386 signals

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.

OpenAI pitches ChatGPT image ads at $300,000 minimum, $40 CPMs

Ad Age’s Garett Sloane reports that ChatGPT will run ads alongside AI-generated images this week, with brands facing minimum commitments of $300,000 and CPMs of $40, according to ad executives familiar with the pilot.

Salesforce to buy Braze for $5.66 billion

Adweek’s Tekendra Parmar reports that Salesforce has agreed to acquire Braze for $5.66 billion, aiming to use the customer-engagement platform’s AI to deliver real-time behavioral signals.

Amazon DSP plus LinkedIn data turns CTV into a performance channel

Next in Media’s Tom Burchill explains how Monks paired LinkedIn’s deterministic job-title data with Amazon DSP streaming inventory and Amazon Marketing Cloud to target high-intent B2B viewers, citing Quicken’s campaign as the proof case.

Op-ed: CTV’s supply-path sprawl is quietly inflating costs, not value

VideoWeek’s Dan Meier runs a guest column arguing that CTV buyers and publishers keep assuming more SSPs and DSPs mean more revenue, when duplicated routes instead add latency, costs, and inflated volume counts.

ChatGPT Ads expands to 26 countries as active advertiser count lags claims

AdExchanger’s Joanna Gerber reports that OpenAI is expanding ChatGPT Ads into 26 new countries, 14 of them in Latin America, and says more than 100,000 advertisers have run ads on the platform since its launch eight months ago.

OpenAI details ChatGPT’s ad stack: a custom LLM orchestrator

OpenAI is explaining that ChatGPT’s ad system runs on a custom post-trained LLM “orchestrator” that calls tools for retrieval, ranking, relevance and auctions across stateful, multi-turn sessions, kept in a separate service from answer generation.

OpenAI’s help center details Ads Manager setup, account limits

OpenAI’s help center explains that Ads Manager lets advertisers create one account and separately set an Account Name, Brand Name and Legal Name, with billing required before campaigns can deliver.

ChatGPT ad units drop their ad box entirely, blend into chat text

AdExchanger reports that ChatGPT’s ad units have evolved through four iterations, shedding darkened backgrounds and “Sponsored” labels until ads now appear as plain text indistinguishable from normal responses.

OpenAI publishes crawler access rules for ChatGPT advertisers

OpenAI’s help center details how advertisers must allow OAI-AdsBot and OAI-SearchBot through robots.txt, firewalls, and bot-mitigation layers so ChatGPT can review and serve ad landing pages.

Meta rolls out category-exclusive ad format for cultural moments

MediaPost’s Colin Kirkland reports that Meta is launching “Ads Super Burst,” a format letting brands book exclusive 3- to 24-hour windows around events like sports games and awards shows, with no competing advertiser allowed in the same category during that slot.

Google’s ad tech remedies land, but publishers may see little extra revenue

A Media Operator’s Kari McMahon reports that Google’s court-ordered ad tech remedies — disclosure, AdX real-time bidding against rivals, and deeper Prebid integration — take effect 60 days after final judgment, with some requirements taking 15 months.

OpenAI’s Ads Manager Beta details bulk and in-line campaign editing tools

OpenAI’s help center documents how advertisers edit campaigns in Ads Manager Beta, offering in-line edits for quick changes and bulk schema uploads for structural changes at scale.

Adform ties DSP to Adobe’s ECID to close identity gap

Madison and Wall interviews Adform’s John Piccone, who says the Adobe partnership lets brands pass their Experience Cloud ID directly into Adform’s DSP, skipping onboarders and closing the gap between CRM match rates and programmatic reach rates.

Study: AI shopping tools earn trust, AI-made ads don’t

eMarketer’s Grace Harmon reports that consumers extend trust to AI-powered shopping tools that help them research and buy products, but that trust doesn’t carry over to ads generated by AI, which shoppers view with more skepticism.

Amazon Ads touts 18% lower CPMs from its new agentic DSP

AdExchanger reports that Amazon Ads VP Kelly MacLean detailed beta results for the company’s AI-powered ad console and DSP merger unveiled at Amazon unBoxed.

OpenAI’s help docs detail self-serve ChatGPT Ads campaign setup

OpenAI’s Help Center documents how advertisers build campaigns in ChatGPT Ads Manager Beta, covering CPM, CPC and conversion-based pricing, budget caps, and country and platform targeting.

Google search CPCs jump as Amazon returns to shopping auctions

MediaPost’s Laurie Sullivan reports that Tinuiti’s Digital Ads Benchmark Report found Google search cost-per-click growth accelerated from 1% in Q2 to 4% in Q3 2026.

Ad blocking passes 1.1 billion users as browsers build it in natively

The Measure’s Mike Gasbara reports that eyeo’s 2026 report counts 1.1 billion ad-blocking users worldwide, up 13% since 2023, as browsers like Brave and Shift now build blocking directly into the browser rather than leaving it to extensions.

Google opens AI Overviews, AI Mode to prescription drug ads

Adweek’s Kendra Barnett reports that prescription drug brands can now advertise within Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, per an exclusive from colleague Trishla Ostwal. The move extends paid placement into Google’s generative-AI search surfaces for a previously restricted ad category.

OpenAI details how ChatGPT ad conversions get measured and modeled

Help.openai.com documents that OpenAI matches conversion events to ad clicks using a click reference called oppref, advanced matching, and modeled measurement when direct signals are incomplete, deduplicating pixel and API events via a shared event ID.

OpenAI’s Ads Manager rules bar telehealth, crypto, payday loans in US

OpenAI’s help center details Ads Manager Beta policy, listing categories like telehealth, prescription drugs, and payday loans as fully barred. Credit cards, mortgages, and crypto are restricted to a small group of pre-approved advertisers only.

OpenAI publishes formal ad terms for Brazil, confirming local push

OpenAI published dedicated Brazil Advertising Terms covering Campaign submission, Advertising Intermediaries, fees, taxes, ad review, and reporting data, governing how advertisers and agencies buy Advertising Insertion through Ads Manager or an approved API in that market.

Ad Age: PubMatic’s agentic ad lessons from 100+ campaigns

Ad Age is reporting that a PubMatic sponsored studio piece claims agentic advertising has run over 100 campaigns, with guardrails, agent intelligence, and access determining performance.

OpenAI seeks agency partner to make ChatGPT ads a standard media-plan line item

ExchangeWire’s Sheila Obeng-King reports that OpenAI is recruiting an agency partner to push ChatGPT advertising into permanent media plans at major holding companies.

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Ad-tech

State of Play