Todd Parsons

The Trade Desk’s VP of Product, Mike O'Sullivan, and the IAB Tech Lab’s Hillary Slattery, are dropping knowledge on the value of clear signals in the supply chain to drive value for both buyers and sellers. #SignalShift

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🚨 (Adweek) LLM disruption also played a role in adtech's Q2 downward trend, "...the complexities of navigating the AI boom—which is causing upheaval in how people search and stifling publisher traffic—and adtech companies are finding themselves in a new kind of pressure cooker." 💡 I think a lot about the turbulence B2B tech marketing pros are navigating: ➡️ If traffic from Search to brand.com is collapsing, pipeline and revenue metrics are at risk due to far fewer high-quality lead volumes ➡️ If publisher traffic from Search is collapsing, content consumption signal is diminished making Intent data less reliable for TALs and ABM tactics. 🦺 Immediate solve: direct prospect engagement through high-quality demand gen - back to basics with tried and true, predictable pipeline will steady the ship during this uncertain time. #b2bmarketing #growthmarketing #revenuemarketing https://lnkd.in/dHQAA8bh

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Excited to see the IAB Tech Lab Agent Registry continuing to grow! 🚀 We’re expanding the registry with new agents from Amazon Ads, Burt Intelligence., Optable, Dstillery, and HyperMindZ.ai! The registry continues to help the advertising industry discover trusted capabilities powering agentic advertising workflows. We’ve also introduced a new deployment classification to make agents easier to understand and integrate: - Remote: Accessible to anyone via the internet, even if authentication is required. Best for hosted services, cloud APIs, and SaaS offerings. - Local: Must be downloaded and installed locally. Best for downloadable software, CLI tools, npm packages, or standalone applications. - Private: Deployed to a customer's private network or infrastructure. Best for enterprise on-premise installations or VPC deployments. This is another step toward building a transparent, discoverable ecosystem for advertising agents. Explore the registry and register your agents. It's free! https://lnkd.in/emEFdexH The agentic ecosystem is just getting started. 🤖 #AAMP #AgenticAdvertising #Agentic #AI #IABTechLab #Standards

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It's been interesting to watch the journey of Dstillery. An AI native company (in the last wave of predictive AI) well positioned to capitalize and accelerate growth with the current wave of generative AI. It's clear that companies that have strong AI talent can adapt much much faster.

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Today brings two more announcements in our ~10 day drumbeat showcasing the power of innovation on the open internet.      First, we are partnering with Snowflake to make it easier than ever for advertisers to upload their first-party conversion data into The Trade Desk in one easy step. And we’re doing it in a way that makes sure that data stays with the advertiser and respects user agreements and privacy, even as they use it to build their retail strategy, for example.  This new connector app will also continually refine the data back to the advertiser, i.e. with insight on what kind of media or targeting actually led to sales. This optimizes performance at every level.  This is a significant step forward in further advantaging the open internet’s measurement capabilities over the walled gardens.     Second, as many know we launched a streaming TV operating system. We know that OEMs margins are near zero and that their future is largely in building advertising businesses (which is foreign territory to many of them). We are partnering with Anoki AI to bring AI-powered FAST channel capabilities to our Ventura CTV operating system. OEMs without an owned FAST service will have the option to offer a FAST app by Anoki for Ventura-enabled devices, creating more ways for OEMs to drive recurring revenue through a clean and fair advertising supply chain. I’m looking forward to sharing more exciting updates about our Ventura work in the months ahead.     https://lnkd.in/gEJPe5vv   https://lnkd.in/gyEUGh65

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What does it really mean to be building a Consumer AI-native product today? BBG Ventures continued its Breakfast Series with a convo on Consumer AI co-hosted with Factorial, Lightspeed, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Stellation Capital (thanks SVB!) We were joined by two forward thinking AI-native builders - Dennis Crowley at Hopscotch Labs and Anna Bofa at Crate - and got into the hard stuff: what's valuable or just a feature; what does real personalization look like; what makes a product a no-brainer for user adoption; what are the new moats, and what are VCs looking for when they invest early? Our top takeaways below - weigh in with your thoughts! ✨ What’s newly possible vs. what’s newly trivial. AI makes a lot easier—but only some things more valuable. The best builders are distinguishing between products that unlocks new user behavior, that are meaningfully differentiated (possible) and features that simply make things easier - or could be built in a weekend (trivial). VCs are looking to invest in the former. H/t Matthew Hartman for this frame. 🧠 Is personalization the VIBE N of 1 personalization is the holy grail - but it's about more than prediction, it's about empathy. It's about building memory over time—capturing user tone, goals, and intent—and creating a vibe match that makes the product feel intuitive and emotionally aligned. That’s what builds trust, repeat use, and brand equity. Crate is doing this by collecting implicit signal, and Hopscotch's Beebot through its ambient "pop in your airpods" approach. Which brings us to ... ⚖️ The product "effort spectrum" Every product lives somewhere on the no → low → hard effort spectrum. AI-native experiences need to be closer to the "no-effort" end of the spectrum - a value exchange and clear payoff for little work. Put another way, friction is the enemy of frequency. 🧱 Moats are the same but different Fundamental moats remain the same, but network effects, proprietary data etc, but they get more exciting because of feedback loops and real time user data - for each interaction and related improvement. Hot take related to personalization from me: maybe the vibe match becomes the moat? 📊 What VCs are looking for at Seed vs. Series A At Seed, the VCs in the room Matthew Hartman Peter Boyce II and BBG Ventures are backing founders with a deep POV on behavior, training loops, and interface design. We prize organic growth and WOM. By Series A, investors like Michael Mignano Danielle Lay are looking for continued organic growth, strong retention and stable user cohorts, real engagement depth, customer obsession and proprietary data We're investing in Consumer AI! If you're building something newly possible and you believe in wow moments; if you’re working on n of 1 personalization and the vibe match with less work users come talk to us. Full post 👉 https://lnkd.in/geFief5D Claire Biernacki Susan Lyne

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Nice piece by Ann Gehan on the fast (slow?) moving world of #agenticcommerce. Unsurprisingly, standardized, accurate #ecommerce data (inventory, pricing, loyalty, payment) is the biggest blocker to checkout inside ChatGPT. My $0.02: - Standards will get defined over 2026. But adoption and ongoing maintenance / compliance will be operationally intensive for retailers and brands. - Technology will help. But products / founders that already have 1P merchant data are best positioned to be merchant-side bridge builders. Merchants don't want another silo in their tech stack. - Expect the entire value chain - AI Search players, payments players - to invest in merchant-side products that give them deep 1P inventory / pricing / loyalty data as they chase a big prize (even partly displacing Google from owning the top of the internet commerce funnel) https://lnkd.in/gkZ7mxrQ

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Many marketers are applying first-order thinking on how to take advantage of emergent AI channels to grow their business. Optimizing for LLM visibility, building crawlable sites for AI traffic, eventually buying ads on these platforms -- this is the conversation. Our discussion with Dmitry at Perplexity delved into second-order effects of the shift that's underway. In a world of agent-based discovery and native checkout inside Perplexity’s new Comet browser (where the agent sees user's full context and can transact), "personalization" looks very different. A few topics we delved into: - Optimizing for decision quality vs transaction friction - How Comet turns every tab into a shopping agent, and which signals it weights in surfacing hyper-personal recommendations. - The role of AI browsers & sidebar agents in threatening display ad real estate - Moving from keyword-orientation to dynamic offers/discounts - Trust remains the hard currency. How to think about AEO and Ads wrt trust Hope this is a valuable episode. Feedback welcome. cc Rishabh https://lnkd.in/gmYtigaC

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There are plenty of AI note takers doing simple recaps, but if your commercial team is processing high call volumes weekly, transcripts sitting in folders don't help much. Claap just released a significant product update that lets you mine thousands of conversations in three clicks. They let you interrogate all your conversations through an intuitive interface, extracting patterns, insights, and actionable intelligence from what was previously an unwieldy archive. You can see how power users are already finding creative applications through the template library below. While most B2B apps are trying to build data walls around their applications, I'm excited to see Claap take the opposite approach. They organize your sales conversations and data to fuel intelligent workflows across your different applications and jobs, wherever commercial insights add value. Next week, they're launching their MCP integration to make these datasets actionable by any AI agent outside Claap's platform... More to come! Robin Bonduelle Pierre Touzeau Thomas Hernandez https://lnkd.in/dVrUwPUW

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Criteo is pointing to the potential of conversational advertising. The pitch deck emphasizes ChatGPT’s role as the leading source of AI-driven traffic, generating 70% of AI assistant traffic—indicating that marketers are missing a major opportunity for conversational campaigns.

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One of the reasons I wrote this blog is think a lot of teams are still overvaluing “being seen.” A mention. A badge. A ranking. That might get you attention but attention is not understanding. AI is very good at making you visible. It is not responsible for making you credible. It will surface you. It will summarize you. But without real depth, you become indistinguishable from everything else. For example: “Easy to use, great performance, highly recommend.” vs. “We deployed this across AWS and Azure. It reduced alert noise, but required about 30 days of tuning to get policies right.” Same product. Very different level of understanding. And that’s where momentum either builds or breaks. Visibility still matters. But without substance, it’s short-lived and can actually work against you. I realize this goes against a lot of what we learned in the SEO era. But AI doesn’t reward volume the same way search did. It rewards what holds up when everything gets summarized. #peerspot #CMO #LLMvisibility #AIinmarketing

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If agentic AI feels harder than expected, you’re not alone. 81% say scaling agentic AI into production is more complex than expected. Get the data behind why scaling agentic AI breaks down. 🎥https://gag.gl/HeJ6ht Full Report 🔗 https://gag.gl/Sl6vCi

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Don’t think of who you can replace with AI, think of what you and they could do better with AI. There are lots of intangible functions people do outside of their defined job descriptions.

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Most measurement systems force trade-offs that are hard to accept. Attribution gives speed, but ignores the full funnel. MMM gives scope, but is too slow. Incrementality offers causality, but only in snapshots that mean channel comparability is lost. This trade-off leaves marketers without full-funnel, daily, ad-level inputs they need to plan and optimize spend with confidence and act on emerging opportunities… As brands head into BFCM, that gap matters more than ever. And it’s exactly why we built Fospha.

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When the stakes are high, the right tech partner makes all the difference. For LSKD—a global movement rooted in performance, community, and grit—that moment came when they uncovered over $100K in fraudulent affiliate commissions. They didn’t just need data. They needed action. That’s where Moby Agents from Triple Whale stepped in: ✅ $100K+ in fraud detected and prevented ✅ 40% lift in blended ROAS ✅ 3+ hours saved per week on reporting and analysis ✅ $8M AUD in revenue growth—with no increase in ad spend But the real story is how it happened: Agent-powered anomaly detection spotted affiliate abuse during a major sale—something even seasoned analysts could’ve missed. AI-driven reporting replaced siloed, inflated platform data—becoming LSKD’s new source of truth. Smarter budget reallocation fueled efficient growth, driven by real impact—not last-click noise. This is what it looks like when brands use AI strategically, not reactively. And here’s the key: Moby Agents didn’t replace the LSKD team—they enhanced it. By handling heavy, repetitive analysis, agents freed the team to focus on what really moves the needle: strategy, creativity, and innovation. This isn’t about less human input. It’s about higher-value human output. Full story here: https://lnkd.in/eNiVtyrC #eCommerce #ArtificialIntelligence #PerformanceMarketing #RetailTech #DTC #GrowthMarketing #triplewhale #moby

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Great to see Anthropic’s commitment to the AI partner ecosystem. Having just spent two immersive days with Claude’s partnerships and product teams, I can tell you firsthand this will create significant, immediate impact for our customers. Stay tuned for more details.

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Nine years ago this week, my piece predicting the rise of “self-driving news” being automatically generated by the same platforms that were creating fake markets for commerce and social. Now, major publishers are seeing 90+% drop-offs in traffic from search engines as LLMs generate synthesized versions of news stories instead of sending readers to read original media articles. https://lnkd.in/eqPVVHgr

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