CMO TLDR: Earnings, Agents, and Publicis CEO calls out Omnicom
PubMatic Earnings
PubMatic Bets on AI to Counter Trade Desk Turbulence
PubMatic reported Q3 revenue of $68 million, down 5% year over year, after what appears to be The Trade Desk's new Kokai platform triggered a summer spending dip that has since stabilized. The ad tech company is fighting back with aggressive AI investments across infrastructure, applications, and transactions, claiming its NVIDIA partnership delivers 5x faster bid responses while its emerging revenue streams grew over 80% year over year. CEO Rajeev Goel dismissed The Trade Desk's "reseller" jabs as noise, pointing to PubMatic's yield optimization capabilities and its own push into direct buyer relationships through its Activate platform, which saw campaigns jump 4x in nine months.
AI Agents
Google and Amazon Unleash AI Agents to Automate Ad Buying
Google launched Ads Advisor and Analytics Advisor chatbots across all English-language accounts, letting marketers turn loose campaign briefs into executable media plans while the AI handles optimization and creative generation for over one million Performance Max advertisers. Amazon followed with its own agentic overhaul, merging its DSP and Sponsored Ads into a unified Campaign Manager topped with planning and creative agents that can build audiences and generate assets in moments instead of hours. The platforms insist they're targeting small advertisers who never hired agencies rather than displacing them, but the automation push forces shops to move from execution button pushing into higher value strategy and interpretation work, or risk becoming obsolete.
Fuzzy Math
Publicis CEO Calls Out Omnicom's Accounting Methods Ahead of IPG Merger
Publicis Groupe CEO Arthur Sadoun publicly challenged Omnicom's practice of reporting gross revenue instead of net revenue, arguing the accounting difference distorts industry comparisons now that Omnicom is set to become the largest holding company through its IPG acquisition. Gross revenue includes pass-through costs like production fees and influencer payments, while net revenue shows what agencies actually keep, with the difference potentially making Omnicom's organic growth appear higher and profit margins look lower than competitors like WPP, Publicis, and Dentsu. Sadoun warned that if Omnicom doesn't switch to industry-standard net revenue reporting, Publicis will start reporting gross revenue itself to enable accurate comparisons, doing so transparently over several quarters.
Quick Links
The Daily Mail's clickthrough rate plummets by 80% to 90% when Google's AI Overviews appear in search results. However, the publisher says the impact on overall traffic remains minimal because most of its audience comes directly to the site. AI summaries rarely trigger for breaking news stories that they cover.
The IAB Tech Lab's Agentic RTB Framework speeds up programmatic ad auctions by running bidding processes in shared computing environments rather than across multiple external systems, cutting transaction times from up to 600 milliseconds to a fraction of that while letting advertisers and publishers deploy autonomous software agents directly into real-time bidding.
Life360 will pay roughly $120 million in cash and stock to acquire ad tech company Nativo, combining the family safety app's location data with Nativo's network of premium publishers to help brands reach families across mobile, web, and connected TV.
Amazon launched location-based interactive video ads on Prime Video that let small and local businesses target customers by geography, adding features like "book an appointment" buttons to reach viewers beyond its own retail ecosystem.
Key Article Takeaways - TLDR
While AI-powered ad tools from Google or Amazon offer value, advertisers still need independent verification, especially around measurement and performance. Google, Meta, and programmatic reps have long counseled me to increase budget allocations to boost performance. Their AI agents will inevitably echo the same recommendation: spend more with us.