CMO TLDR: Google, Publicis and the New AI Ad Economy
Publicis Cracks AI at Scale
Publicis Widens AI Lead as Rivals Struggle to Monetize
Publicis Groupe reported strong Q4 growth of 5.9%, wrapping up a year where CEO Arthur Sadoun says the French advertising giant cracked what most competitors haven't: making generative AI actually profitable at enterprise scale. The company's decade-long investment of €14 billion in data and technology is paying off with expanding margins and 5,000 new hires, even as the broader ad industry shrinks and rivals face expected negative growth. Publicis is projecting another €1 billion in additional revenue for 2026 and aims to be the industry's "Most Valuable Partner" by building AI solutions that deliver real business outcomes, not just pilot projects that fail to scale.
Google Proves Ads Still Power AI
Google Doubles Down on AI with $185 Billion Spending Spree
Google plans to double its capital expenditure to as much as $185 billion in 2026, far exceeding analyst expectations, as strong advertising and cloud revenue give the search giant firepower for its massive AI bet. The company reported Q4 revenue of $113.8 billion, up 18% year over year, with its core search and advertising business growing 17% to $63.1 billion and allaying fears that AI chatbots are stealing users. Google says its Gemini AI models are driving significant improvements across all areas of marketing, from better query understanding to more accurate ad targeting, with the technology now reaching 750 million monthly active users and helping expand the "entire playing field that advertisers can compete on."
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Lego is hiring programmatic experts in the US and Denmark to expand its in-house media buying capabilities, joining retailers like Boots and brands like Dollar Shave Club in bringing digital advertising operations inside despite programmatic remaining the hardest specialty to staff internally.
CloudX, founded by the creators of MoPub, launched its mobile ad platform that uses AI agents to automate tedious ad operations tasks like setting price floors and managing line items while running auctions in a secure trusted execution environment to address buyer concerns about signal leakage.
OpenAI is requiring advertisers to commit at least $200,000 to participate in its limited ChatGPT ad beta launching as early as February 6, with some retail and streaming brands receiving budget requests closer to $250,000 as the company tests impression-based ads priced around $60 CPM.
Nielsen is piloting a new measurement approach during the Super Bowl that uses data from its Portable People Meter Wearables to more accurately capture co-viewing, though the results won't immediately be incorporated into its official currency and will instead be shared with clients as impact data in a few weeks.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau released proposed legislation called the AI Accountability for Publishers Act that would require AI companies to pay for publisher content they scrape to train models, warning that without immediate action, the ad-supported publishing industry will collapse within years as AI firms undermine the economic model that funds free content online.
Amazon Ads launched a beta program for its Model Context Protocol server that acts as a translation layer connecting advertisers' existing APIs to agentic AI systems, allowing tools to respond to natural language prompts and automate tasks like building full campaigns or shifting keywords without requiring custom integrations for each API.