Google

    Fistful of Google Ads Bits

    Google is continuing its transformation to Meta Ads:

    The agents are coming: Open Source Google Ads API MCP Server

    The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is the open standard that allows Large Language Models (LLMs), like Google Gemini, to connect with and act upon external data sources and applications. By releasing an MCP Server specifically for the Google Ads API, we are making it possible for any MCP-compatible AI application to understand and analyze advertising campaigns through natural language.

    (If you don’t know what any of that means, you’re fine.)

    Old news at this point, but Google is trying to toss some pennies at the publishers that took a traffic hit after its AI glow up with Offerwall:

    Offerwall lets publishers give their sites’ readers a variety of ways to access their content, including through options like micropayments, taking surveys, watching ads, and more.

    Getting a lot of spam from PMax?
    Block app placements: tools > content suitability > excluded placements


    YouTube’s new Brand Pulse Report seems like it could be really useful.

    evaluate your brand presence across YouTube by detecting brand mentions via visuals (brand logos, product shots, etc.) and language (audio, video titles, etc.). So, if a creator uses or mentions your product in passing, we recognize it and capture it.

    incorporating metrics that demonstrate how your paid ads on YouTube can lead to more views on organic videos — a previously underreported value for paid media — and how users seeing both your paid and organic videos together leads to searches for your brand.

    A side-by-side comparison shows two smartphone screens with different scenes and text below indicating 4.1M Paid Views and 451K Organic Views.

    Coming Soon: AdsGPT?

    OpenAI wants to monetize ChatGPT via ads (which isn’t a surprise, just think of the Google Search budgets waiting to be reallocated).

    The company recently hired for a “Growth Paid Marketing Platform Engineer” (listing is no longer up) that :

    would be responsible for “developing campaign management tools, integrating with major ad platforms, building real-time attribution and reporting pipelines, and enabling experimentation frameworks to optimize our objectives.”

    There is currently an open role called Growth - AI Workflows, Martech, Creative Systems that will:

    Design and launch AI-powered creative systems (dynamic content generation, automated asset production, experimentation tooling) that enable rapid, personalized campaigns across multiple channels.

    &

    Build and scale a modern martech stack (data pipelines, automation platforms, experimentation frameworks) that supports sophisticated targeting, measurement, and real-time optimization.

    Connecting ad functionality to Instant Checkout is an obvious first step. The trap is building an ad system that looks like the current heavy hitters.

    Turning responses into pay-to-play performance PR outputs kills trust.
    Plopping Google Search Ads style placements somewhere in the chat pane is lazy and annoying.

    Utilizing the unique understanding of a user, content, and intent to create a new paradigm of contextual advertising that provides value and isn’t reliant on hoovering up user data is the opportunity.


    ChatGPT adds Instant Checkout (which sounds a lot like Perplexity’s Pro Shop).

    Buy from Etsy sellers (Shopify coming soon) without leaving your chat thread. This continues the trend of every platform trying to become a shopping platform (see: Google Shopping, Meta Shops, TikTok Shop, etc.)

    Merchants pay a small fee on completed purchases, but the service is free for users, doesn’t affect their prices, and doesn’t influence ChatGPT’s product results.

    The processing fee is a marketing expense. This could be great for early adopters.


    Google and Meta Ads are saturated and automated.

    There is no in-platform secret sauce and the days of scaling your sales to the moon on one or the other are in the rear view.

    They’re still the best at what they do, but you need something else if you want outsized results.

    What’s your new frontier?


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