Marketecture Podcast Episode 136

Title: Will Jonathan Roberts become People’s Sexiest Man in AI
Date: August 22, 2025
Host: Ari Paparo (A), Co-Host: Eric Franchi (B)
Guest: Jonathan Roberts, Chief Innovation Officer, People Inc. (C)

Overview

This episode dives deeply into the impact of AI on the publishing and advertising industries, featuring Jonathan Roberts of People Inc. (formerly Dotdash Meredith). Topics covered include publisher licensing deals with AI companies, protecting content from unauthorized scraping, the evolving marketplace for information in the AI era, and broader news in ad tech, CTV, and privacy. Throughout, the hosts keep the tone witty and incisive, with memorable analogies and quick banter.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. People Inc.: New Name, Legacy Brands

• People Inc. is the new name for Dotdash Meredith, nodding to their Time Inc. heritage.
  • Properties: People, Better Homes and Gardens, Travel & Leisure, Investopedia, Food & Wine, Allrecipes, Real Simple.
  • Mission: Upholding the value of human-created journalism (“by people, for people”).
  • (04:33-05:32)

2. AI in Publishing: Practical Applications and Limits

• Where AI Helps:
  • Coding assistance, back-office research, generating alt text, and "manual grunt labor" tasks.
  • “What things that were hard are now easy, and what things are still hard?” (07:32, Roberts)
• Where Human Work Still Matters:
  • Journalistic writing, creative content, and anything beyond “average” outputs.
  • “The output of an AI system is average definition...We didn't get into this business to write average content.” (09:03, Roberts)
• The Goal: Use AI to streamline the work so humans can focus on quality journalism.
• Fun AI Use Cases:
  • Jonathan uses AI to plan travel and gardening (“built a Sicilian AI travel app”). (06:16-06:41)

3. Protecting Content: Licensing, Blocking, and the AI Economy

• OpenAI Partnership: First US publisher deal—multi-year, non-exclusive deal including:

  1. Payment for Training: Content can be used for model training during the term.
  2. Attribution: OpenAI must cite People Inc. content.
  3. Co-development: Collaborative tech initiatives (e.g., OpenAI tech in People’s targeting tools).
  • “We did the first OpenAI deal of any publisher in the US… it’s got three parts.” (11:46-13:44, Roberts)

• On Unlearning Content:

  • Once AI models are trained, “nobody has yet acknowledged or agreed or tried to untrain a model from a publisher.” (14:00-14:27, Roberts)

• Real-time Web Scraping:

  • AI models continuously need updated, quality information—not just from historic training, changing publisher-AI relationships.
    • “These systems are not one and done…suddenly these systems are not one and done.” (15:10-16:19, Roberts)

• Blocking Unauthorized AI Bots:

  • Using Cloudflare and other CDNs to block scraping at the bot layer; 10.5 million unauthorized attempts blocked in a week.
  • “Cloudflare, they get blocks at the…CDN layer, at the bot layer.” (16:43-17:35, Roberts)

• The Future of Information as “Fuel” for AI:

  • There must be an economy for information. “There isn’t a marketplace for information until you stop people getting it for free.” (18:30, Roberts)

4. Google, Search, and Content Usage Rights

• Search vs. AI Use Cases:
  • Indexing for discoverability ≠ licensing for AI reasoning and responses.
    • “That doesn't…give you the right to read, store and reason on that content. For AI, that's a totally different use case.” (21:31-22:45, Roberts)
• Snippets versus Overviews:
  • Snippets helped publishers (drove deeper engagement), but full AI-generated overviews are “attempting to actually be the publisher.”
    • “It is an extreme change in degree.” (23:19-24:38, Roberts)

5. AEO/GEO: Marketers & the Answer Engine Optimization Problem

• Marketer Dilemma: Can’t influence choices when AI selects a single answer for everyone.
  • “The job of a marketer is to affect choices…when it’s one single monolithic AI system…you can’t affect the person, because the choice got made already.” (25:20, Roberts)
• Chat vs. Search User Experience:
  • Chatbots tend to give ‘average’ answers, which suppresses niche or minority needs.
    • “If everyone gets the majority answer, nobody gets the minority answer. We all have minority needs…” (27:32, Roberts)
• Future UX:
  • More personalized, interactive AI that asks for more user input could improve this.
    • “You can build these systems that know what they do not know and therefore ask you for the extra information so they can give you a better answer for you.” (29:08-30:06, Roberts)

6. Memorable Moments, Jokes, and Quotable Exchanges

• “As the owner of all these traditional content properties...you're facing a lot of challenges with AI…” (06:58, Paparo)
• “You should start referring to them as tokens, I guess. Ask your writers how many billion tokens.” (11:07, Paparo)
• People's “Sexiest Man Alive” and AI:
  • “We’ve done one every year for over 50 years, so there’s at least 50 sexiest men alive.” (30:20, Roberts)
  • “I’m going to hire some sort of technology vendor to submit my photo over and over again to see if potentially I can rise in that ranking.” (30:36, Paparo)

News of the Week (with Eric Franchi)

Fundraising and Startups

• Bluefish: Raised $20 million for LLM search optimization—ad tech veterans returning to help brands ‘rank’ in AI-generated results.

  • “This category is exploding…Bluefish is actually the second company with deep ad tech roots in this space.” (33:16, Franchi)

• Discussion of ad tech SEO/SEM analogies—is Answer Engine Optimization the new search business?

• “Human-created content is just the data that feeds all of this stuff. And it’s essential.” (34:50, Franchi)

Standards and Blocking Initiatives

• IAB’s AI Monetization Framework: Block Bot Traffic, LLM-Friendly Discovery, LLM Ingest API.

• Technical progression: serving content from the “open web” to a “ring-fenced” system.

  • “You’re sort of like putting a ring fence around your website.” (37:33, Paparo)

• Skepticism on Blocking Effectiveness:

  • “The LLMs have such massive leverage and workarounds…things like this are effectively not going to work.” (38:54, Franchi citing Trey Totone)

AI Impact on Search and Google

• AI Increases Search Query Volume:

  • Microtest indicated AI surfacing new queries to Google Trends.
    • “The general data point is that AI reduces the click out to publishers, but it’s increasing the amount of searching…” (40:10, Paparo)
    • “The phrase ‘organic Abercrombie socks’...and after 24 hours it popped up on trends.” (41:36, Franchi)

• Takeaway: Trends might indicate Google is understating its search volume declines.

Commerce Media and AI Optimizations

• TikTok’s “GMV Max”:
  • Mandating its algorithm for commerce advertisers.
    • “GMV Max is a terrible name…But it actually is saying what it does in a way that pmax doesn’t.” (43:21, Paparo)
  • Pros/Cons: For TikTok, maximized optimization. For brands, limited visibility/control over what’s being shown.

Privacy and Measurement Allegations

• Meta/Facebook ROAS Scandal:
  • Whistleblower claims Meta counted tax/shipping in revenue and used deterministic IDs even without ATT consent.
    • “That sounds like it has to be an error. Like somebody just messed up on that.” (46:20, Paparo)
  • Broader debate over Apple’s privacy jurisdiction and regulatory gray areas.

CTV M&A and IPO News

• MSNBC rebranding to “MS. Now”: General confusion and mockery over new branding.

  • “What does 'my' mean in that sentence?” (50:00, Paparo)

• Nexstar buying Tegna: Local TV’s scale-constrained legacy and regulatory context—may need more scale to compete with streaming.

• LG Ads IPO: Born from Alfonso acquisition; revenue cited as “1 trillion won,” around $750 million USD.

Memorable Quotes & Timestamps

• On AI-created content:
  • "If all we've managed to do is create AI content farms, that's not progress, that's backsliding." (09:03, Roberts)
• On content licensing:
  • "There isn't a marketplace for information until you stop people getting it for free." (18:30, Roberts)
• On AEO/Answer Engine Optimization:
  • "If everyone gets the majority answer, nobody gets the minority answer...You're only getting that bland majority..." (27:32, Roberts)
• On local TV consolidation:
  • "I think holding them to these older rules maybe doesn't make sense anymore." (53:13, Paparo)
• On billionaires & giving pledges:
  • “If you were to give me $100 million, I’d give it away, too.” (59:08, Paparo)

Conclusion

This episode delivers a rich, fast-paced, and entertaining look at the intersection of AI, publishing, and advertising, punctuated by sharp industry observations and memorable one-liners from all parties. Jonathan Roberts offers a publisher’s view of AI’s true value and risks, while Ari and Eric round out the news with speculation, opinions, and plenty of in-jokes for ad tech natives.

For more insights and interviews, visit Marketecture.