TMW #200 | Wednesday Martech Briefing

Nov 6, 2024

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Welcome to The Martech Weekly, where every week I review some of the most interesting ideas, research, and latest news. I look to where the industry is going and what you should be paying attention to.

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AI budgeting, the Reddit test case, losing sentiment signal

Here’s the week in Martech:

AI budgeting: AI is giving Big Tech more control over marketers’ budgets.
The Reddit test case: Reddit is leaning into AI-powered translations.
Losing sentiment signal: ‘Help me write’ features are abstracting customer verbatim.
Everything else: the AI search race heats up, Google astroturfing, HubSpot acquires Cacheflow, and more.

👇 Here’s everything you’ve missed in marketing and tech this week.

📰 Latest Developments

AI budgeting. In a perfect economic world, there is a clearly defined line of supply and demand that determines how much of a particular product will be sold at a certain price. AI-driven advertising tools are moving us towards a world that is closer to that theory, where marketers set a target KPI, and AI goes off to achieve it within the price bounds that the user sets. Many marketers will optimize towards ROAS, but this ignores the possibility of gaining more clicks or conversions at a higher price. For search marketers more interested in scale, Google Search has a new tool for you: Search Bidding Exploration. Google says the feature will “intelligently bid on expanded reach to uncover new pockets of valuable traffic,” with a 10% tolerance for lower ROAS. This could be valuable for advertisers, but zooming out, it’s a continuation of Big Tech’s deployment of AI for black box solutions that give it more control over advertiser budget allocation. You might argue that more efficient allocation is good for marketers, but Google has a track record for abusing auction-style economics, as evidenced in its recent Adtech antitrust trial. Perfect economic allocation only works if the market maker is unbiased; Google is not. Link

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Stay Curious,

Keanu Taylor

Make sense of marketing technology.

Want to share something interesting or be featured in The Martech Weekly? Drop me a line at juan@themartechweekly.com.