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CMO TLDR: Your Weekly Marketing Brief

Weekly Digest - May 2, 2025

Author

Peter Brendan
May 02, 2025

CMO TLDR: Google Faces DOJ Heat & PMax Demands; OpenAI Shops; TTD’s CTV Fees

Google Faces DOJ Heat & PMax Demands

DOJ Case Against Chrome Could Upend Digital Advertising Landscape

The U.S. Department of Justice's ongoing court battle to potentially force Google to sell Chrome represents a significant escalation beyond the company's third-party cookie delays, with regulators targeting the browser as a key gateway that unfairly advantages Google Search. While legal experts consider a full breakup unlikely, the case, alongside Google's recent defeat in its adtech trial, signals mounting regulatory pressure that could fragment the search market and force marketers to diversify strategies across platforms like Bing, Brave, Perplexity, and OpenAI. Industry observers recommend brands reassess channel mix, track search market shifts, maintain flexible media buying strategies, and demand greater transparency from partners as the digital ecosystem faces potentially transformative regulation.

Google Is Finally Showing Buyers Where Pmax Ads Run, As Antitrust Pressure Mounts

Google is rolling out channel-level reporting for its Performance Max AI media buying tool, allowing advertisers to see how campaigns perform across Search, YouTube, Gmail, Display, and other properties - a feature long requested by the tool's one million advertisers seeking more transparency. The update will enable buyers to view metrics like impressions, clicks, conversions, and costs broken down by format and channel, rather than the current aggregated reporting, giving advertisers deeper insights into which placements drive actual value. The timing coincides with mounting antitrust pressure on Google, which faces historic court rulings on its search and adtech monopolies that could potentially result in remedies requiring greater transparency or even structural breakups of its advertising business.

CTV Fees

The Trade Desk's 20% Take Rate Under Fire as CTV Competitors Slash Fees

Despite maintaining a consistent 20% take rate for nearly a decade, The Trade Desk faces mounting competitive pressure from rivals offering significantly lower DSP fees, specifically targeting the growing CTV advertising market. Amazon's DSP is wooing buyers with near-zero fees on its owned-and-operated inventory and just 1% on select streaming publishers, while Comcast's Universal Ads charges no DSP fee and CTV-focused startups like Pontiac DSP and Azerion's Hawk platform offer rates up to 80% lower than industry standards. These challengers can afford lower rates because CTV advertising requires less data processing infrastructure than traditional programmatic display, eliminating the costly cookie-based infrastructure and bidstream data collection that The Trade Desk employs when scanning "600 million impressions every 30 seconds.”

Artificial Intelligence

OpenAI Launches AI Shopping Feature to Rival Perplexity and Amazon

OpenAI unveiled a new AI-powered shopping experience within ChatGPT that allows users to find, compare, and purchase products through shoppable links to retailers like Walmart, rolling out to Plus, Pro, and Free users. The feature, which OpenAI claims generates results independently rather than as advertisements, arrives as ChatGPT's search functionality has become one of its fastest-growing capabilities, with over one billion web searches in the past week. Industry analyst Debra Aho Williamson describes the move as following "the playbook" of Google and Meta, where platforms initially build organic presence before pivoting to advertising revenue models, suggesting OpenAI's $300 billion valuation may soon be supported by a formal advertising business.

Earnings

Meta's AI Advertising Tools Drive 16% Revenue Growth in Q1

Meta reported a 16% year-over-year increase in first-quarter revenue to $42.3 billion, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg highlighting improved advertising as the first of five major AI-driven opportunities for the company. The company's new Generative Ads Recommendation model (GEM) has already increased conversion rates by 5% in Facebook Reels, while adoption of AI creative tools jumped 30% among advertisers last quarter, signaling Meta's strategic focus on transforming advertising into "an AI agent that delivers measurable business results at scale.”

Amazon's Advertising Services Surged 18% in Q1, Outpacing Overall Growth

Amazon reported advertising services revenue of $13.9 billion for the first quarter of 2025, jumping 18% year-over-year (19% excluding foreign exchange impacts) to significantly outperform the company's overall revenue growth of 9%. The robust advertising performance, which continues to deliver double-digit growth following a 24% increase in Q1 2024, remains one of Amazon's highest-performing business segments alongside AWS (17% growth) and far ahead of core retail operations like online stores (5%) and third-party seller services (6%).

Comcast-owned FreeWheel unveiled new features for its Streaming Hub, including AI-powered dynamic floor pricing and enhanced data signals, aiming to create more direct connections between publishers and advertisers. Roku's Miles Fisher reports that the streamlined system simplifies workflows and helps publishers like Roku retain more revenue that would otherwise be lost to the "ad tech tax" amid 2025's challenging economic landscape.

AI-powered "gray bots" from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are driving billions of scraping attempts across media and e-commerce sites, with DoubleVerify reporting they accounted for 16% of general invalid traffic last year. The dual-natured bots, which both fuel AI innovation and potentially undermine publisher revenue models, are prompting security firms like Skyfire and Cequence to develop monetization frameworks that transform these automated visitors from threats into paying users.

Yahoo DSP has launched its own Conversions API (CAPI) product with a LiveRamp integration, joining Meta, Snap, TikTok, and other platforms in the race to better measure cross-channel attribution. According to Yahoo VP Gio Gardelli, early tests show the CAPI solution increases attributable conversions in cookieless browsers by 30-50%, potentially benefiting both advertisers seeking better measurement and publishers with logged-in users who "steal budgets" from those without comparable identity solutions.

Interpublic Group reiterated its forecast for a 1-2% organic revenue decline in 2025 during its Q1 earnings call, with CEO Philippe Krakowsky noting clients are in "scenario planning" mode as they assess potential impacts from global trade disruptions. The company, which reported a better-than-expected but still negative 3.6% organic revenue decline in Q1, emphasized its ability to navigate difficult economic circumstances while progressing toward its planned acquisition by Omnicom Group expected to close in the second half of the year.

Publicis Groupe has purchased Adopt, the Portland-based sports and culture marketing agency founded in 2021 by former Nike executives David Creech and Josh Moore alongside sports agent Rich Paul, adding to its Connected Media division for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition marks the latest in Publicis' aggressive $500 million-plus 2025 shopping spree that has already included data company Lotame, creator shop Influential, Mars United Commerce and BR Media, with CEO Arthur Sadoun having allocated between $800-900 million for further M&A this year focusing on first-party data, production, digital media and innovative technology.

NBCUniversal and GroupM have demonstrated a breakthrough in cross-platform measurement by incorporating standardized Ad-IDs into creative content across both linear TV and digital streaming environments. The test, conducted in collaboration with IAB Tech Lab's Ad Creative ID Framework, resolved a critical industry problem where an NBCU audit found only 15% of incoming digital ad creative had properly appended Ad-IDs, enabling measurement company VideoAmp to accurately track cross-platform frequency for the first time without requiring significant technical changes from advertisers.

Key Article Takeaways - TLDR

  • AI & First-Party Data are Reshaping Measurement & Discovery: AI expands into commerce and search functionalities (like OpenAI's shopping feature), creating new potential advertising surfaces and discovery paths outside traditional channels. Simultaneously, the rollout of platform CAPIs (like Yahoo's) and advancements in cross-platform identifiers (like Ad-ID adoption) underscore the urgent need for robust first-party data strategies and improved measurement capabilities across the board to prove value in a privacy-first world.

  • Regulatory pressure on Google is reaching an inflection point that requires strategic adaptation. The DOJ's case to potentially force Google to sell Chrome, combined with its recent defeat in an ad tech trial, signals that the digital advertising landscape could undergo significant fragmentation. Smart organizations should diversify search strategies beyond Google to include emerging players like Bing, Brave, Perplexity, and OpenAI while demanding greater transparency from partners across the ecosystem.

  • The CTV advertising market is experiencing fee compression that challenges established players. The Trade Desk's consistent 20% take rate is under significant pressure as competitors like Amazon's DSP (offering near-zero fees on owned inventory), Comcast's Universal Ads (charging no DSP fee), and CTV-focused startups offer dramatically lower rates. This competitive environment creates opportunities for advertisers to negotiate better terms while highlighting how CTV's infrastructure requirements differ fundamentally from traditional programmatic display.