Daily News Roundup

Perplexity didn’t just try to buy Chrome; product placement in TV and film is on the rise; and the FCC is on one again.

Walmart Connect’s deal with The Trade Desk isn’t so exclusive anymore; Amazon is competing with everyone except publishers; and Meta’s chatbots don’t exactly inspire confidence in the company’s ability to deliver effective AI tools.

Some accuse The Trade Desk of becoming a walled garden; short form video clips are the only way to go viral; and a new startup touts “micro-dramas.”

Data brokers de-index their opt-outs; Meta is still the go-to for influencer ads; and Perplexity offers to buy Chrome.

Sometimes, price can itself be promotional marketing; Reddit is no longer playing nice; and AI scrapers are reshaping the web in another way.

Creative agencies are trying to adapt to AI’s sudden invasion of their turf; it’s a sunny day for TikTok travel influencers; and publishers have more than just Google’s AI overviews to worry about.

The pivot to AI has led to a gap in many SaaS and ad tech companies’ payment models; AppLovin bounces back in Q2; and Grok might be your newest media planner.

The New York Times’ growth rate blows other large news companies out of the water; Shopify’s shares leapt by 20% after an upbeat Q2 earnings report; and Google’s AI Overviews may or may not be causing web traffic to plummet, depending who you ask.

RE/MAX gets into the retail media game; Meta loses a class-action lawsuit over how it handled period-tracking data; and the IAB Tech Lab unveils its ad delivery playbook for live events.

Google’s former SSP practices are the legal gift that keeps giving; Perplexity has been disregarding robots.txt files; and ads prop up a large chunk of the US economy.

Coinbase is getting into ads; Etsy can’t rely on search ads for very long; and Zuckerberg wants to buy AI companies.

Dotdash Meredith is People now; brands love influencers again; and Apple’s gonna finally help you with all those spam calls.

X will begin scoring ads according to Elon Musk’s aesthetic preferences; what those Sydney Sweeney jeans ads say about how brands capture attention online; and a Google exploit lets sites be deleted from search results.

SaaS companies are abandoning interoperability in search of more revenue; Spotify’s ad business is growing slower than expected; and sports is an upfronts winner for Disney and NBCU.

Google’s AI search tools are creating a paradox; Amazon pulled its Google ad budgets; and now’s a great time for indie commerce ad tech startups.

ChatGPT will google that for you; the Canadian TikTok shutdown gets real; and Elon’s crusage against media ratings organizations goes on.

Reddit is surging with advertiser demand; not everyone is Substack material; and Trump released his AI Action Plan.

Amazon acquires AI-equipped wearable manufacturer Bee; the UK’s CMA shares competition guidelines for Google and Apple; and AI models may be learning from each other in unexpected, potentially harmful, ways.

Netflix cracks Nielsen’s top 3 channels, but YouTube is still tops; CTV is maturing as a marketing channel, but it comes with zits; and Google rolls out another core update for search.

Marketing zippers is harder than you think; What should the new SEO be called? And TV-era consumer brands are all-in on influencers.

Social media companies are cutting the junk from their diet; Trump is trying to reshape American media; and selling ads is always the last resort.

Sing along, now: “Everything is an ad network!” Plus, Publicis is doing A-OK and Substack is changing its tune on advertising.

The Trade Desk makes the S&P 500, triggering a stock price rebound; Estée Lauder is the latest big legacy brand to embrace influencers; and CMOs are trying to measure their return on AI, but it’s tricky.

Nextdoor isn’t ruling out AI data licensing, but it has concerns; NBCU touts sports and streaming as drivers of its record Upfronts; and Scholastic follows kids and parents to YouTube.

Amazon’s DSP enjoys many advantages; More on the Cloudflare controversy; the European Commission moves forward with its age verification laws.

Can Google AI overview and other search chatbots cancel each other out?; say goodbye to both Demand Media and Linda Yaccarino.

Amazon locked in two more publishers for its AI shopping engine; AI companies are working on web browsers now; and platforms have a hard time telling AI from reality.

AI Overviews are even dinging Google Search ads’ traffic; WPP downgrades its earnings forecast; and Google’s AI competitors launch their own web browsers.

AI Overviews makes dodgy product recommendations because it scrapes marketing copy; discrepancies in TV ratings hamper upfronts negotiations; and why mar tech companies are building software fortresses.

Google challenges Cloudflare’s anti-scraping tech; are dupes plagiarism?; and web traffic is careening off a cliff.