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AdTechGod Pod
The Refresh News: March 24 – Claude Gets Web Search, Apple’s Streaming Gamble, and AdTech’s Next Great Shift
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Thank God we finally had a quiet week in advertising news. I'm Kate with marketecture and this is the Refresh, your weekly download on what went down in advertising. Today is Monday, March 24, 2025, and on today's episode we're talking about cloud enabling web search, Apple TV plus's losses, and then a broader reflection on the current state of the industry right now. So let's get started. Anthropic just enabled web search on cloud, which has most AI enthusiasts saying it's about time. Paid users of cloud will now have access to Claude + web search, which isn't a change to the interface itself, but a change to the way that Claude is able to search and reference across the open web to give more accurate up to date answers. ChatGPT, perplexity, Gemini all already offer this, so Anthropic is getting a little bit caught up to speed here. So why is this a big deal? Large language models all have what's called a knowledge cutoff date. It's essentially an end date for all the information that a model has been trained on. Most models have been trained through sometime in 2023, Deep Sequence trained through July 2024, and Cloud 3.7 Sonnet was trained through October 2024. The way to bridge the gap between the knowledge cutoff date and what's happening in real time is to enable web search. Web enabled search is made possible through two primary processes. The first is search augmentation or retrieval augmented generation, one of the main ways that advertisers will be able to take an off the shelf large language model and customize it to their needs. The second is a layer that operates between the LLM and the web search environment that allows the model to communicate with and reference information from the search environment to pull relevant information back into its response. Moving on to Apple TV plus, who has racked up $1 billion in losses despite having some supreme content. While this feels like a really big deal for most companies, it's not that big of a deal for Apple, who posted $391 billion in revenue in its last fiscal year. It does make you wonder though, what is Apple's end game by having a streaming platform that's basically hemorrhaging cash? Streaming platforms in general have had a difficult time achieving profitability, and it was only until recently when many of them added ad supported options that they saw any success. Apple has given no indication that they're going to move to an ad supported offering. So the most optimistic theory is that Apple is comfortable writing off losses from TV plus to achieve some sort of larger end game. It was rumored a while ago that Apple is building on a dsp, but given the sheer amount of access they have to our lives, the devices we're spending all of our time on, the platforms we're spending a lot of time in, I can't help but wonder if they actually have much greater ambitions. Ambition centered around data and the ability to measure within their ecosystem in a way that no one else can offer. I guess we'll just have to wait and see. Our final segment is a little bit more philosophical, but it's something that I've seen quietly gaining momentum. Seb Joseph over at Digiday wrote a piece that examines more in depth what's going on at the trade desk and what it's signaling for the industry as a whole. The piece provides more evidence and backup for a theory that I've had tossing around in my mind for kind of a while now, and that is that our industry is on the precipice of massive change and it's not just because of AI, although that's certainly a large component. I think the fundamental legacy business model for most companies in the industry is being challenged and re architected. Recent mergers, acquisitions, earnings reports and product releases all illuminate micro trends that are transforming into macro business impacts. Digital and programmatic media is nearing full maturity at the same time that their foundation, the open web, is under attack from changing consumer behavior and the infiltration of AI. Meanwhile, the mechanisms and methodologies that have been the backbone of the digital advertising ecosystem, third party cookies, multi touch attribution, legacy brand safety and ad fraud verification are being eliminated or replaced by tech that is better suited for the future state of the industry. At the same time, advertisers themselves have become much more savvy. They're able to sort through the noise of false promises and half baked solutions, and they're seeking out transparency in order to achieve legitimately smarter and more efficient media buys. They're also seeking to consolidate as many of their media buying processes into one platform as possible. And a lot of times they want to do it themselves to secure that transparency thereafter, as well as to ensure that they have ownership and control over their data from the platform side. The DSPs, SSPs, media networks. They're left to contend with these variables as well as differentiate themselves in a market where everyone is offering virtually the same thing, just different flavors. Businesses are constantly evolving to meet the demands of their industry and their customers at any given time. But right now, in this moment, I think that what's happening is much bigger than just minor course corrections. I haven't had time to fully vet this theory yet, so this is mostly just stream of consciousness. At the dawn of the last big industry shift, which was digital and programmatic, I had just finished racking up student loans, so while I lived this shift out, I was pretty green because of that. I would love to hear perspectives from anyone across the industry, especially those who were in the thick of it at that time. That's all we have time for today, but brace yourselves because upfronts and Q1 earnings are going to be here before we know it. Thanks for listening to the refresh and we'll catch you next week.