If today’s earlier post wasn’t positive enough for you, the New York Fed also wants to rain on your parade.

September survey says…

households’ inflation expectations increased at the short- and longer-term horizons and were unchanged at the medium-term horizon.

Despite a small rebound in the expected job finding rate, labor market expectations continued to deteriorate with consumers reporting lower expected earnings growth, greater likelihoods of losing jobs, and a higher likelihood of a rise in overall unemployment.


Consumer confidence dipped

Income-based splintering continues

Luxury shoppers are feeling good

Jobs numbers aren’t great

And it’s beginning to look a lot like an expensive holiday season

Prices / inflation are top of mind for almost everyone &

A higher income doesn’t necessarily mean less concern over rising prices.

Best guess: total holiday spend may be relatively stable with past years, but purchase volume will be down.
Basically: less stuff for the same spend.


Thriving businesses create value, dying businesses strip-mine it

from Annette Franz


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.