InMobi and Scope3 are betting that AI agents, rather than traditional programmatic pipes, are the future of premium media buying. https://www.adweek.com/media/inmobi-scope3-debut-sell-side-agent-for-autonomous-media-buying/
Customer data platform Hightouch has developed a new tool that allows advertisers bypass third-party identity providers to directly confirm which consumers saw their ads placed by The Trade Desk.
Any advertiser transacting through The Trade Desk gets reports on each ad impression, click, and conversion, among other campaign performance data. But details specifying who actually saw or clicked on an ad are generally anonymized through privacy-safe identifiers like cookies, device IDs, or third-party IDs like The Trade Desk’s UID2. Without identity providers, there has historically been no way to directly match those anonymized IDs with customers in the advertiser’s own database.
https://www.adweek.com/media/this-new-tool-cuts-out-identity-providers-by-linking-trade-desk-data-with-brands-first-party-ids/
Anthropic Labs, the team dedicated to incubating and testing experimental AI products like within Anthropic, today unveiled Claude Design, an AI-powered platform that automates the creation of designs, slides, one-pagers, and other marketing and sales collateral. It’s designed to be easy to use for both experienced designers and nontechnical users.
The product is built on Claude Opus 4.7, the upgraded version of Anthropic’s flagship model, launched Thursday.
The product is poised to rival other design software titans like Figma and Adobe, both of which have been aggressively investing in AI tools to streamline design workflows, including prompt-based interface and asset generation.
Designers, marketers, creatives, and sales teams can use Claude Design through a familiar natural language interface. They can simply tell the system what it wants to make and watch Claude produce an output based on that input. Then, users can edit the asset directly, or prompt Claude to make changes through chat conversation, inline comments, or custom sliders, a Claude tool that lets users manipulate images, data, or other elements in real time.
During onboarding, users plug in foundational reference materials like design files and codebase. Claude Design then creates a design system that will be used as the de-facto standards for each project, standardizing colors, typography, and other design elements. Users can update or refine the design system, and can create more than one.
Once they’re set up, users can input text prompts, refer Claude Design to their codebase, upload documents and visuals, or even pull elements straight from a website using Claude’s web capture feature. Claude Design will produce outputs based on these inputs; then, users can make edits to polish their designs and can collaborate with colleagues in a shared interface with Claude. Then, designs can be exported in various formats or plugged into Claude Code to start building.
Claude Design is currently in a research beta with select companies, including design software platform Canva, cloud monitoring software company Datadog, and online learning platform Brilliant.
Testing teams have used Claude Design to build product mockups and wireframes, pitch decks and presentations, alongside marketing content like social media content, webpages, and campaign visuals. Claude Design also allows users to create more advanced prototypes and digital experiences sans manual coding, including voice interactions, video elements, 3D visuals, and special effects.
Canva, which in theory could view AI asset generators like Claude Design as competitors, considering the platform has its own native AI-powered visual generation tools, has worked with Anthropic for a year. The company is leaning into the partnership further as it tries out Claude Design. The company’s CEO and cofounder Melanie Perkins said the integration will make it “seamless for people to bring ideas and drafts from Claude Design into Canva, where they instantly become fully editable and collaborative designs ready to refine, share, and publish.”
At Datadog, Claude Design has already proved capable of shortening iteration periods and “enabling live design during conversations,” according to product manager Aneesh Kethini. “We’ve gone from a rough idea to a working prototype before anyone leaves the room, and the output stays true to our brand and design guidelines. What used to take a week of back-and-forth between briefs, mockups, and review rounds now happens in a single conversation.”
Anthropic hopes the new product will appeal to both advanced designers and nontechnical users. “Even experienced designers have to ration exploration—there’s rarely time to prototype a dozen directions, so you limit yourself to a few. And for founders, product managers and marketers with an idea but not a design background, creating and sharing those ideas can be daunting. Claude Design gives designers room to explore widely and everyone else a way to produce visual work,” the company said in a press release shared with ADWEEK.
Claude Design is accessible to Claude Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers.
https://www.adweek.com/media/anthropic-debuts-claude-design-for-building-marketing-assets-decks-and-uis/
Dentsu has overhauled its flagship AI platform, Dentsu.Connect, in preparation for a future where marketing and media workflows between brands, agencies, and tech partners are largely automated by agents.
The holdco unified its data and tech groups in 2024 and brought them into Dentsu.Connect. The goal was to supercharge marketing operations with a shared data layer and AI tools.
The newest iteration of Dentsu.Connect, built on a combination of custom small language models and frontier large language models like Google’s Gemini and Meta’s Llama models, goes much further. It acts as a centralized platform where all the existing workflows, like media planning, strategy, audience-building, can communicate and learn from each other.
https://www.adweek.com/agencies/dentsu-revamps-its-ai-platform-for-an-agentic-future/
Meta is poised to surpass Google in digital ad revenue for the first time this year. According to Emarketer, Meta is projected to generate $243.46 billion in global ad revenue in 2026, edging past Google’s $239.54 billion. The social media network is also expected to take a larger share of global ad spend—26.8% compared to Google’s 26.4%—a reversal from just a few years ago.
The milestone would mark the first time Google has ceded the top spot, as advertisers increasingly prioritize platforms that pair scale with automation and measure return on ad spend.
Google’s ad business, encompassing Google Ad Network (search and display ads) and YouTube, is still growing, albiet at a slower pace.
https://www.adweek.com/media/meta-is-quietly-becoming-a-bigger-ad-business-than-google/
Possible, the Miami-based media and marketing conference that first made a splash with an Elon Musk keynote in 2023, is entering its fourth year with a larger physical footprint, thousands more attendees, and a fresh partnership with YouTube to extend its content online.
Organized by Beyond Ordinary Events, acquired for a rumored $40 million in 2024 by Shoptalk owner Hyve Group, the conference is expected to draw around 6,800 attendees from April 27 to 29—up about 25% from last year’s count of 5,441. Though the company wasn’t able to share the 2026 split, last year’s attendee list consisted of 30% brand marketers, 22% ad agency reps, 32% tech vendors, and 14% media company insiders.
https://www.adweek.com/media/possible-wants-to-be-davos-for-adland/
Mobile adtech giant AppLovin is shaking up its upper ranks with a new chair of the board and the impending departures of both its chief technologist and its chief legal officer.
Adam Foroughi, AppLovin’s CEO and cofounder, stepped down as chairman of the board last week, according to an SEC filing made Tuesday. He was replaced by Wynn Resorts CEO Craig Billings, who has sat on the board since 2020. Foroughi will remain CEO and retain a seat as board member.
In a press release, Foroughi called Billings “thoughtful and engaged,” and added that the switch will allow him to “fully focus on strategic execution.”
https://www.adweek.com/media/applovins-ceo-is-no-longer-board-chair-and-two-top-execs-are-stepping-down/
Three key executives at The Trade Desk are exiting the company.
On Tuesday, chief marketer and executive vice president Ian Colley announced he is leaving the publicly traded demand-side platform (DSP) after seven years. Colley is being replaced by Anna Sayre, who has worked on marketing at the company for roughly the same amount of time.
“I’m stepping down from TTD after more than 7 years, in order to pursue an exciting new opportunity that I’ll be able to talk about in a couple of weeks,” Colley told ADWEEK. “We’ve done some incredible marketing work at TTD in recent years, positioning the company as the industry’s leading independent DSP, and in championing the power and value of the open internet.
https://www.adweek.com/media/exclusive-ian-colley-three-executives-depart-trade-desk/
After recent controversy surrounding The Trade Desk, competitors are jumping at the chance to capture dollars from the platform’s potential defectors with new bids for advertiser business.
Two weeks ago, the French advertising giant Publicis advised its clients to stop transacting on The Trade Desk, the largest independent demand-side platform (DSP) on the market, after it failed an audit of its fees and media spend. Publicis claimed, in a memo leaked to ADWEEK, that the platform “improperly applied their DSP fee to other fees” and automatically opted the holding company and some of its clients into fee-based offerings without authorization.
https://www.adweek.com/programmatic/the-trade-desk-rivals-swoop-in-on-the-heels-of-publicis-omnicom-auditing-drama/
Yahoo is building out a range of new AI-powered tools within its demand-side platform, or DSP, for mid-market, performance-focused advertisers. These include automated options for activating and managing media designed to make the DSP more accessible and easy to use for all kinds of advertisers.
The development signals an expansion beyond Yahoo DSP’s core business, which has historically serviced enterprise advertisers facilitating ad buys for brands like Kroger, Arby’s, and Planet Fitness. The new tools could help the platform extend its market penetration, attracting a wider variety of advertisers, such as ecomm platforms and direct-to-consumer brands.
“AI is enabling us to better support existing customers while making our technology accessible to a broader range of advertisers, and we will share more when ready,” a Yahoo spokesperson said in a statement.
Yahoo is hiring a dedicated team to build out these offerings, according to a source familiar with the matter.
A job posting for a head of growth accounts for the new project appeared on LinkedIn earlier this month. The range for the role is $217,905 to $473,710 annually, with a core mandate to “drive net-new advertiser acquisition across mid-market brands, with a strong focus on CTV and full-funnel programmatic solutions.”
The company is also seeking out talent to fill strategy and product development roles associated with the new features, the source said.
Yahoo is in the early stages of building out these new features and is eyeing a launch date for later this year, according to the source.
Yahoo’s core enterprise DSP business has grown substantially over the last year. The company strengthened its privacy-safe targeting, began testing AI agents within its DSP, and inked a handful of deals likely to bring more offsite retail media dollars onto the platform. Plus, Yahoo became a key beneficiary of advertisers’ disgruntlement with The Trade Desk, which lost millions of dollars last year to rival DSPs. Yahoo’s lower fees have proved particularly appealing to The Trade Desk defectors.
Now, by folding in more performance-minded features, Yahoo could bolster its competitive edge with advertisers for whom automation, cost efficiency, and accessibility outweigh the sophisticated customization options offered by some other DSPs on the market.
https://www.adweek.com/agencies/exclusive-yahoo-moves-downmarket-with-dsp-performance-push/
