DataBeat

AI chatbots could disrupt retail media’s $38B search ad market. 🛒 Gartner predicts search volume may drop 25% by 2026 as shoppers shift to AI. RMNs won’t vanish, but they must evolve fast. Is retail media ready for this shake‑up? #AdTech #AI #RetailMedia #Search #DataBeat

Criteo is pitching ChatGPT ads as the future of conversational commerce. 🛒 Think discovery → purchase collapsed into a single AI chat. $60 CPM, 50 products/campaign, live in days. Is this the next big ad channel or just hype? #AdTech #AI #ChatGPT #Criteo

@Daktronics It’s kinda wild, DOOH now drives 4x more online activity than traditional ads. The next frontier is not just reach, but intelligence - agentic workflows that fuse DOOH’s scale with AI‑driven precision, turning public screens into autonomous growth engines for brands.

When connecting with travelers is crucial, install an LED digital display! This display, known as The Whale in Germany, is engaging people as they make their way through the station with travel information and advertising messages. #DOOH #OOH #DigitalSignage

Publicis Epsilon warns: don’t buy into the LLM hype. 🚨 Real‑time bidding runs on specialized ML - 800B bid requests daily, 15 decisions in <10ms. LLMs help with language tasks, not live markets. The future? Hybrid AI stacks, not LLM‑only. #AdTech #AI #LLM

Why do so many AI projects stall at Pilot? As our CDO Pratyush Mulukutla shared with DataCamp, it’s not the model but foundation: • Clear business objectives • Real workflows • Strong Data Engineering & MLOps • Solid data architecture 👉shorturl.at/DknBh

Apple just turned every iPhone into a local storefront :) For retailers, this is the most significant inventory expansion since Google Local Services. The challenge? Keeping your creative as clean and 'Apple-standard' as the map itself.

@KarstenW Impressive creative output. The value comes from repeatable CTR improvement and conversion impact.

Lovely chatting with OpenAds' founder and CEO Steven Liss. Another cool chatbot ads startup doing real business as a combined DSP/gen-AI creative platform. The creative platform generates some really impressive numbers... openads.ai

@StartupArchive_ Marketing buys attention, but only a great product buys loyalty. In an era of high CAC, the delight as virality model is the only sustainable way to build a brand that actually lasts.

Wealthfront CEO on why advertising spend makes it harder to find product/market fit Andy Rachleff believes paid user acquisition can be a distraction for startups: “The way that you know you have product/market fit is if you have exponential organic growth. That’s not an easy thing to do, and advertising can make you think you’re doing well because you’re buying customers when in fact you’re not. The only way you drive exponential organic growth is through word of mouth.” He recalls a Japanese saying in manufacturing: “You can’t see the rocks until you drain the water.” “By getting rid of the advertising, we could actually see if we were driving exponential organic growth… The great companies were all built through word of mouth and through great products.” Instead of marketing, Andy has chosen to invest most in building a product that delights customers because, as he puts it, “delight is the greatest form of virality.” Video source: @Fintechnexus (2018)

@fogoros Great framing. In 2026, the competitive edge isn't the model you use - it’s how well your 'Action Layer' talks to your internal data. Transitioning from AI-as-a-consultant to AI-as-a-collaborator is how we’re finally seeing true end-to-end automation.

#sponsored by HighByte. Think of Agentic AI as an "Action Layer" for your business. Generative AI: The creative engine. External Data: Your apps, documents, and databases. The Agent: The bridge that connects the two. The agent uses the model to reason through a task, pulls data from your services, and then performs the action without you needing to copy-paste. #sponsored @HighByteInc #highbyte_iiot

@trishlaostwal @OpenAI OpenAI isn't fighting for clicks but for mindshare.Low CTR is expected when the user is deep in a task & not browsing. The winner in 2026 won't be the platform with the most clicks, but the one that integrates the brand into the user's workflow without breaking the experience.

Scooplet: @OpenAI is testing an Ads Manager with a small group of partners as its ChatGPT ads pilot takes shape. Early data: some brands see CTRs below 1%, far behind Google Search. Still, its early days for OAI's ads to be as effective as Google’s. adweek.it/4733pqi

@eric_seufert Let’s be honest, this shift toward secure AI architectures is the new gold standard for scaling high-performance attribution while respecting the 73% of consumers who now prioritize data privacy.

AI Tracking Transparency In November, Apple updated its App Store developer guidelines to require developers to obtain affirmative, opt-in consent from users before sending “personal data” to third-party AI services. A pertinent question is: if Apple is able to dissuade developers from utilizing third-party AI services through the consent requirement, but accessing models hosted via PCC does not require consent, will Apple be able to charge a revenue share for “default AI status” at some point, as it does with default search engine status in Safari? mobiledevmemo.com/ai-tracking-tr…

@Beet_TV @weareogury Total agreement..don’t just automate the mess, solve it. We’re seeing that AI-driven data can filter the 30% of noise in the bid stream so we can finally focus on true performance signals.

AI can either automate the industry’s existing mess or finally cut through it, and as @weareOgury’s Nicolas Bidon tells Beet.TV, the goal isn’t to pile AI onto complexity but to use it to extract real signals from the noise. beet.tv/2026/03/ogurys…

@PRcarly AI LLMs overwhelmingly cite non‑paid sources. Earned PR media is now a measurable growth channel, not just brand hygiene.

PREDICTION: Gartner says that PR and earned media budgets will DOUBLE by 2027... and the reason why should matter to every marketer still pouring money into paid channels. Their latest report lays it out: mass adoption of AI as a replacement for traditional search is going to force a fundamental reallocation of marketing spend away from paid, toward earned. THE EVIDENCE: Between the first half of 2024 and first half of 2025, ChatGPT traffic grew 608%, while Google and Bing both declined. Muck Rack's research shows that more than 95% of links cited in AI-generated answers come from non-paid sources, with half of all AI citations coming from content published in the last 11 months. And per Semrush, AI search visitors convert at 4.4x the rate of traditional organic search. We've been watching this play out with our own clients... one saw 38% of their leads this year come directly from earned media surfacing in ChatGPT queries (we got them in the NYT, WSJ, Wired, Forbes, TechCrunch, and others). WHAT THIS MEANS: Gartner is essentially telling CMOs: the channel your customers use to find you is changing to AI; and earned media is what AI trusts. Brands still treating PR as a "nice to have" line item below paid media and SEO are in store for an awakening (I was going to say “rude awakening” but that would be… rude). For PR teams already doing the work, every placement you secure isn't just building credibility with human readers anymore; it’s informing the AI systems that are increasingly deciding which brands get recommended and which ones don't exist. And for marketers who spent the last decade buying their way into "earned-looking" content... native ads, sponsored posts, advertorials pretending to be editorial... AI is seeing right through it. THE NEW REALITY: We're watching a once-in-a-generation shift in how people discover brands. The companies investing in real earned media (that is, true third-party validation) are the ones building a moat. Every month without it? Good luck catching up.

@aripap Latency is the silent killer of ROI and if the ad doesn't load, the impression doesn't exist. High latency triggers bid timeouts that slash fill rates and waste budgets before the auction even ends. See the data on the hidden costs here: databeat.io/knowledge-base…

Lately I've been spending time on news websites and the ads are SLOW. Here are screenshots of 3 totally random sites loading -- I waited about ~1 second before taking these shots and the ads hadn't loaded. This was not scientific, it was the first three sites I visited.

MediaMint is landing in Vegas for Shoptalk Spring (Mar 24–26)!✈️ Catch our SVP Kevin Gianatiempo at Mandalay Bay & let’s talk Mia + Services‑as‑a‑Software and turning complex ops into measurable outcomes. See you at Shoptalk! #Shoptalk2026 #RetailMedia #Mia #MediaMint

US Programmatic Trends, Mar ’26📊 CPMs up 3.6% MoM (Display strong), Video soft, YoY CPMs still +36%. Fill rates dipped slightly. Recovery signs are here, but demand quality & format mix matter more than ever. more:shorturl.at/jpzSm #DataBeat #ProgrammaticTrends #AdTech

Thrilled to welcome Krishan Bhatia as Board Advisor! 🤝 With leadership at Amazon, NBCU & now Taboola, he brings deep expertise in scaling revenue & partnerships to guide our next growth phase with Agentic Growth Services powered by Mia. 👉shorturl.at/WvNrN

Amazon just overtook Walmart on the Fortune 500 🏆 Andy Jassy’s tech‑driven retail playbook is reshaping scale, while Doug McMillon’s Walmart faces a new competitive era. Is retail’s future now defined more by cloud + AI than store count? #DataBeat #AI #AdTech #Fortune500

@anthonykatsur Total agreement - you can’t scale these agents if the consent signals are breaking the backend. Legacy systems just weren't built for this kind of pressure.

If agentic workflows are going to operate across the advertising supply chain, privacy architecture can’t be an afterthought. Agents will need to verify consent signals, respect data permissions, and enforce policy automatically, or we risk scaling privacy failures as automation expands. This isn’t theoretical. We’ve already had discussions with regulators around the world on this. A thoughtful piece from @IABTechLab Sr. Director of Privacy, Rowena Lam, asks the right question: Where is the privacy architecture for agentic advertising? (Sneak preview: there’s a spec for that.) 🔗 cynopsis.com/cyncity/as-ai-…

@MarkStenberg3 This is the reality check we needed. Relying on platform handouts was never a strategy, and this traffic dip is just accelerating the inevitable. Operationally, the winners are those treating O&O platforms as the primary product, not just a social link destination.

New: This year, Time is on pace to generate 50% of its revenue from events alone, up from 28% in 2023. Within Time's advertising business specifically, events now make up 79% of its revenue. The transformation reflects how vital events have become to the media industry. (1/3)