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Ad-tech

Desk brief

State of Play

Revised Nov 1, 2026

The moment. Search is paying for the AI that is replacing it. Adweek’s Kendra Barnett reports Alphabet’s Q3 search revenue growth slowed to 12% from 17% the quarter before, with executives citing AI Mode’s lower ad monetization, and TechCrunch has Google taking AI Mode ads international anyway. Google is also moving to personalize those ads with signals from Gmail and Photos. Meta rebuilt the engine underneath its feed: AdExchanger’s Allison Schiff reports an LLM-based ranking model and a retrieval overhaul letting Andromeda score more than a billion ads per second. OpenAI kept building its ad business in public, taking ChatGPT ads to 26 more countries for 89 in all, adding an automatic bid strategy, and applying creative enhancements to existing ads from October 30 unless an advertiser opts out. The FTC cleared Publicis’s LiveRamp acquisition under a consent order with a five-year data firewall.

The tension. The platforms are editing the work and moving the liability to the buyer. Adweek has Meta’s AI reworking creative without being asked, and Meta’s new terms make advertisers solely responsible for whatever it generates, a change Meta pushed from October 30 to November 20 after publisher trade bodies objected. Identity is closing in one browser and opening in another inbox: Apple confirmed it has broken identity resolution vendors’ tracking on Safari, while Google’s policy now lets Gmail, Drive and Photos data feed ads once a user connects them. CTV’s plumbing is still the weak joint: The Measure’s Jon Lafayette reports Wurl finding 89% of CTV ad requests lack a usable program name, and executives from Magnite to The Trade Desk name frequency waste as the problem nobody has fixed. Indie agencies now ask aloud whether they need a DSP at all.

Who’s moving. Google, with search growth at 12% and AI Mode ads going global. Google again, on Gmail and Photos signals in AI Mode ads. Meta, scoring every impression with an LLM. Meta again, delaying its terms to November 20. OpenAI, at 89 countries. The FTC and Publicis, on a five-year firewall around LiveRamp. Apple, closing the Safari workarounds. Wurl, on CTV requests with no program name. Skydance, weighing Google over FreeWheel. FreeWheel, following NBCU in the Comcast split. Madhive, adding AdImpact spend data across 210 markets. Pinterest, launching Programmatic Deals with Magnite.

What the desk is watching. Whether Meta’s November 20 date holds, and whether AI Mode’s ad load closes the gap in Google’s search growth or widens it.

FTC, 22 states sue Amazon over deceptive ad auction pricing

Axios’s Sara Fischer reports that the FTC and 22 state attorneys general sued Amazon, alleging it secretly overrode its ad auction to charge higher rates, overcharging more than 1.2 million advertisers and generating over $20 billion in revenue since 2018.

OpenAI’s ad run rate hits $1 billion, nearing its 2026 target

eMarketer’s Marisa Jones reports that OpenAI’s advertising business has reportedly reached a $1 billion annualized run rate, according to reports cited by EMARKETER.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT ad business hits $1 billion run rate

Reuters reports that OpenAI said its ChatGPT Ads business has reached a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate, and expanded Ads Manager to India, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.

OpenAI’s ad business hits $1B run rate in under 200 days

Axios’s Sara Fischer reports that OpenAI said ChatGPT Ads reached a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate less than 200 days after launch.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT ads hit $1 billion run rate, opens EU self-serve

Digiday’s Seb Joseph and Krystal Scanlon report that OpenAI’s ad business is now annualizing at $1 billion in revenue less than 200 days after launch.

ChatGPT’s ad business hits $1 billion annualized run rate

Adweek’s Mark Stenberg reports that ChatGPT is now on pace to generate more than $1 billion in advertising revenue over the next 12 months, OpenAI said, extrapolating current revenue forward.

FTC sues Amazon over alleged secret ad-auction surcharge

The Verge’s Stevie Bonifield reports that the FTC and 22 state attorneys general allege Amazon secretly replaced its second-price ad auction results with a higher, profit-maximizing price since 2019, extracting over 20 billion dollars from advertisers. Amazon calls the claims misguided.

Google’s bidding change exposes agentic advertising’s principal-agent problem

AdExchanger’s AdExchanger Guest reports that Google Ads now bids more aggressively toward a set target ROAS or CPA, even when historical performance beat that target, turning the target into a price rather than a ceiling.

OpenAI redesigns ChatGPT ad onboarding to build campaigns in 60 seconds

Marketing Brew’s Jasmine Sheena reports that OpenAI is rolling out a new campaign onboarding flow that lets advertisers input a website URL and get an AI-generated ad, targeting suggestions, and bidding setup in under a minute.

OpenAI’s ad business hits $1 billion annualized run rate

CNBC’s Ashley Capoot reports that OpenAI said its advertising business, roughly 200 days old, has reached $1 billion in annualized revenue run rate.

Sony Music Pub and Warner Chappell sue Anthropic over AI training

The Ankler’s Sean McNulty reports that Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell filed a multi-billion-dollar suit against Anthropic, calling its use of their catalogs “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.”

Cox Media Group pays $880,000 to settle FTC ad-tech case

Inside Radio reports that the FTC finalized its consent agreement with Cox Media Group over “Active Listening,” a marketing product that claimed to target ads using AI analysis of conversations overheard by smart devices.

L2 and PharosGraph link voter salience data to programmatic ad targeting

Voter-file platform L2 has integrated PharosGraph’s narrative intelligence platform, which ranks how salient issues and candidates are to individual voters over time. The integration works through L2’s data-mapping tools inside DSPs like Yahoo, LiveRamp and The Trade Desk.

OpenAI to cut off Cursor’s AI models over Musk’s SpaceX ownership

Reuters’s Anusha Devang Shah reports that OpenAI plans to stop providing AI models to Cursor, now owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, proposing a November 12 shutoff date. Anthropic said it would boost compute to support Claude models in Cursor instead.

Google auto-expands AI Overviews, pushing links further down search

The Verge’s Jay Peters reports that Google is automatically expanding AI Overviews for some queries, replacing the “Show more” button with a full AI summary and an “Ask anything” box before the traditional link list appears, per Search Engine Roundtable.

Google wants Demand Gen to drive travel spending

eMarketer’s Marisa Jones reports that Google is pushing its Demand Gen ad format toward travel marketers, positioning it as a way to reach browsing travelers across Search, YouTube, Discover, and Gmail.

Trade Desk’s Zuma update trades disruption for polish after Kokai backlash

Digiday’s Krystal Scanlon and Seb Joseph report that The Trade Desk’s Zuma release adds UX fixes, faster lift studies and a Koa AI assistant to Kokai, plus the option to route agents through outside tools like Claude rather than forcing everything into its own interface.

EX.CO exec: agentic AI hasn’t transformed ad buying yet

EX.CO’s Paul Jelinek says agentic advertising talk at Cannes outpaced reality, and that CTV programmatic today resembles online video’s state roughly eight years ago. He expects a major programmatic transformation within two years as scaling sales teams stops working.

Nvidia, Stripe race to buy up open-weight AI infrastructure

TechCrunch’s Tim Fernholz reports that Nvidia is reportedly closing in on a $13 billion deal for Hugging Face after a $6 billion Poolside acquisition, and Stripe just paid over $7 billion for OpenRouter.

Trade Desk rolls out Kokai Zuma with agentic AI assistant

uk.themedialeader.com’s Jack Benjamin reports that The Trade Desk has launched Kokai Zuma, an “evolution” of its Kokai platform featuring a redesigned interface, an upgraded forecasting engine, and a conversational AI assistant called Koa.

Gracenote brings show-level content data to The Trade Desk in first DSP deal

Nielsen reports that Gracenote, Nielsen’s content intelligence unit, is integrating its content IDs, metadata and taxonomy directly into The Trade Desk, marking its first demand-side platform partnership.

Yospace launches Ad Presentation tool for non-linear TV ad formats

Advanced Television reports that Yospace has released an Ad Presentation solution letting broadcasters deploy non-linear ad formats — pause ads, overlays, squeezebacks and L-banners — standardized under IAB Tech Lab’s Ad Format Hero initiative.

Broadpeak launches Click2Cart for shoppable CTV ads

Advanced Television reports that Broadpeak has unveiled Click2Cart, letting viewers add products to their cart with one remote click during a streaming ad. It builds on Click2, adding engagement and conversion beacons for performance measurement across pre-roll, mid-roll and L-Banner formats.

Meta runs full-page ads pushing rivals to adopt its own teen-safety limits

The Ankler’s Sean McNulty reports that Meta plans to run a full-page print advertisement in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and New York Times pushing other companies to adopt the same restrictions it is adding to its own apps under its settlement.

Google’s AI Mode adds flight tracking and hotel booking

TechCrunch’s Aisha Malik reports that Google is expanding AI Mode with tools to track flight prices across more than 300 airlines and travel sites, and to book hotels directly through conversation.

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