a long career in leadership roles including global CEO at Zaxis, Global Chief Commercial Officer at Group M, and most recently CRO and President at Criteo. Prior to acquiring Brian Gleason, CTAG acquired Beachfront, a supply side platform that specializes in TV and video, in June of last year. The moves come as seedtag eyes aggressive growth to position itself as a leader in the AI powered contextual space in the face of a rapidly evolving advertising ecosystem. Our final addition to the LinkedIn job update crew is Cindy Rose, who was just named Mark Reed's successor as WPP CEO following Reed's recent announcement that he'd be retiring at the end of 2025. A few weeks ago, I mentioned that WPP's best bet for a new CEO would be someone with a tech background and not necessarily a traditional agency background. It seems like that's exactly where WPP's head was at, given Rose's most recent roles at Microsoft, where she led multibillion dollar operations and helped large enterprises adopt AI and reshape their business models. She's also held senior leadership roles at major global companies including Disney, where she helped to launch hits like Finding Nemo in the UK, Virgin Media and Vodafone. WPP's chair Philip Jansen affirmed their selection and confidence in Rose's ability, stating her expertise in this landscape will be hugely valuable to WPP as the industry navigates fundamental changes and macroeconomic uncertainty. The move reinforces WPP's intention to transform into an AI and tech organization as it tries to regain momentum and profitability in the wake of a pretty rough past year. Speaking of tough times, WPP hosted an unscheduled H1 earnings update late last week, led by Mark Reed. And let's just say the update did not leave investors feeling warm and fuzzy as WPP unexpectedly cut its full year revenue guidance for 2025. They're now forecasting a 3 to 5% decline versus their earlier estimate of a 0 to 2% drop, citing intensified macro pressures and weaker client spending, which is maybe putting it lightly. Major client losses like Coca Cola's $700 million North America media Business, Paramount and Mars have especially hurt the agency's business. Despite wins with Heineken and Levi's outgoing CEO Mark Reed emphasized that WPP will keep Investing heavily in AI and data, such as its just over $400 million annual spend on WPP Open, its proprietary AI driven media activation platform and its recent Infosum acquisition to retool for future growth amid fierce competition from rivals like Publicist Group. Moving over to our social shakeups with news from threads, Instagram and YouTube. First up is Threads, whose daily app users are seriously gaining on Nexus. Meta's Threads is quickly closing the gap on X, with mobile daily active users jumping to 115 million in June, up nearly 128% year over year, while X's mobile base has dropped to around 132 million, down about 15% in the U.S. threads now has over 15 million daily app users compared to X's 23 million, signaling a real threat to Elon Musk's platform. X still dominates on desktop, with nearly 146 million daily visits versus Threads modest 7 million, but the overall momentum is clearly shifting. The app's steady growth is being fueled by the introduction of more creator friendly features, although some users may debate you on the friendly part of that statement and Meta's strategy to siphon disillusioned Twitter users seeking a more stable alternative. Of course, it doesn't hurt that Meta can continue to tap into its existing user base on Instagram to drive traffic over to Threads. Jumping over to Instagram, whose content is now indexable on Google, the social platform is finally allowing public posts from business and creator accounts to be indexed in Google search. Now, to be fair, this is something that Google has actually been doing for years, but Instagram is now giving users the ability to specifically and officially opt into this this feature making content that's publicly posted to Instagram like reels and posts, discoverable beyond the app. This is a big shift in how Instagram content can drive organic traffic and engagement, giving creators and brands a massive visibility boost. The feature is opt in by default, but users can manually disable it if they want to keep their content within the walls of Instagram. This announcement should compel you as an advertiser to revise your content and SEO strategy if you haven't already, to incorporate social search and social SEO best practices. Finally, we have YouTube, who seems to be siding with humans instead of machines as they tighten monetization rules for AI content. They announced updates to their creator policies to ban fully AI generated or faceless content from its partner program, meaning this content can't be monetized. The change is meant to protect authenticity and curb low quality spam as generative video tools become more widespread. The changes should serve as a warning signal for creators experimenting with or looking to capitalize on the AI wave, especially considering YouTube's Creator program is known for being one of the more lucrative programs when compared to TikTok and Instagram. Alright, to close things out, let's talk browser wars. With both Perplexity and OpenAI making moves this week, promising radical shifts from traditional web surfing, Perplexity finally released their Comet browser, which is immediately available to its premium users. Comet blends AI powered search with an always on assistant that summarizes pages, remembers what you're doing across tabs, and even helps with tasks like booking meetings, all while prioritizing privacy. OpenAI's rumored browser will offer a similar experience, layering in a chatgpt like interface and an operator AI agent to handle form fills, reservations and other web tours autonomously. Unlike traditional browsers that rely on static clicks and links and disjointed web experiences, these AI browsers make browsing conversational and proactive, paving the way for new ad opportunities like sponsored answers in Assistant brand offers or real time context based placements that tap into deeper user intent. Whether or Not Perplexity or OpenAI will be able to capture meaningful market share from Google remains to be seen. However, their ability to build a system that directly integrates emerging AI capabilities into a fluid system rather than siloing them into disjointed tools could be a major selling point for consumers customers if Google doesn't get to them first. Personally, I've been a bit surprised to see Google continue to lag here, although they are walking a fine line between advancing their capabilities forward while not alienating users and potentially advertisers. Alright, I think we did it. We got to have it all by covering all of the headlines that happened this past week in advertising. That's all for this time. Thanks for joining us for the refresh and we'll catch you next week. It.