Adweekly: Gen-AI Search Engine Perplexity Has a Plan to Sell Ads
Welcome to Adweekly, the LinkedIn newsletter giving you an inside look at the advertising industry. Each edition will highlight some of Adweek's most important stories from the past week to help marketers, agency leaders, creatives and publishers better understand the industry they work in. By senior media reporter Mark Stenberg
Good morning, and welcome back to Adweekly.
The top story this week is an ADWEEK classic: new platform decides to introduce advertising. Except this time, the platform is the Gen-AI search engine Perplexity, which uses the technology to provide answers to search queries rather than send users to websites, reports Trishla Ostwal .
The introduction of ads to the platform, which currently costs $20 per month to use, would mark the first instance of a Gen-AI search engine monetizing its output with advertising.
Of course, Google built its entire business around running relevant ads alongside search queries, so the model is hardly novel. And at least at the moment, brand safety considerations, relevance and scale remain open questions.
“We all remember when native recommendation widgets went wrong by propagating spammy ads about belly fat and celebrity gossip,” said Mathew Larson , the vice president of media and connection strategy at Collective Measures | Media & Analytics .
Read more: Check out the details behind Perplexity's plan to introduce advertising to its Gen-AI search engine .
How the Bud Light Boycott Changed Marketing
One year ago, the transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney posted an Instagram post promoting Bud Light's #EasyCarryContest.
The backlash for the brand was swift, substantial and remains an ongoing case study in the new dynamics of digital marketing.
ADWEEK reporters Jason Notte and Rebecca Stewart revisited the debacle on its one-year anniversary to explore the ways in which the marketing stunt went wrong, and what marketers have learned from it.
For one, brands including Target and Starbucks became victims of an anti-LGBTQ fervor that swept parts of the country in response to Mulvaney's post. This led brands to grow more cautious about openly supporting queer communities.
But the episode also speaks to the ways in which advertising—targeted as it might seem—has the potential to spill over from its specific audience, something savvy marketers need to keep in mind.
“You can no longer expect to speak to one audience without the other audiences finding out about it,” said Sadie Dyer , strategy director at Omnicom 's global brand experience firm Siegel+Gale .
Spotify's Plan to Monetize Live Events
Spotify has long been known for its star-studded events, which have featured talent like Lizzo and Megan Thee Stallion and spanned stages from Cannes to West Hollywood.
But in seven years of hosting these swanky soirees, the company has never invited brands to sponsor them—until now.
Over the weekend, Spotify announced its newest ad offering, called Live Experiences, with a two-night kickoff in Chicago, sponsored by Samsung Electronics .
This year, the company will host between 5 and 20 such events, which it will time to coincide with major moments in music, its playlist franchises (like Fresh Finds and Rap Caviar), and its slate of owned and licensed podcasts.
The move reflects not only the broader interest in events sweeping the marketing space, but also the growing pressure on technology companies—and Spotify in particular—to shift their focus from growth to profitability.
“We’re at a point where the company recognizes that there’s so much opportunity and appetite from brands to take what we’ve done so well digitally and transform that into an in-person experience,” said director of technology and telecommunications sales Brendan O'Donnell .
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7 个月It was bound to happen that Perplexity will go that route… I think their competitor in Gen-AI Search, Arc Search from The Browser Company, will go that direction soon, if they haven’t already.