• Google is expanding ads in AI Overviews from mobile to desktop and testing ads in AI Mode.
• It's also adding other AI-powered ad tools, designed to help automate ad creation and buying.
• Ad experts said Google's AI strategy needs to balance monetization with a clean user experience.

Google's multibillion-dollar investments in artificial intelligence need to pay off eventually. Ads may be the answer.

Google on Wednesday said it's expanding ads within the search and shopping AI Overviews that appear at the top of results, going from mobile to desktop in the US. AI Overview ads are beginning to roll out in other locations, too.

It's also testing ads within its AI Mode, a relatively new product built into its search page, where users can conduct deeper research using its Gemini AI chatbot, Google said.

Dan Taylor, VP of global ads at Google, told Business Insider that queries within AI Mode tend to be twice as long as traditional searches and more exploratory in nature. This "opens up these new opportunities to discover brands where advertisers might not necessarily have been in the conversation before," Taylor said.

The ad news follows the opening of Google's big summer developer conference, in which the search giant offered a look at updates it's been cooking up for its AI models. CEO Sundar Pichai described a "total reimagining" of Search as AI Mode is brought to all users in the US this week.

With Google committing to invest more than $75 billion in AI infrastructure and to expand its cloud capacity this year, Wall Street is watching closely for hints about how the company intends to profit from the new technology.

Advertising is set to be an important portion of that pie; the majority of Google's revenue is derived from traditional search ads. While Google is embracing its new AI future, it will also be looking to protect its cash cow. Last year, Google recorded about $265 billion in ad revenue.

Google introduced ads to AI Overviews on mobile last year. This week, Google said that the launch of AI Overviews has grown the number of "commercial queries," where users are searching for information about a particular product or service they may later go on to buy. It didn't state by how much.

For now, advertisers can't directly opt for their ad placements to appear within AI Overviews or AI Mode. Instead, Google will pull from existing search campaigns, where marketers target users on variables like their location, demographics, and by keywords and topics.

Google's introduction of AI-generated answers to its search results got off to a fairly bizarre start last year. It infamously recommended users add glue to their pizza and suggested they eat rocks. Taylor said Google had strict brand suitability guidelines and extensive controls in place across search, display, and YouTube to prevent ads from appearing in unfortunate places that marketers would rather avoid.

Advertisers and website owners are grappling with the impact of AI-generated search. Overviews often offer a definitive answer rather than a series of links that encourage users to visit their websites. According to an April analysis of 150,000 popular keywords from the search marketing company Ahrefs, the average click-through rates on top-ranking search results have dropped since Google's AI overviews were introduced.

Google will need to strike a careful balance between monetizing its AI offerings and providing a clean user experience, especially since some generative-AI rivals, like OpenAI's ChatGPT, have yet to roll out ads. (OpenAI has hinted that ads aren't out of the question, though.)

"If people are changing the way they search and using AI search more for commercial queries, there's no doubt we'll see a shift in ads moving to that space," said Matt Steiner, director of biddable media at the marketing agency Croud.

Google is exploring ways to automate the entire advertising process through AI

Google also offered a glimpse on Wednesday at how it's using AI to automate creating and buying ads across search, its display ad network, and YouTube.

It's letting advertisers use its AI text-to-video and text-to-image generators, Veo and Imagen, to create the visual elements of their ad campaigns based on their product catalogs. On search, a new feature called Smart Bidding Exploration will automatically detect new types of queries advertisers can bid on based on more complex user searches that go beyond typical keywords like "best credit card." And Google is offering an AI agent within Google Ads and Google Analytics, which can make recommendations on campaigns or suggest new trends in their data that might be of interest.

"More traditional marketing tactics are not really able to keep up with the change in consumer behavior, and so AI is coming to the rescue, if you will, to help marketers adapt," Google's Taylor told BI.

Big Tech giants are increasingly looking for ways to automate advertising, with the potential to disrupt the entire industry of advertising agencies and vendors. In a recent interview, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said his company is working toward a future where advertisers simply state their objective, connect their bank accounts, and Meta would do the rest — from creating the ads, selecting the targeting, and then providing the results. Google is moving in a similar direction with its AI-powered Performance Max product.

Scott Sadeghian-Tehrani, media strategy director at the marketing agency 26PMX, said some clients are wary of these types of automated tools. That's particularly true of retailers who often dice their budgets between different product categories and want to be able to make adjustments in the event of holding excess stock, or if it's unseasonably sunny and they want to ramp up advertising their swimwear, for example.

"Clients aren't really ready to hand over those reins, so there's a bit of trepidation," said Sadeghian-Tehrani.

• Famed for selling virtual goods, Roblox now allows brands and creators to sell physical items.
• Roblox's ambition is to capture 10% of the $180 billion global gaming market.
• Creator studio Twin Atlas is selling merch via Roblox, and Warner Bros. is selling movie tickets.

Roblox is known as a Gen Z destination for gaming and hanging out. Could it soon also be the place young people go to shop?

That's Roblox's stretch goal, at least.

Roblox on Thursday said it was expanding its commerce program, allowing more creators and brands to sell physical items — think hoodies, lipsticks, plushies, and concert tickets — without leaving the platform.

The commerce push forms part of a broader companywide ambition for Roblox to make up 10% of the $180 billion global gaming market. To do so, it's diversified its revenue streams, generating income from subscriptions, the sale of virtual goods bought using its virtual currency Robux, and through advertising.

"Everywhere there's digital goods being bought, we will look at ways in which there is an opportunity to actually buy physical goods," Louqman Parampath, VP of product for ads and commerce at Roblox, told Business Insider.

Starting in the US, creators can integrate items from their Shopify catalogs into the virtual experiences on Roblox for users ages 13 and over (and 18-plus in Texas) to buy. The company said more commerce partners and locations are on the way — it previously partnered with Walmart on a trial to sell physical items, for example.

Parampath told BI that over time, he envisions Roblox becoming more of a marketplace-style offering, and famous stores like the Nike store might appear across several popular Roblox experiences.

"Our plan is to have much deeper product-catalog integrations, which means the variety and diversity of products that will be available across our experiences, and perhaps even a marketplace, will continue to grow," Parampath said.

Roblox has been outlining its real-world commerce plans since at least 2023, and began testing last year.

The company said the creator studio Twin Atlas generated "six-figure commerce revenue" in a few weeks after it began selling T-shirts and hoodies in Roblox games like "Creatures of Sonaria" and "Dragon Adventures." Fenty Beauty and Warner Bros. were also early testers of the commerce program. Twin Atlas said around 90% of its merch sales now come via Roblox versus its own website. Elsewhere, pop star The Weeknd is launching a ticket bundle within Roblox for his coming feature film "Hurry Up Tomorrow," which will be released in movie theaters later this week.

James Poulter, head of AI and innovation at the marketing agency House 337, said Roblox will need to ensure the commercial expansion of its real-world shopping efforts doesn't disrupt gameplay and provide adequate controls to prevent its young users from overspending.

"At worst, it risks becoming an Amazon-on-steroids scenario where children are immersed in a commercial environment that parents may not be comfortable with," Poulter said.

Roblox said goods sold must adhere to its newly published commerce standards and other applicable policies, such as its community and advertising standards.

Roblox sees commerce as a flywheel for its ad business

Roblox is also bringing virtual goods to the real world. Through its Approved Merchandiser Program, brands can add a Roblox badge to their packaging and merchandise that contains a code which can be transferred for digital items users' Roblox avatars can wear and use.

A Roblox spokesperson said that the company doesn't take a cut from sales of physical items bought through the Shopify integration but will earn a commission from any paired avatar item or developer product sold. Those fees can vary, determined by the total price and price ratio of both the physical and virtual item, exclusivity, and category of the item, the spokesperson said.

Parampath said Roblox is also hoping these efforts can help prove the effectiveness of its advertising to marketers.

"If you run a campaign for any particular product and that particular product is also purchased on our platform by a subset of our users, you can effectively close the loop," he said.

Chris Camacho, CEO of the ad agency Cheil UK, said commerce on Roblox will be of particular interest to fashion, beauty, and lifestyle brands looking to reach younger audiences. Roblox said it had around 97.8 million daily active users as of its first quarter, 62% of whom were over 13.

"For Gen Z and Gen Alpha, seeing an avatar in a hoodie, a lipstick or a pair of trainers and being able to buy the real thing on the spot just makes sense," Camacho said. "This is commerce on their terms: instant, contextual, and embedded into the experiences they already love."

• Advertisers have hit back at X's lawsuit, which claimed they illegally boycotted the platform.
• In a legal filing, advertisers said there was no conspiracy and X disrupted its own business.
• The case centers on members of a now-defunct initiative, the Global Alliance of Responsible Media.

The advertisers and trade group targeted by an antitrust lawsuit from Elon Musk's X have hit back against its claims that they colluded to form an illegal boycott of the platform.

X is suing several major brands, including Mars, Lego, Nestlé, and Shell, alleging their participation in an ad industry initiative called the Global Alliance of Responsible Media, GARM, was tantamount to a conspiracy to "collectively withhold billions of dollars in advertising" from X after Musk's takeover of the company, then known as Twitter.

X had claimed the alleged boycott resulted in it becoming "a less effective competitor to other social media platforms in the sale of digital advertising and in competing for user engagement on its platform."

In a joint motion filed on Wednesday seeking to dismiss the case, the defendants said the lawsuit was instead "an attempt to use the courthouse to win back the business X lost in the free market when it disrupted its own business and alienated many of its customers."

Founded in 2019, GARM was an initiative of the advertiser trade body The World Federation of Advertisers that aimed to provide the industry with a common language and frameworks to help categorize the kind of content that advertisers tend to want to avoid.

The categories ranged from obviously harmful content like child sex-abuse imagery, to content like violence, which different sorts of advertisers have varying risk appetites toward. The uptake of these frameworks was voluntary. X was previously itself a GARM member.

"None of the membership materials refers to boycotts, the exclusion of competitors, or the disclosure of competitively sensitive information," the WFA and advertiser defendants said in Wednesday's filing.

GARM discontinued operations after X filed its initial lawsuit last summer, saying the two-person operation lacked the resources to fight it. GARM's parent, the WFA, is still operating and remains a defendant in the case.

In Wednesday's filing, the WFA and the group of brands rejected the accusations of a conspiracy and said that advertisers — including non-GARM members —made their own individual decisions about pulling ad spend from X. It noted that X's own lawsuit said just 18 of GARM's more than 100 members stopped advertising on the platform.

X's advertising revenue had plummeted after Musk took control of Twitter in 2022. Under his leadership, the company fired reams of staff who had been responsible for areas like brand and platform safety, loosened content moderation rules, and brought back controversial banned accounts.

Some of X's original legal argument was built on a prior probe from the House Judiciary Committee, led by its Republican chairman Jim Jordan. The committee published an investigation last summer that alleged GARM and its members colluded to boycott platforms, podcasts, news outlets, and other conservative-leaning media content they disfavored.

The WFA and the advertiser defendants said in the latest filing that even if marketers had chosen to stay away from X for political reasons, this would be protected by the First Amendment as an act of free speech and wouldn't be within the scope of antitrust law.

The WFA and some of the advertiser defendants — many of which are headquartered outside of the US — are also seeking to dismiss the case, which was filed in a Texas court, for lack of proper jurisdiction.

The WFA, CVS Health, and Nestlé declined to comment. X and the advertiser defendants — Mars, Ørsted, Abbott Laboratories, Colgate-Palmoliver, Lego, Pinterest, Tyson Foods, and Shell — didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.

This month, X dropped its claims against the video platform Twitch, which was also previously a defendant in the case. X's court filing didn't state a reason, but the dismissal was brought "without prejudice," which means X could potentially sue Twitch again over the ad-boycott dispute. Last month, X had told the judge presiding over the case that the two companies had reached an agreement for the claims to be dropped if Twitch met conditions, which it didn't detail, this year.

Unilever was also initially named as a defendant in the original lawsuit, but reached an unspecified agreement with X and was dropped from the case in October.

Read the filing below:

• Amid tariffs and boycotts of US products, some brands are "de-Americanizing" their marketing.
• Companies like Kraft Heinz in Canada are emphasizing local production.
• Others are taking efforts to use local creators and are stepping up ad spend internationally.

Can you make my brand look less American when we advertise to Brits?

That was the nature of a request recently fielded by Luke Jonas, cofounder of Nest, a UK-based ad agency that specializes in helping e-commerce brands launch in the US and American companies market internationally.

Jonas said Fresh Threads, a proudly American apparel brand that often features hot young things skating on boardwalks of San Diego in its marketing, is working with Nest to identify British creators it can photograph lounging in London parks and English gardens for its UK push.

This move by Fresh Threads is part of a broader trend sweeping the marketing world. Huge brands like Coca-Cola and McDonald's, and smaller companies alike, are leaning into local in their ads. Rather than playing up their American roots, many are making efforts to embrace local culture when they advertise abroad as geopolitical tensions between the US and its international counterparts simmer.

Jonas said Nest has also seen a big shift in the regions its clients are targeting. Over the past month, around two-thirds, or 67%, of Nest's customers who were targeting the US with their marketing have shifted to focus on other countries, with the agency assuming that skirting tariffs was a big motivator. The most common are countries in the European Union (60%), followed by the Middle East (20%).

"In 20 years working in e-commerce, I've never seen such a dramatic shift in brand behaviour as the reaction to the Trump tariffs," Jonas said.

As US tariffs threaten industries that make products ranging from toys to trucks, consumers in some countries have reacted negatively to American brands.

Perhaps the starkest example is Canada, where some consumers are refusing to buy American goods or visit the US. In Europe, some shoppers are using an app called "BrandSnap" to help them identity EU alternatives to US products.

With some international consumers going out of their way to boycott American products, companies are exploring everything from subtle rebranding to "full-fledged marketing pivots" in various countries, said Minkyung Kim, assistant professor of marketing at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business.

"Brands are localizing and 'de-Americanizing' their marketing where needed, without completely abandoning their identity," Kim said.

Kraft Heinz wants you to know its Canadian products are made in Canada

Kraft Heinz is a clear example of the localizing trend.

The brand could have been a prime candidate for a Canadian boycott after it closed a major Ontario factory in 2014, which left a lingering resentment toward the company in the country. After President Donald Trump made Canada one of his first targets for tariffs — and even floated the idea of annexing the country — Kraft Heinz Canada revved up its marketing response.

It ran TV ads during the Canadian broadcasts of the Super Bowl and March Madness, reminding viewers that its KD mac and cheese contains Canadian wheat and cheese, that Philadelphia cream cheese is 100% Canadian dairy, and that the peanuts in Kraft peanut butter are roasted in Canada.

In January, it ran full-page newspaper ads declaring that Heinz Ketchup is "made in Canada, by Canadians, using Canadian tomatoes," in response to the country's then-Prime-Minister Justin Trudeau telling reporters about a previous tariff dispute in Trump's first term, during which Heinz's ketchup was "replaced by French's ketchup because French's was still using Canadian tomatoes in its ketchup."

A Kraft Heinz spokesperson said additional Canadian TV ads are airing soon.

Meanwhile, on the American side of the border, some brands are proudly advertising their US roots.

Ford last month ran a campaign with the tagline "From America. For America." Elsewhere, the apparel brand American Giant recently sent an email to customers, reminding them its products have been "made here since 2011."

When the geopolitical going gets tough, big brands get local

On earnings calls in recent weeks, execs across corporate America representing brands from Harley-Davidson to Skechers to KFC were peppered with questions from analysts about whether they're facing pressure internationally from anti-American consumer sentiment.

McDonald's said it had conducted three different global surveys to gauge how consumers feel about America the country, America the brand, and McDonald's the brand. The results were bad news for Brand America: McDonald's said the surveys found an "eight to 10 points" increase in anti-American sentiment. This was most pronounced in Northern Europe and Canada. It also found there was an increase in people saying they were going to cut back on purchasing American brands.

Ian Borden, the fast-food chain's chief financial officer, said McDonald's was able to weather the storm because "our brand has been able to adapt appropriately to the kind of cultures and communities that we do business in."

Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey emphasized its strategy of making global brands locally relevant.

"In the moments of geopolitical tension, one of the key strategies is to drive and reinforce the made in or made by," Quincey said on the company's recent earnings call. "The fact that it's a local business, the factory is down the road from you, your neighbors make the product."

Joey Camire, CEO of the strategy and design firm Sylvain, said that while brands should always have considered localizing their marketing, it was previously expensive. The rise of AI tools to help with things like language translation and the use of influencers has helped to bring those costs down.

"Strategically, it makes a lot of sense in this moment" for brands to localize where possible, he said.

• Fidji Simo, 39, is set to join OpenAI later this year as its CEO of applications.
• Simo spent over a decade at Meta and is the chair and CEO of Instacart.
• She grew up in a fishing village in France before starting her career in Silicon Valley.

Fidji Simo's career in tech has already taken her from Facebook to Instacart. Now, she's set to join OpenAI as its new CEO of applications.

On Wednesday, OpenAI announced that it had hired Instacart's chair and CEO to join its C-suite. OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, wrote in a blog post that Simo is "uniquely qualified" for the role and will report to him directly.

Altman said Simo "has already contributed a great deal to our company" since she joined OpenAI's board in March 2024. She is expected to join OpenAI's leadership team later this year after she begins her "transition from her role at Instacart over the next few months."

The hiring of Simo, 39, who spent much of her career at Meta, has been interpreted by some people in the tech industry that OpenAI is serious about building a social network. The Verge reported last month that OpenAI was in the early stages of building an X-like product.

"It looks like they want to go after Facebook, after every consumer mobile app that is successful because they can and because she has the background to do it," Julien Codorniou, a partner at 20VC who worked alongside Simo at Facebook, told Business Insider. "It's a very big signal to the competition, to the market, and to the users."

Simo did not respond to a request for comment from BI. OpenAI referred BI to Altman's blog post on Simo's hiring.

'The crew comes before you, always'

Simo's story began in Sète, the French fishing port town where she grew up.

"My family, all the men in my family, whether it's my dad, my grandpa, great grandpa, and all my uncles were fishermen and one of them, my uncle became a fish monger, after you know, stopping fishing," Simo told Bloomberg in an interview that aired in November.

Simo started her corporate career at eBay as a strategy manager in 2007, after graduating from HEC Paris, one of France's top business schools.

The French-American joined Meta, then known as Facebook, in 2011.

Simo's rise at Facebook was meteoric. Even her job application was remarkable. She applied for a marketing communications role — an area in which she had no previous experience, but she was determined to give it a shot regardless.

In a 2021 interview on "The Twenty Minute VC" podcast, she recalled how she spent an entire Thanksgiving weekend inventing a new product called "Facebook Stores," and recorded a webinar and produced marketing materials to promote it. The presentation helped her get the Facebook role, but Simo said the hiring manager later laughed that she would never have been considered just on her previous experience alone. (Facebook later launched a very similar initiative, called Shops.)

Simo later switched from marketing to product — another role where she had no prior experience — and worked on some of the most influential product launches at Facebook. She was put in charge of monetizing mobile shortly after its 2012 IPO, at a time when there were concerns about whether the company could ever make a successful mobile business. She led the launches of video products like Facebook Live and Facebook Watch and eventually rose to lead the Facebook app.

"I think a lot of my career took off around moments where I made bets other people didn't think were obvious bets," Simo said on the "Twenty Minute VC" podcast interview.

Simo became popular among coworkers and business partners alike. Dominique Delport, who sat on Facebook's client council for eight years when he was managing director at the French advertising giant Havas Group, told BI that "openness" is a big part of Simo's leadership philosophy.

"Big Tech sometimes has an image of arrogance — and Facebook has been through some phases — and I think she was among the ones who helped change the perception among the advertising community," Delport said.

Simo joined Instacart's board in January 2021 and became its CEO in August 2021.

Simo said in her interview with Bloomberg that her childhood growing up in a fishing village influenced her career choices.

"I think it was incredibly special because there is a craft and a respect that fishermen have. It's interesting, in Silicon Valley, the people who are most respected are like tech people, whereas here, the people who are most respected are the people who feed the town," Simo said.

"So in a way, becoming CEO of Instacart is kind of bridging these two things for me, where I love tech but I always had a passion for feeding people, and so it's a really special thing to be able to bridge the two," Simo added.

In a profile published by Sequoia in February 2024, Simo said her leadership style was shaped by her father and grandfather, who were both boat captains.

"The crew comes before you, always," Simo said of their leadership ethos.

Simo is also a passionate artist. A sculptor and painter, she previously served on the boards of Cirque du Soleil and the L.A. Dance Project.

"You always need to put creativity at the center of everything you do," she said on the "Twenty Minute VC podcast."

Leaving Instacart

Simo's exit comes in the same week Instacart reported its best quarterly order growth in more than two years. It also forecast positive growth for the second quarter, bucking the trend of a bleak retail sector.

Rachel Wolff, an analyst at EMARKETER, a BI sister company, said the upbeat earnings showed "how successfully the company has positioned its service as a necessity for many households."

In a letter to Instacart employees on Wednesday evening, Simo said it was an "incredibly hard decision" for her to leave the company.

Simo said her decision was partly driven by her passion for AI and its "potential to cure diseases," which made OpenAI a difficult opportunity to pass up. Simo is currently the president of the Metrodora Institute, a for-profit healthcare clinic that focuses on treating complex neuroimmune diseases.

While she will remain CEO of Instacart while the company searches for a successor, Simo is preparing her next chapter. Simo has previously said her favorite book is "The Night Circus," a fantasy novel about two magicians preparing to take each other on in a deadly duel. Now working for Sam Altman, Simo is set to go into battle with her former mentor, Mark Zuckerberg, as OpenAI bids to dominate the world of apps.

"For that job, she's absolutely perfect," said Codorniou. "She has something very special — she's one in a billion."

• YouTube is the 800-pound gorilla crashing TV's annual upfronts sales extravaganza.
• TV companies like Disney and Paramount will try to reclaim the spotlight with tech and sports.
• But ad buyers want flexibility amid economic uncertainty, which benefits platforms like YouTube.

Streaming and network giants like Amazon, Disney, NBCUniversal, and Paramount will gather in New York this week to parade their best programming in front of ad buyers, in hopes of securing big commitments.

One thing everyone's sure to be whispering about: YouTube's growing dominance in the living room.

The platform's success on bigger screens has been well documented. Now, the economic uncertainty rattling markets is making YouTube increasingly attractive to advertisers. MoffettNathanson analyst Michael Nathanson recently predicted that YouTube would be the biggest media company in the world by revenue this year, surpassing Disney.

At the TV upfronts this week, streaming giants and traditional networks will try to prove they can deliver the same value and flexibility as YouTube — and remind advertisers about areas like sports where they are still dominant.

"YouTube has been the beneficiary of tremendous growth in streaming and also in ad spend, and it has done that without a formula that's dependent on premium content," said Christopher Vollmer, a partner at the talent agency UTA and managing director of its media consultancy MediaLink.

"It's giving the buying entities — the agencies and the brands — a lot of what they look for: Scaled media consumption, on a big screen, looks like TV, and all the bells and whistles in terms of the performance metrics of digital," Vollmer added.

TV players are taking a page from YouTube

As the impact of tariffs and declining consumer confidence threatens advertisers' spending plans, a key theme of this year's upfronts will be flexibility, ad buyers said.

Digital players like YouTube are well-positioned in this sort of environment because online ads tend to be easier to switch on and off as required. TV networks, for whom the upfronts were created to lock in ironclad spending commitments, will begrudgingly have to accept the current reality.

"Clients want to feel like they are putting money into the marketplace, but if they need to pivot in any way, that they have the ability to do so without penalties," said Jessie Schwartzfarb, an EVP at the media agency Dentsu Media US.

In their pitches, TV players are acting a little more like YouTube, industry insiders said. Their presentations are likely to hammer home how they're matching the tech giant's adtech and data chops.

Given the macro environment and the decline of linear TV viewing, there's no escaping that the upfronts will probably be a buyer's market this year. An EMARKETER forecast estimated that tariffs could drag down the upfronts TV haul by as much as $4.1 billion, a 23.5% decline from last year.

The so-called scatter market — TV ad inventory that's not purchased during the upfronts, and which typically sells at rates around 30% to 40% more — is already soft, said Ed Papazian, founder of MediaDynamics, a media research and consulting company.

"The fly in the ointment right now is the erratic behavior of the government — the tariffs — which is making it difficult to predict the economic picture for the full year next season," Papazian said.

MrBeast vs sports

YouTube, which will host its own Brandcast sales event during the upfronts, will return to the stage with its biggest star: MrBeast. It's also promoting opportunities for advertisers to own the conversation around cultural events like the Masters and the Met Gala and work more closely with creators.

Despite its rise, YouTube isn't a must-buy for all TV advertisers. Some are still befuddled by its breadth and see it as downmarket.

"The tension is really still — I don't know if my ad will show up on something amateur," an exec at a major ad agency said.

Another area of weakness for YouTube is sports. Sure, YouTube has the NFL's Sunday Ticket. But the TV companies will certainly remind buyers that there's no better place to reach large, captive audiences than with tentpole live sports like the Super Bowl and the Olympics.

"I got one word for you today: sports," said Michael Kassan, a longtime ad industry player, riffing on the famous advice a young Dustin Hoffman's character got in "The Graduate." "That's what's selling. And I got two words for you: women's sports."

NBCUniversal plans to emphasize in its pitch that it'll own nearly 40% of big event viewership in the US, with 129 nights of live sports in primetime from 2025 to 2026. Upfront attendees can expect to see personalities representing the NBA, Super Bowl LX, and the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics take the stage. Paramount will also lean on its extensive sports offering, with appearances by its on-air talent.

Disney is going for an intimate show that emphasizes the famous IP that only the Mouse House has, like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, said Bill Skrief, who runs DeadLizard with Todd Reinhart, a creative agency whose clients include Disney.

Papazian said TV networks may also look to bundle their broadcast, cable, and streaming holdings as one package to advertisers in order to regain some leverage.

Everyone's touting their creator relationships

The line between digital and TV in the ad market is increasingly blurring.

In years past, TV companies focused their upfront events simply on the programming and the celebrities, but they are now devoting more stage time to the under-the-hood tech. On the flipside, YouTube, streamers, and tech platforms are attempting to prove they've moved beyond "video" to premium TV.

Legacy TV companies have also sought to deepen their relationships with creators. Last week, for example, NBCUniversal announced four scripted series on its streaming service Peacock featuring "self-made social media stars."

Ed East, CEO of the influencer marketing agency Billion Dollar Boy, said TV networks are increasingly exploring partnerships where advertisers co-produce creator-led content.

"These are sophisticated, commercially-driven operations, and TV networks are responding," East said.

Who will come out on top this year?

Katie Klein, chief investment officer of the media agency Omnicom Media Group North America, said the winner of the upfronts will be whoever best combines digital and TV strengths.

"I don't think there's a clear winner yet, but I do think that this year's upfront will certainly help us to determine who's coming out ahead," Klein said.

• Meta's ad business is firing on all cylinders.
• That's despite rolling out major content moderation changes that could have spooked advertisers.
• Nope! Advertisers spent more than $41 billion with Meta in the first quarter.

Meta's content-moderation mishaps used to be the talk of Madison Avenue, when advertisers would lambast the tech giant over its so-called brand safety concerns.

But it's a new era, and advertisers are spending through it.

The company's first-quarter revenue, which is almost entirely derived from advertising, reached $42 billion in the quarter, ahead of analysts' expectations and up 16% year over year.

In January, Meta said it was replacing third-party fact-checkers with an X-inspired community notes system on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. The company said it also planned to bring back more political content to users' timelines and was easing content moderation rules around topics like gender identity and immigration.

Advertisers and industry analysts told BI in January that while the changes made them feel uneasy, they'd likely continue to spend with Meta as long as it delivered the large audiences and ad performance they've come to expect from the platform.

Meta's bumper earnings, released Wednesday, confirmed the theory.

On the earnings call, Meta's execs credited the momentum of its AI-powered suite of ad tools, Advantage Plus. These tools automate many aspects of creating an ad campaign, from identifying the types of users to target to creating the images in the ads themselves.

Susan Lee, Meta's chief financial officer, said there had been some spending reductions from Asia-based e-commerce advertisers targeting US users, likely in anticipation of President Donald Trump ending the de minimis tax loophole on May 2. The exemption had allowed the likes of Temu and Shein — huge Meta advertisers — to ship orders under $800 from China without paying duty fees.

Meta said its ad business would remain strong, pushing aside fears of a tariff-induced advertising slowdown. It's expecting to post revenue of between $42.5 billion and $45.5 billion next quarter, ahead of the $44 billion analysts had anticipated.

Nick Manning, a former ad agency exec and founder of the marketing consultancy Encyclomedia International, told BI that major advertisers still have deep concerns about user safety and the type of content that gets published on major tech platforms.

Part of Meta's resilience, he said, is that it's less reliant on blue-chip companies and more on the millions of small and medium-sized businesses that advertise across its sites and apps. Indeed, the company said Wednesday that online commerce companies were the largest contributors to its ad sales growth in the quarter.

"Meta, for certain kinds of advertisers, still delivers the goods — and those advertisers aren't really bothered about user safety and brand safety," Manning said.

Meta said in January that it continued to be focused on ensuring brand safety and suitability by offering a range of tools for advertisers.

While it faces the same macroeconomic uncertainty as many other businesses, Meta is doing so from a position of strength.

"Advertisers will allocate more ad dollars to proven, sophisticated networks like Facebook and Instagram — all while pulling back spend on smaller social platforms — while they navigate uncertainty," said Minda Smiley, a senior analyst at the research firm EMARKETER, a BI sister company.

Just take a look at the contrasting fortunes of Snap. Its shares plummeted Tuesday after it reported first-quarter revenue and earnings that were in line with expectations but said it wouldn't share guidance for the second quarter, blaming the macroeconomic uncertainty.

• LinkedIn is launching a slate of original video shows with influencers.
• Business-focused creators like Steven Bartlett and Rebecca Minkoff are making the content.
• It's part of LinkedIn's efforts to snag a piece of the creator economy and become a video hub.

Have you noticed more professionally produced videos in your LinkedIn feed recently? It's by design, and you can expect to see more.

LinkedIn on Thursday said it's launching a new slate of five original shows from business-focused creators, including the entrepreneur and "The Diary of a CEO" podcast host Steven Bartlett, the fashion designer "Real Housewives of New York" star Rebecca Minkoff, and Candace Nelson, who founded Sprinkles Cupcakes and the Pizzana pizzeria chain.

LinkedIn's new video push comes as tech companies, from Spotify to YouTube, scramble to lock down top creator talent.

Davang Shah, LinkedIn's VP of marketing, told Business Insider that the effort is also part of the platform's increased focus on video. Total video viewership is up 36% this year versus last, and video creation is growing at twice the rate of other post formats, he said.

The new LinkedIn shows will focus on topics such as female entrepreneurship, the CEO playbook, and artificial intelligence. The other creators taking part are Shelley Zalis, founder of The Female Quotient; Guy Raz, host of the "How I Built This" podcast; and the author Bernard Marr.

LinkedIn said more shows from additional content creators are in the works, though the company plans to keep the selection highly curated for now.

The new shows mark an expansion of LinkedIn's Wire Program, which has been renamed BrandLink. The initial 2023 to 2024 launch partners were professional news publishers like The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and Business Insider. LinkedIn said it's also bringing on new publishers this year, including The Washington Post, Front Office Sports, and Adweek.

The expansion to creators, however, shows how influencers are becoming an increasingly important part of social media, especially when it comes to news topics. While LinkedIn was once seen as a largely self-promotional tool for job seekers, more corners of the business community — from venture capitalists, to CEOs, and marketers — are regularly coming to the platform to riff on the latest news and other trending topics in their industries.

The BrandLink program lets the publishers and creators monetize their videos through pre-roll ads on their shows, which appear in the feed as users scroll the app. Like YouTube, users can skip the full ad after watching for a few seconds. Advertisers can choose which shows they want to appear in and use LinkedIn's data to target specific cohorts of users, with pricing determined by an ad auction.

LinkedIn has typically kept a 50% cut of the ad revenue through the BrandLink program, a publisher exec told BI. A LinkedIn spokesperson said the company couldn't share specifics about the revenue share model. Creators own the intellectual property of the content they create for LinkedIn, and they are free to distribute the content on other platforms — but they must post it to LinkedIn first, the spokesperson said.

LinkedIn's professional, affluent audience is attractive to advertisers

LinkedIn has long courted creators. In 2012, it launched its Influencers program, encouraging famed businesspeople like Bill Gates, Richard Branson, and Arianna Huffington to post to the platform. But its efforts have ramped up in recent years, as it's rolled out tools for famous and everyday creators alike, designed to help them showcase their expertise and boost their followings. Creators told BI last year that they had seen early success by posting videos to its TikTok-style vertical video feed.

Shah said advertisers are drawn to content on the platform that has credibility and authenticity.

"When you produce authentic and trusted content, it leads to connections, it leads to conversations, and ultimately, it leads to closed deals, and that's what marketers care about the most," Shah said.

For LinkedIn, any uptick in user numbers and engagement boosts its advertising business. Research firm EMARKETER, a sister company of BI, forecasts that LinkedIn will generate $8.06 billion in ad revenue in 2025, up 12.4% year-on-year.

LinkedIn's video ambitions face stiff competition from YouTube and TikTok, which already host oodles of business and finance-focused content. YouTube, in particular, has become a top destination for podcasts, including the aforementioned "Diary of a CEO."

Brendan Gahan, the CEO of Creator Authority, an influencer marketing agency focused on LinkedIn, said the platform has its advantages, however. It ticks off attributes that many marketers want: A large audience (more than 1 billion users, per LinkedIn), strong ad tools, and a largely brand-safe environment. Gahan said what sets the platform apart is its professional, affluent niche.

"This is where decision-makers and executives actually spend time," Gahan said. "Probably more time than any other platform."

As LinkedIn goes all in on video, Nick Cicero, founder of Mondo Metrics, an analytics platform and data consultancy, said the platform should avoid chasing volume over value.

"LinkedIn must curate high-signal content that matches the platform's professional intent, not just push engagement bait," Cicero said. "The goal isn't scale, it's signal. You don't need a million views. You need the right 10 decision-makers."

• Big marketers aren't rushing to celebrate a potential Google ad breakup.
• Why? They lack alternatives to Google's reach and effectiveness.
• Some ad industry insiders say CMOs should push Google for more transparency, however.

Google could get broken up. The response from marketers? Shrug.

Google is battling separate rulings in two landmark US antitrust cases that found the company illegally monopolized the search and adtech businesses. While the exact remedies haven't yet been determined, Google is trying to avoid divesting assets like its prized Chrome browser and key parts of its under-the-hood adtech.

Marketers collectively spend more than $264 billion advertising on Google properties like YouTube and search annually. So, they must be champing at the bit at the prospect of the biggest player in the market amputating limbs and losing some power, right?

Right?

Well, not so fast.

Many of the agitators pushing for a Google breakup are those who, unsurprisingly, stand to benefit the most: owners of demand-side platforms, ad servers, and supply-side platforms that directly compete with Google's adtech, or the publishers who feel their revenues have been decimated by unfair ad auction shenanigans.

But you'd be hard-pressed to find the CMO of a major brand talking about the matter publicly, or even privately putting much stock in it. For now, Google has large audiences that they desire and ads that appear to work.

As Rob Norman, the former chief digital officer of ad buying giant GroupM, wryly puts it: "My feeling is advertisers enjoy a well-organized oligopoly — Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, and a few others."

"This is a drug people have become addicted to," said a marketer at a midsize company, who asked for anonymity to protect business relationships. "Breakup or no breakup, people keep spending in these places because there's a lack of real alternatives that deliver."

That's not to say CMOs won't welcome a more marketer-friendly Google.

Marketers and marketing consultants told BI that they were hopeful the outcome of both antitrust cases could force — or at least encourage — Google to be more transparent about its data and open up its systems to operate with other third-party tools. There's also a somewhat optimistic theory that any weakening of Google could make it less powerful when it comes to the table on negotiating major ad deals.

The rulings might be monumental in some corners of the ad industry, but at a time when CMOs face the prospect of a recession, tariffs, geopolitical uncertainty, DEI rollbacks, and major advertising budget cuts, dealing with the fallout of a potential Google breakup lies somewhere near the bottom of a marketer's to-do list.

"For enterprise CMOs, this is an issue to delegate," said Steve Boehler, founder of the marketing consulting firm Mercer Island Group.

It's also a precarious time for CMOs to take a public stand on any hot-button issue.

Google didn't provide a comment for this story.

Ad industry insiders have long pushed for Google to open up its 'black box'

Major marketers may not immediately react, but the two cases still have the potential to shake up search and online advertising.

Let's quickly get you up to speed.

Last summer, a judge ruled that Google violated US antitrust law by maintaining a monopoly with its online search business. The case returned to court again this week to decide what remedies could be imposed on Google. Those could include forcing it to sell Chrome, ending exclusive deals with the likes of Apple to be the default search engine on smartphones, or breaking off its Android mobile operating system.

And last week, another judge ruled that Google holds an illegal monopoly in certain adtech markets. Google owns an ad server that publishers use to manage their inventory, buying tools that advertisers use to purchase ads, and an ad exchange that connects the two. This dynamic was akin, according to a Google manager cited in the ruling, to "Goldman or Citibank owning the NYSE." The judge will set a hearing later to determine the remedies in that case, which industry experts believe could include the forced disposal of Google's publisher-side adtech business.

The huge caveat in both cases is that Google has said it plans to appeal, which could push back the implementation of any proposed remedy by years.

For some in the ad industry, the finer details are irrelevant because the Schadenfreude of seeing Google lose two successive antitrust cases in court is victory enough.

"Agencies, advertisers all understand that they are paying a premium for some lack of competitive advantage," said Dave Helmreich, CEO of the adtech company Triplelift.

"There is a desire that I've heard from some people in the industry for Google to just get punished for something," he added.

And remedies aside, some industry insiders are hopeful that the ongoing antitrust scrutiny, both in the US and abroad, will mean Google will be more open to ceding to some long-asked-for demands. Could it finally let advertisers use their own preferred adtech to buy ads on YouTube, rather than having to go through Google directly? Might Google become less precious about letting advertisers audit their Google ad campaigns with third-party measurement tools rather than simply using Google's ad server?

"Advertisers want interoperability to foster competition and independence to allow accountability," said Gerry D'Angelo, senior advisor at McKinsey and former vice president of global media at Procter & Gamble.

Such changes could raise the bar for the entire adtech industry, said Arielle Garcia, a former agency executive now serving as chief operating officer of the nonprofit ad watchdog Check My Ads.

"Given Google's dominance in adtech, they have been able to establish the norms," said Garcia, who used the example of Google not enforcing "know your customer" requirements on the publishers it monetizes on its ad network. "Why would a smaller player invest in quality or policy enforcement in a way a larger player has not?"

As search evolves, Google's dominance is wobbling

As the Google search and adtech cases continue to wind their way through the lengthy court process, CMOs are monitoring broader changes in consumer behavior and how they should adapt their marketing budgets in response.

Competitors like OpenAI's ChatGPT, TikTok, and Amazon are gaining on Google's search dominance. Research firm EMARKETER, a sister company of Business Insider, predicts Google will fall below a 50% share of the US search ad market in 2025, for the first time since it started tracking the space in 2008. This is partly due to competition from retail media platforms like Amazon, Walmart, and eBay, in addition to new players in the general search market.

"Google will be forced to compete harder and evolve one way or another, perhaps faster than it would have done anyway through the natural pace of change taking place in the market," said Andrew Warner, a marketing consultant and former CMO at brands such as Sony, LG, Monster, and Expedia.

"That in itself is probably a plus for marketers and the consumers they serve," Warner added.

For better or for worse, many marketers are OK with the status quo for now.

"There is not a common feeling that advertisers want Google to become less powerful because, in exchange for Google's seeming omnipresence, advertisers get peerless signals for efficient and effective media planning, buying, and optimization," said Nikhil Lai, senior analyst at the research firm Forrester.

• At the World Federation of Advertisers conference, it was clear marketers are under pressure.
• Tariffs, DEI rollbacks, the potential for ad budget cuts — it's a lot.
• But CMOs are a creative bunch. They told me they're hopeful marketing can steer brands through.

"Snafu: Situation normal, all f—d up."

Stephan Loerke, CEO of the World Federation of Advertisers, dropped this f-bomb — part of an acronym coined by the US military during the Second World War — onstage at the ING Arena at the trade body's recent flagship event in Brussels. He said it was an apt way to describe how marketers feel three months into 2025.

Yet marketers will often say they're at their most creative when they're under pressure. (Just don't mention cutting their budgets.)

The duality was on full display at the glitzy conflab, replete with snazzy onstage graphics and a house band playing electropop in between sessions. Speakers from brands like Mastercard, L'Oréal, and Kraft Heinz painted an optimistic vision to the 2,000-strong audience about how marketers could position their companies for growth, despite the tectonic shifts happening around them.

Between the prospects of tariffs, inflation, the rising cost of living, global conflicts, political polarization, and the disruptive impact of AI, there's a lot for a CMO to keep on top of.

Almost all (99%) of the roughly 600 marketers polled in a recent survey from the WFA and the consultancy firm Oxford said economic and geopolitical uncertainty — and the need to quickly adjust priorities and budgets — would be important or more important in the next five years. Roughly two-thirds (68%) said they'd anticipate these pressures would grow.

One knock-on effect of that is ad budgets are likely to take a hit. Marketing is often the first department to feel the impact of cost cuts. In separate reports last month, analysts from Madison and Wall, as well as Magna Global, trimmed their US ad market forecasts for 2025.

Backstage, Loerke told me that many marketers felt the uncertainty was at an inflection point, which was driving conversations about how to prove marketing's value as CMOs prepare for a tough year.

"Usually, when that conversation starts, it means that actually there's a recession coming," said Loerke, a former marketer at L'Oréal in the 1990s.

I interviewed six top global CMOs and spoke with other marketing execs attending the Brussels event to get a sense of what's top of mind for marketers as they navigate the turbulence.

Marketers are scenario planning while trying to keep on track with their long-term strategies

Many marketers are spending a significant portion of their time locked in scenario-planning meetings with their CEOs, chief finance officers, and other members of the C-suite.

"Back in the day, when I started in the business, it was an A plan and a B plan," said Diana Frost, global chief growth officer at Kraft Heinz. "Well, that's a C plan and a D plan now."

With the costs of raw materials going up, marketers in sectors like consumer goods and food are having to make rapid-fire decisions about prices, packaging, and product formulations. Consumers' willingness to pay more at the checkout is often partly determined by years of brand-building designed to make them choose one product over another.

Patrik Hansson, EVP of marketing and innovation at the dairy company Arla Foods, said that while companies may encounter a year with disappointing growth, it's important for CMOs to stick to their plans — a five-year horizon rather than a six-month horizon, say — to ensure their marketing has a long-term impact.

"If you have a way forward, then a bit of noise, a bit of turbulence doesn't distract you from the long term, and that's what we're trying to focus on because otherwise, you get lost in this," Hansson told me.

It all adds up for marketing measurement

Over coffees, canapés, and cocktails, job security was a hot topic at the event.

A February survey published Tuesday from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business found that 63% of the 281 US marketing leaders polled felt increased pressure from their chief finance officers, up from 52% in 2023.

"One of the big problems is that the advertisers themselves are shedding people in an attempt to cut costs, so CMOs are risk-averse and look for signs of success that are supposedly measurable," Nick Manning, founder of the media consultancy Encyclomedia, who was in attendance, told me after the event.

"Saying 'trust me, it'll work' doesn't play in a world where short-term is the only term," Manning added.

Diageo is often seen across the industry as a poster child for demonstrating marketing effectiveness.

In 2023, it began working with a tech company called CreativeX. CreativeX uses artificial intelligence to generate a "creative quality score" that predicts whether digital marketing assets will be effective.

The drinks giant is also using an AI listening tool, developed with its partners Share Creative and Kantar, to predict consumer trends. One insight: 2025 is the year of "zebra striping," in which consumers cut down on their alcohol consumption by alternating between alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks.

Diageo's marketers also use an internal tool called Catalyst to get immediate access to data to help them make planning decisions.

"I want our marketers to have a business mindset and delve into the insights we can now access to plan spend, design campaigns, create content, and collaborate with partners based on what scenario best delivers the brand-building outcome that drives growth," said Cristina Diezhandino, Diageo's chief marketing officer.

At Kraft Heinz, Frost wants to instill a sense of swagger and pride within the marketing department — and she's got the receipts to back it up. The Heinz brand, in particular, has marked compound annual revenue growth of 6% over the past two years, adding around $600 million in top-line growth to the broader Kraft Heinz business, Frost said. She credits the creation of its internal digital ad agency, "The Kitchen," and also the repeatable frameworks it's put in place for Heinz marketers around the world to help grow the brand further.

"When you have these proof points of growth, then you can build the pride, then you can build the momentum of how it's actually possible as you roll it out to the rest of the portfolio, " Frost said.

Jitters over brand safety and DEI rollbacks loomed large

"Brand safety" was the elephant in the room at the event.

Unspoken but present were lawsuits filed by Elon Musk's X and the video platform Rumble, plus a Jim Jordan-led House Judiciary Committee investigation. These took aim at the WFA's now-shuttered voluntary initiative, the Global Alliance of Responsible Media, and more than a dozen of its advertiser members. The lawsuits and the probe, which are ongoing, allege GARM's members illegally colluded to boycott platforms like X and Rumble. While GARM closed, which the WFA said was due to its limited resources, the WFA has said it adhered to competition rules and would prove so in court. The WFA told me in Brussels it didn't want to discuss the matter.

(Side note: For all its glamour, the WFA's event had been originally due to take place at the far-flung locale of Mumbai, India, but after the legal troubles arose, it was shifted to Brussels, where the WFA is headquartered. The WFA partnered with the local advertising trade body, the UBA, to run the main show.)

While GARM was off limits, marketers did open up about another topic that's become newly contentious, particularly in corporate America: the anti-woke movement and the vocal backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

Gael de Talhouet, VP of brand building at the Swedish hygiene company Essity, said marketers should be mindful that "a brand is not a political stage."

"It's something where you tell people about the good you bring to the world," he added.

Rupen Desai, CMO and venture partner of the Una Terra Early Growth Fund, said the recent DEI rollbacks had revealed two types of companies: those where DEI was hard-coded into the company's economic model and those that were investing in these sorts of programs just because everyone else was.

For the second type of company, Desai said the recent movements are a "huge sigh of relief."

"When you're grappling with growth, or the lack of it, and this investment isn't really yet showing results, it's probably easier to take a step back," Desai said.

But he added: "The companies who continue on this journey will be bigger winners than the ones who took a step forward, took a step back."

As the sun set over the Palais de la Bourse, the former Brussels stock exchange, where the event's gala dinner was held, the mood was buoyant, despite the complexities the people in the vast dining room were having to navigate this year. (And sure, perhaps the frequently topped-up wine, exquisitely cooked duck, and performance from the French comedy TikTok creators Supermassive helped a tiny bit.)

CMOs are complex creatures, after all, as David Wheldon, the new WFA president and chief brand officer of the lottery group Allwyn, summed up.

"A marketer has to have this strange combination of optimism and belief in what you're doing personally, and belief in what you're doing for your company and your customers — and you have to be aware of the context you're in," Wheldon said. "If you flip-flop because the context is changing rapidly, then you cause yourself a problem."

• Conservative media outlets say they're seeing an uptick in advertising from major brands.
• Fox News, Daily Wire, National Review, and Rumble are among those touting increased ad demand.
• Some advertisers fear signaling a political allegiance by skewing left with their ad placements.

Yes, that's a Gucci ad on Fox News. Conservative media is having a moment — and advertisers are here for it.

Outlets including Fox News, The Daily Wire, the National Review, and the right-leaning video platform Rumble said in interviews with Business Insider and on recent earnings calls that, since the election, they had seen a noticeable uptick in blue-chip advertisers either returning or signing deals for the first time.

It's a shift from the brand boycotts that occurred during President Donald Trump's first term in office when advertisers shunned the likes of "Tucker Carlson Tonight" over brand safety concerns.

A Fox spokesperson said Fox News had brought on 125 new large advertisers since the election.

According to the TV measurement firm iSpot. tv, new blue-chip advertisers appearing on Fox News national linear broadcasts since the election include Gucci, Busch Beer, and Netflix. New advertisers in this analysis were characterized as having not advertised on the channel since 2022. These brands didn't respond to requests for comment.

What's driving the new behavior? Industry insiders tell BI that some advertisers have grown increasingly wary of signaling a political allegiance on either side of the aisle and are adjusting their media budgets to cover both bases. Earlier this year, the Harris Poll found that 45% of Democrats and 34% of Republicans would stop buying from companies whose political views they disagreed with.

The new flow of ad dollars suggests that some marketers now view avoiding conservative platforms as a risk to their brands. The shift comes as companies across corporate America, from Disney to Meta, have overhauled their DEI programs and changed other policies since Trump's election win.

"Ultimately, big businesses are rational, and they will look to invest in advertising wherever their target audiences are and, provided those environments aren't toxic or brand-damaging, then you're happy to place your ads there," said Sam Tomlinson, chief client officer of the marketing consultancy MediaSense.

Fox News takes a victory lap

Fox Corporation's ad sales, marketing, and brand partnerships chief, Jeff Collins, told BI that while Fox News had seen a gradual growth in advertisers over the last several years, that had grown into a "pretty dramatic" increase over the last two quarters.

The channel is also surpassing viewership records: Nielsen Media Research said Fox News marked its most-watched February in total daytime viewing in the network's history, up 50% year-over-year to 2 million. Competitors MSNBC and CNN were down on the same measure year-over-year.

"There's this virtuous circle where the top newsmakers who want to reach the largest audiences are coming to Fox, which provides Fox with the best interviews, increases our audience even more, which attracts more newsmakers, and is fueling ad demand," Collins said.

Pharmaceutical and medical companies are the largest category of advertisers on Fox News, accounting for around a fifth (20.7%) of spending on its linear TV channel since Trump took office in January, according to iSpot.tv. That's in line with the broader trend. Industry analyst Brian Wieser, principal at Madison and Wall, told BI that pharmaceutical ads tend to account for 20% of all spending across cable news channels.

On Monday, Fox News competitor Newsmax was also in the spotlight. It went public in a mini-IPO and saw shares soar. The stock closed up over 700%, valuing the company at around $8 billion.

The Daily Wire and National Review see increased advertiser demand

Advertisers are looking beyond the Fox News juggernaut as well.

The Daily Wire recently said it had signed an annual deal with the AI company Perplexity, which will appear in the "Ben Shapiro Show" podcast.

"Demand for our inventory has soared to all-time highs, fueled by our direct response partners and an influx of brand advertisers now targeting news and political content, with our conservative demographic now top of mind," Christine Hoffmann, SVP of ad revenue at the Daily Wire, told BI in a statement.

Despite promising advertising trends, The Daily Wire hasn't been immune to broader media market pressures. The outlet laid off some staffers Friday, a spokesman confirmed. The reduction was part of the company's plans to "better align resources with business priorities and growth areas," the spokesman said in a statement.

Chuck DeFeo, CEO of The National Review, told BI that his conservative news magazine had received an uptick in requests for proposals and insertion orders since the election. According to its 2024 media kit, The National Review's website reaches around 10 million monthly users.

"I think that it is a different moment in terms of where the political environment is and a recognition there have always been a large number of Americans who are conservative," DeFeo told BI in an interview last month.

"Since 2017, you have seen examples of brands who have associated themselves too far to the left and that has cost them customers," DeFeo added, pointing to Bud Light as the most famous example. The beer brand faced a consumer backlash after it partnered with a transgender influencer for a social media promotion.

A post-GARM bump for Rumble?

Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski said last year that the video platform benefited from the closure of the ad industry brand safety initiative, the Global Alliance of Responsible Media.

GARM, as it was known, dissolved after Elon Musk's X and Rumble filed antitrust lawsuits against it and several advertisers, accusing them of participating in an illegal agreement to withhold ad dollars from their platforms. The World Federation of Advertisers, GARM's parent organization, said it made the decision to close GARM because it had limited resources. It is fighting the cases and has said it's confident it will "demonstrate our full adherence to competition rules in all our activities." Both cases are ongoing.

"Immediately after we saw GARM disband, Rumble landed its first major brand advertising partnership," Pavlovski said on the company's November earnings call last year, without naming the advertiser.

GARM was a US-based initiative designed to create common frameworks and language for brands, agencies, and platforms to categorize harmful or sensitive content such as hate speech, pornography, and misinformation.

This month on Rumble's latest earnings call, Pavlovski said the Trump administration's strong stance on free speech put Rumble in a good position. Rumble, which describes its products as "immune to cancel culture," intends to target brands more aggressively in response to the changing environment, Pavlovski said. The company said it expected to post revenue growth of 25% year-over-year in the first quarter. Besides advertising, Rumble makes money through subscriptions, fees charged on users tipping creators, licensing, and platform hosting.

"We are entering a new era for Rumble, one where artificial advertising headwinds have the potential to turn into real tailwinds," Pavlovski said.

Prospects also seem to be looking up at Elon Musk's X. A number of big-name advertisers fled after Musk's takeover, but some have slowly crept back in recent months. A recent forecast from EMARKETER predicted X's ad revenue would increase this year, though added that some of the increased spending was driven by "fear" of potential retaliation from Musk and, for that reason, might not be sustainable.

BI recently reported that ad agency execs and consultants were begrudgingly advising clients to pay what could be called an Elon tax: buying ads on X in order to avoid legal and political woes.

• CMOs are beginning to unlock the value of artificial intelligence tools.
• Concepts like digital twins and spiking neural networks are shifting marketing strategies.
• Jamie Allan, an Nvidia director, shared examples of CMOs putting AI to work.

How can AI help supercharge advertising?

That's one of the major questions on the mind of Jamie Allan, a director at chip giant Nvidia who works on partnerships in the adtech and digital marketing industries.

In an interview with Business Insider, Allan outlined how some marketers are tapping combinations of AI tools to use the vast amounts of data they have inside their businesses to improve the performance of campaigns and better measure the results.

"You start realizing this flywheel within advertising, marketing, and agency land," Allan said.

Nvidia has been increasingly working with the ad industry, bringing together teams of solution architects to help marketers and their agencies build AI tools and tap into the latest technologies.

Allan spoke about how major brands like Delta Air Lines and Mars are embracing the latest AI technologies to unlock more value from their marketing, including using digital twins and tapping into spiking neural networks.

Brands like Delta are using AI to connect 'brand advertising' efforts to sales

Delta has been working with an AI platform called Alembic. It uses a proprietary technology called a spiking neural network, which works similarly to how neurons fire in the brain. Alembic says its tech filters through big data sets and "pulses" only the important information so that it doesn't waste energy on irrelevant pieces.

"They're looking to find the connections between advertising data and sales information, which is like the Holy Grail for lots of CMOs," Allan said.

Delta used Alembic's tech to understand how its sponsorship of the 2024 Paris Olympics was driving ticket sales for its flights. Alembic pulled in data from sources like TV ads, social media mentions, and harder-to-measure marketing, such as when the Delta logo was visible when athletes received their medals.

Speaking onstage at Nvidia's annual GTC conference, Alicia Tillman, Delta's chief marketing officer, said the technology helped her to attribute $30 million in cash sales to its Olympics activity.

Tillman said that while a large proportion of marketing budgets are devoted to brand building, this area of marketing has the least sophisticated measurement compared to lead generation or direct-response ads. The new AI tools have helped Dell communicate not just how many impressions the activity reached but that those people made a purchase as a result.

'Digital twins' are connecting marketing to the supply chain and other departments

Marketers have been using AI to create "digital twins," virtual replicas of customers that can be useful in predicting how consumers might behave.

A brand creating a new loyalty app might create a digital twin that has the attributes of its ideal customer — a 26-year-old male with an iPhone who earns $100,00 a year — to check whether there are any kinks in the design, for example.

Allan said digital twins are becoming more sophisticated. For example, a marketer might produce an Instagram ad using a 3D replica of a product, which is easy to digitally insert into an image with all the correct dimensions.

These replicas can also now contain all their manufacturing information and real-life physics, such as weight. That means they can simulate, for example, how many soda cans fit on a supermarket shelf or a pallet in a warehouse.

"It connects the digital thread in large manufacturing and retail and CPG and automotive in a way that has traditionally been broken," Allan said.

Unilever, for instance, has been using Nvidia's Omniverse development platform to use 3D digital twins within its product shoots. The consumer goods giant said the tech has made producing product imagery twice as fast and 50% cheaper.

Allan said this sort of process can break down silos between different functions within a business.

"AI has now created this common language between the CIO, the CEE, CFO, and CMO under which their proprietary data and information sits, but they can now all have a conversation about how they can interact with each other's departments," Allan said.

Allan said Mars Wrigley is an example of a company using this approach with its "One Demand" data and analytics team and a tool called "Brahma," which helps connect all the different data sets within the business and develop new product concepts.

AI is accelerating advertising production at warp speed

More commonly, many marketing departments and their agencies are now using generative AI to quickly spin up hundreds of different iterations of ads in a fraction of the time it would take for a human to produce them.

Last year, fashion retailer Forever 21 used Monks.Flow, AI tech from its digital ad agency Monks, and Meta's AI-powered ad targeting platform Advantage+, to produce AI-generated ads targeted to specific audiences and big cultural moments.

The companies said the campaign, which would have previously taken weeks, was created in less than a day and delivered a 66% higher return on investment than previous comparable activity.

"That's what we're starting to see a lot more of," Allan said. "It's not just the shiny 'we're using generative AI,' it's that 'we've found 10s of percent of improvement.'"

• X will clock $1.3 billion in US ad revenue this year, per a new forecast from EMARKETER.
• The report said some of the growth is motivated by fear of Elon Musk and isn't sustainable.
• X's advertising tactics have garnered scrutiny from Democratic senators.

Things seem to be looking up for the advertising business of Elon Musk's X.

A new forecast from the research firm EMARKETER says X's advertising business will get its first annual growth since 2021 this year.

EMARKETER forecasts X's US digital ad revenue will jump 17.5% to $1.3 billion this year, up from $1.1 billion in 2024. Globally, EMARKETER estimates X will pull in $2.3 billion in ad revenue this year, up 16.5% year-on-year.

There's a catch, however.

EMARKETER principal analyst Jasmine Enberg cautioned in her report that some of the growth is "being driven by fear" and, because of that, could be unsustainable.

"Many advertisers may view spending on X as a cost of doing business in order to mitigate potential legal or financial repercussions," Enberg said. "But fear is not a sustainable motivator, and the situation remains volatile, partly as some consumers' discontent toward Musk grows."

Enberg's comments echo previous reporting by Business Insider.

BI recently reported that ad agency execs and consultants were begrudgingly advising clients to pay what could be called an Elon tax: buying ads on X in order to avoid legal and political woes.

Enberg also said some of the ad growth came from the addition of small and medium-sized businesses and that X could also stand to benefit from Meta's new lax moderation policies.

X did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI. It's a private company and doesn't publicly report ad revenue.

X's relationship with advertisers has been fraught

Despite the recent upswing, X's ad revenue is still much lower than it was pre-Musk. In 2022, the year Musk bought it, the company pulled in $2.4 billion in US ad revenue, per EMARKETER estimates.

X's ad business plummeted in the wake of Musk's takeover. Some advertisers were wary of his changes to the company. X laid off a large chunk of its staff, loosened moderation, shook up account verification rules, and brought back some banned accounts.

X fired back at some advertisers who had spurned the platform. The company filed a lawsuit against several advertisers in August last year, accusing them of illegally conspiring to boycott the platform through their membership in a now-defunct industry initiative called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media. The case is ongoing.

X's sales tactics have garnered scrutiny from Democratic senators, who sent letters to the DOJ and FTC calling for investigations. In their letters, the Senators referenced a report in The Wall Street Journal that said X's CEO, Linda Yaccarino, and a lieutenant had pushed IPG to spend more money on X, citing people with knowledge of the talks. The Journal reported that IPG execs had interpreted the message as a reminder that the Trump administration could impede its proposed $13 billion merger with the ad giant Omnicom.

Disclosure: BI and EMARKETER share a parent company.

• Adform is exploring a sale, another sign of a rebound in the adtech M&A market.
• Adform, founded in 2002, offers products for both advertisers and publishers.
• Adform declined to comment.

The Nordic adtech company Adform is exploring a sale, four people familiar with its plans told Business Insider. A deal would mark the latest sign that the adtech M&A market is bouncing back after a couple of tepid years.

The four people said Adform had appointed Carnegie, a Swedish investment bank, to lead the process. They asked for anonymity to protect their business relationships; their identities are known to BI.

One of those people said Adform asked prospective buyers to submit their bids in April.

Adform and Carnegie declined to comment.

Founded in Denmark in 2002, Adform is one of the oldest independent adtech companies. Unlike many of its competitors, which tend to focus on either the advertiser side or publisher side of ad transactions, Adform offers solutions for both.

Those include a demand-side platform that helps advertisers buy and manage their ad campaigns across various media channels, data management platforms that help both advertisers and publishers organize their data, and ad servers where its clients can store their ads and track their campaigns.

Those assets could be attractive to other adtech companies, private equity firms, or the growing number of companies that have recently launched so-called retail media and commerce media businesses, such as supermarkets, e-commerce platforms, apps, and travel and leisure companies.

While it's been around a long time, Adform has struggled to gain the kind of traction in the market enjoyed by its US rivals, such as Google and The Trade Desk.

Adform reported revenue of 88.6 million euros, around $97 million, in 2023, down 3.7% from the prior year, according to its most recently published annual report. The company said the decline reflected economic uncertainty that led to advertisers reducing their marketing spend. "EBITDA before special earnings," its measure of profitability, came in at 16.9 million euros, or around $18.5 million. The company said it employed around 669 employees on average throughout 2023.

Adform had once planned to go public with hopes of raising $100 million, but it shelved its initial public offering in 2018, blaming the volatility in the financial markets at the time. The company has long been the subject of potential takeover rumors.

The adtech M&A market appears to be revving back into action after a quiet couple of years marred by ad spend slowdowns, economic volatility, and uncertainty around the impact of privacy and policy changes from the likes of Apple and Google.

Notable deals so far this year have included:

• T-Mobile's purchases of the outdoor media company Vistar and the location-based ad specialist Blis
• The Trade Desk acquiring metadata startup Sincera
• DoubleVerify buying the attribution platform Rockerbox
• Ad agency giant Publicis picking up data collaboration platform Lotame

• We're seeking nominations for Business Insider's 10th annual list of the most innovative CMOs.
• Marketers are looking to drive growth for their companies while navigating economic uncertainty.
• Submit your entries by 5 p.m. ET on April 25.

Business Insider is seeking nominations for our 10th annual list of the most innovative CMOs in the world. Submit your nominees via this form by 5 p.m. ET on April 25.

Your nomination doesn't have to hold the CMO title at their organization, but they must be the senior-most marketing executive at their company. They must also have been in their current role for at least six months or longer.

CMOs are steering their companies through a period of great political and economic uncertainty. Amid the rise of artificial intelligence, they are also navigating tremendous technological change. And all the while, marketers need to be laser-focused on driving financial growth for their organizations.

Criteria and methodology

The list will consider factors including the executives' influence on their company's financial performance, their role and responsibilities, the size and impact of the brand they represent, and how these executives are driving the entire marketing profession forward.

We highly recommend supporting your entries with case studies and quantitative data.

While information about the individual's wider career history will be considered helpful context, the entries should focus on the impact nominees have made over the past 12 months.

Business Insider's editorial team will judge and determine the list based on the nominations we receive and our own reporting. We may contact you with follow-up questions.

Submit your nominations here by April 25.

Check out last year's list here.

• Five senators asked the DOJ to probe the advertising tactics of Elon Musk's X.
• They said they were alarmed by reports that X used Musk's political power to sway advertisers.
• Leaders from one advertiser interpreted its dealings with X as an implicit threat, the WSJ previously reported.

A group of Democratic senators have called for a Justice Department probe into whether X has used Elon Musk's political status to pressure companies into advertising on the platform.

Senators Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Richard Blumenthal, Adam Schiff, and Chris Van Hollen wrote to Attorney General Pam Bondi to "express alarm about reports that Elon Musk's social media company 'X' (formerly Twitter) is leveraging his influential position in the Trump Administration to extract revenue from advertisers."

"If evidence emerges that Musk is, in fact, using his official role to coerce advertisers or is participating in particular matters in which he has a financial interest, we ask that DOJ investigate the potential violation of federal ethics laws, as the Department should for any other federal employee who appears to be breaking the law," the letter says.

Business Insider viewed a copy of the letter, which The Wall Street Journal earlier reported.

The senators specifically reference an article published last month by the Journal that said X's CEO, Linda Yaccarino, and a lieutenant had pushed IPG to spend more money on X, citing people with knowledge of the talks. The Journal reported that IPG execs had interpreted the message as a reminder that the Trump administration could impede its proposed $13 billion merger with the ad giant Omnicom.

X did not immediately respond to a request for comment. IPG declined to comment. The company previously said clients had the ultimate decision-making authority on where they spend their budgets.

The senators also wrote a separate letter to Andrew Ferguson, chair of the Federal Trade Commission, and Omeed Assefi, acting assistant attorney general of the DOJ's antitrust division, urging them to "resist any pressure based on private business interests to manipulate your agenda."

The senators asked the DOJ and FTC to inform them if Musk or his associates attempted to interfere with their antitrust work.

"Every business seeking a merger or acquisition deserves to have their matter reviewed without undue influence from the President or his allies," the letter says.

Ad agencies and consultants have told BI that they're begrudgingly advising clients to spend on X to help avoid political and legal risks.

It's an about-face from the waves of advertisers who fled X over concerns about brand safety, performance, and the return of some banned accounts after Musk took over the platform in 2022.

X has since gone on to sue several big-name advertisers — including Mars, Shell, and Colgate — accusing them of illegally conspiring to boycott the platform through their membership in a now-defunct industry initiative called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media. GARM shut down days after X filed the lawsuit. Its parent organization, a trade body called the World Federation of Advertisers, has said it plans to defend itself against the lawsuit and said it hadn't violated any antitrust laws. The litigation is ongoing.

Read the letters Senators Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Richard Blumenthal, Adam Schiff, and Chris Van Hollen sent to the DOJ and FTC in full below:

• AppLovin plans to sell its games unit to Tripledot Studios in a $900 million deal, sources say.
• Tripledot Studios, valued at $1.4 billion, specializes in popular mobile games.
• AppLovin declined to comment, while Tripledot did not respond to BI requests for comment.

The adtech company AppLovin is nearing a $900 million deal to sell its games unit to Tripledot Studios, a London-based mobile games developer, four people with knowledge of the matter told Business Insider.

The people asked for anonymity to preserve their business relationships; their identities are known to Business Insider. They said the deal isn't yet finalized, and the plans could still change.

AppLovin declined to comment. Tripledot Studios did not respond to requests for comment.

AppLovin, which helps app developers make money through advertising and find new users through ads, has been the buzziest company in adtech in recent months. AppLovin's shares have been on a tear and are up more than 400% over the last year, with its market value topping $100 billion.

While AppLovin was traditionally known for working with the gaming community, its recent stock run was propelled by a new move to court e-commerce advertisers.

It now wants to focus purely on advertising and exit the game development business. AppLovin's game studios include Lion Studios, Machine Zone, and Magic Tavern, which create more than 200 free-to-play mobile games like "Popsicle Stack," "Project Makeover," "Game of War: Fire Age," and "Mobile Strike."

While AppLovin's overall fourth-quarter revenue was up 44% year-over-year to almost $1.4 billion, its app revenue lagged — down 1% to just over $376 million.

AppLovin said it's 'never been a game developer at heart'

In a filing for AppLovin's latest quarterly earnings update in February, it said that it had reached an "exclusive term sheet agreement" with an undisclosed private company to offload its games studio in a deal that was expected to close by the second quarter.

AppLovin said at the time that the deal consisted of $500 million in cash and $400 million in equity, though it was still "subject to customary purchase price adjustments."

The buyer was looking to borrow up to $250 million to fund the deal, AppLovin said in a filing. The company also said that if the buyer couldn't find the funding, AppLovin would instead loan it the required cash to ensure the deal went ahead.

AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi said during the February earnings call that while the company had acquired several game studios over the years to help train its machine learning model, "we've never been a game developer at heart."

"I want to emphasize to our teams you'll soon be part of a company that specializes in and champions game development," Foroughi said.

Tripledot Studios fits that description. Founded in the UK in 2017, the company specializes in simple, popular mobile games such as "Solitaire," "Woodoku," and "Blackjack."

TechCrunch reported that a $116 million Series B funding round in 2022 valued Tripledot at $1.4 billion. Its investors include 20VC, The Raine Group, Eldridge Industries, and Lightspeed Ventures.

AppLovin is fending off short-sellers

AppLovin's stock market status has also meant that the company has attracted some negative attention in recent weeks.

Two separate short-seller reports published late last month sent its stock tumbling after they accused the company of exaggerating the performance of its AI models.

In a blog post, Foroughi said the reports were "littered with inaccuracies and false assertions" and were aimed at driving down its shares for the short sellers' own financial gain.

Big-name hedge funds like Viking Global, D1 Capital, and Castlehook have been piling into AppLovin of late. One prime broker told BI earlier this year that AppLovin had become the latest hedge fund hotel, a term describing stocks with a disproportionate amount of hedge fund ownership relative to the overall market.

• Some ad agencies and consultants say they're advising clients to spend on Elon Musk's X.
• Industry insiders told BI they felt advertising on X could help brands avoid some political and legal risks.
• However, many ad insiders bemoaned the way the political environment was affecting ad buys.

You might call it the Elon tax.

Some ad agency execs and consultants tell Business Insider they are begrudgingly advising clients to spend on Elon Musk's X.

Their attitude reflects a wider discomfort in the ad world.

Thirteen ad industry insiders who spoke with BI said they were bristling at the current state of play — namely that advertising on X seemed to be a cost of doing business in a politically charged era with Musk a central force in Donald Trump's White House.

Some of these insiders said they viewed spending on X as a type of insurance policy to avoid an advertiser being singled out publicly as a boycotter, sued, or saddled with some sort of regulatory scrutiny.

These insiders were a mix of marketers, agency executives, and consultants. Most of them asked for anonymity because of concerns about potential reprisals; their identities are known to BI.

On Tuesday, the research and advisory firm Forrester published a blog post that lambasted X while advising advertisers to spend on the platform to avoid potential repercussions. The analysts wrote that advertisers were "losing control of media choice" in the current political environment. They recommended advertisers "lean into non-binding advertising commitments with X" and increase spending gradually if X met specific goals.

Jay Pattisall, VP and principal analyst at Forrester, told BI that the firm heard less feedback than usual for a post weighing in on a hot industry topic.

"It's reflective of the business community at large not wanting to engage in controversy," Pattisall said. "The unique conditions of the moment and politics of the day make for the necessity to put these very common sense, practical pieces of advice out."

Some advertising agency insiders and consultants shared similar sentiments with BI.

"While Musk keeps the position he has, you just have to be a bit more careful," said an ad agency veteran of more than 20 years. "That's the reality."

"Until we get more legal guidance, keep setting aside that money," they added.

Fears of potential political reprisals for advertisers who spurn X got more credence recently with a report in The Wall Street Journal. Citing people with knowledge of the talks, the Journal reported that X CEO Linda Yaccarino and a lieutenant had pushed IPG to spend more money on X. IPG execs interpreted the message as a reminder that the Trump administration could impede a proposed merger with ad giant Omnicom, the Journal report said.

Several ad industry insiders said that if X really used these tactics, they felt it would amount to bullying.

"We do not make spending commitments on behalf of clients to any partner or platform, and decision-making authority always rests with the client," an IPG spokesperson said in a statement.

X and Yaccarino didn't respond to requests for comment.

X has been attracting advertisers, but long-term success is far from certain

While X has attracted advertisers, new and old, in recent months — including big names like Apple — its business doesn't seem to be booming. Marketing research company WARC estimates that X will pull in $1.96 billion in global ad revenue in 2025, down 11% from last year — and a steep fall from the $4.53 billion WARC estimated X generated in 2022, the year Musk acquired it (back when it was named Twitter). X is a private company and doesn't publicly share revenue figures.

X has not historically been a priority media buy because it doesn't provide the scale and performance that platforms like Meta and Google offer.

That said, X has a sizable audience that appeals to many advertisers, especially during high-engagement events like live sports or breaking news.

WPP CEO Mark Read, who runs one of the world's largest advertising holding companies, told the Financial Times that the company had seen more clients returning to X in recent months. He added that WPP was talking with X about how it could support the platform in communicating to advertisers that it is a safe venue to advertise on.

"The usage is definitely up and if you look at the impact that it has on world politics, you have to say it's powerful," Read said in an FT story published last week. "I think for some clients it's a good place to be."

Some advertisers are seeing a higher return on investment on X than in previous years, Michael Beach, CEO of the adtech company Cross Screen Media, told BI.

"Pre-Elon Musk, their adtech was so bad we moved spend away from Twitter," Beach said. "The technology has improved, and small advertisers understand that the inventory is undervalued versus other platforms."

Another top media buyer previously told BI that advertising money was increasingly being used to hedge against political risk — and often, these decisions were being made by the CEOs of big corporations versus the chief marketing officer.

Lou Paskalis, CEO of the marketing consultancy AJL Advisory, said this kind of fraught political situation makes the job of a CMO harder.

"If 10% of my ad budget has to be allocated" to risk mitigation, Paskalis said, "my CFO isn't going to reduce my business goals by 10% — he's simply going to say, you need to deliver your goals with the 90% of your budget that is investable 'rationally.'"

Musk versus advertisers

Musk's takeover of the platform in 2022 laid the groundwork for the current relationship between X and the ad industry.

A wave of advertisers pulled away from X over concerns about brand safety, ad performance, and the return of banned accounts.

But X didn't go down without a fight.

In August, X filed a lawsuit against several of its advertisers — such as Mars and CVS Health — accusing them of illegally conspiring to boycott the platform through their membership in a now-defunct industry initiative called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media. X has since added several more brands to that complaint as defendants, including Colgate, Lego, and Shell. Unilever was initially named as a defendant but reached an agreement with X — the terms of which weren't disclosed by either party — and was dropped from the suit in October. Unilever said X had committed to meeting its responsibility standards around brand safety and performance.

GARM shut down days after the X lawsuit was filed, saying it was a small nonprofit with limited resources. Its parent organization, the World Federation of Advertisers, has maintained that it plans to fight the suit and didn't contravene antitrust laws. The litigation is ongoing.

Jim Jordan, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, is also investigating whether advertisers' and agencies' participation with GARM led to conservative media, including X, being demonetized. In December, Jordan wrote to the CEOs of Omnicom and IPG, asking them to provide documents and reserve records regarding their GARM membership.

"Given that your company was a member of GARM from its inception and was also an active participant in GARM during its collusive activities, the proposed merger raises potential anticompetitive concerns," the letters read.

The legal developments — as well as Musk's political rise — have put marketers on high alert.

"I've never seen anything like this before in the history of our business," said a second advertising industry veteran speaking generally about the current political environment for advertisers.

But, they added, "You've got to play defense right now."

• Hulu crashed during the livestream of the 97th Academy Awards.
• Some users reported error messages at critical moments of the show, including the best actress nomination.
• This is the first time the platform has streamed the awards live.

Hulu crashed during the livestream of the 97th Academy Awards on Sunday, leaving fans disappointed and unable to follow along in real time for some of the biggest awards of the night.

For some users, the outage occurred during the best actress segment. Several Hulu users said the livestream went dark for them while Emma Stone was onstage introducing the award, before listing off the nominees.

"This evening, we experienced technical and livestream issues on Hulu which impacted some Oscars viewers," a Disney spokesperson said in a statement to Business Insider. "We apologize for the experience and will make a full replay of the event available as soon as possible."

Earlier in the night, the Disney-owned streaming platform experienced technical issues as well.

According to DownDetector.com, some 33,650 customers reported experiencing problems with login and video streaming beginning around 7 p.m. ET. — just as the awards show commenced.

"Our team has identified the issue and users affected should be able to log back in again soon. We apologize for the inconvenience," Hulu wrote in a post on X addressing the issue.

About an hour later, the company replied to the initial post and offered an update on the outage.

"Thanks so much for hanging in there!" Hulu wrote. "Our team took the necessary steps to resolve this, so you should be all set after rebooting your device. We appreciate your patience!"

It was Hulu's debut streaming the Oscars and a setback for its standing in the streaming wars.

Live broadcasts are particularly attractive to advertisers looking to reach large audiences amid the decline of traditional linear viewing. Disney had said last week that it had sold out of all of its Oscars ad inventory, with brands including Rolex, T-Mobile, and Starbucks purchasing spots.

Hulu rival Netflix has been bolstering its live offering lately, streaming live sports, WWE, comedy, and the Screen Actors Guild Awards. Some of its streams have also suffered from technical glitches, including the highly anticipated boxing match between Mike Tyson and YouTuber Jake Paul last year.

March 3, 2025 — The story has been updated to include a statement from Disney.

• Taboola is expanding beyond its native advertising roots to the broader display ad market.
• The company said its new Realize platform opens up a $55 billion performance ad budget opportunity.
• CEO Adam Singolda said its relationships with 9,000 publishers give it the edge over rival players.

Taboola cornered the market for bottom-of-webpage "content you may like" advertising widgets — less affectionately referred to as the "chum box."

Now, it's moving beyond its native advertising roots by launching a new ad platform called Realize that expands its offering to more prominent ad placements on publisher websites and apps, the adtech company exclusively told Business Insider.

The move puts Taboola in more direct competition in the display ad market with traditional demand-side platforms — companies like The Trade Desk and AppLovin that help advertisers plan and buy their ad campaigns across various media — and supply-side platforms, such as Magnite and PubMatic, that help publishers connect with advertisers and monetize their webpages and apps.

Taboola CEO Adam Singolda told BI that the company has estimated that its new strategy can target an additional $55 billion in performance advertising budgets. The company reported Wednesday that it generated $1.8 billion in annual revenue in 2024.

Performance advertising refers to ads designed to drive a near-immediate outcome, such as a purchase, app download, or email subscription.

Most advertisers' performance advertising budgets lean heavily on Meta and Google, but these are highly competitive platforms, and acquiring new customers has become more difficult and expensive over time, Singolda said.

"Search and social are maxed out," he added.

A similar thesis has propelled rival AppLovin's market value in recent months after it expanded its performance advertising offering to e-commerce advertisers. It had traditionally focused on the mobile gaming market.

"Outside of search and social, two companies have done a good job: The Trade Desk, for the top of the funnel, for branding, and AppLovin for apps," Singolda said. "No one is the third leg."

While plenty of established demand-side platforms already offer access to similar web inventory outside Google and Meta, Singolda said many of these companies have shifted focus to areas like video and connected TV or require a minimum level of monthly spending, which can shut out many smaller advertisers.

"Adtech is fragmented, complicated, and not scaleable," Singolda said.

Taboola says its publisher relationships give it an edge

Taboola aims to make it easy for advertisers to set up campaigns by conversing with an AI assistant, Abby, which lets them upload their existing creative assets and select the outcome they hope to achieve, like driving website visits or encouraging customers to try a new product.

Singolda said Taboola's heritage in running code on publisher websites that operate its recommendation widgets gives it an edge over competitors because it has unique data about the type of content users read, what they click on, and what they buy. It counts Yahoo, Microsoft, NBC News, Apple News, and Business Insider among its 9,000-plus publisher partners.

Singolda said Taboola would continue to offer its content recommendation widgets.

Ana Milicevic, cofounder of the adtech consultancy Sparrow Advisors, said that Taboola's large publisher-direct footprint and access to data would appeal to performance advertisers, especially if it emphasizes that its platform is easy to use. However, those publishers may be highly alert to potential brand safety risks as performance advertising moves higher up their article pages.

"Let's say I'm on CNN's website and am seeing performance ads for a new diet fad or crypto course that readers or users may perceive as low-value — does that, in turn, turn off other advertisers who may be buying CNN directly," Milicevic said.

Earlier this year, Taboola's close rival, Oubtrain, also expanded its offering beyond traditional content recommendation widgets. It closed its acquisition of fellow adtech firm Teads, a specialist in video advertising. The combined company is now operating under the name Teads.