Marketing Is Calling
By PPC Land
Categories: News, Business News
The daily briefing from PPC Land, read aloud. Each episode is the audio edition of Landline, the newsletter covering programmatic advertising and ad tech: DSP and SSP shifts, privacy rules, measurement changes, and the deals and lawsuits reshaping the industry. Stories come from primary documents such as court filings, regulatory decisions, and platform release notes, not press releases. A few minutes a day to keep up with where ad budgets go and who sets the rules. Full stories and sources at ppc.land
24 episodes indexed on podsearch.
Recent episodes
- ChatGPT reaches a fifth of Google search volume
OpenAI says ChatGPT now handles roughly a fifth of Google's search-like query volume, as Taboola blames AI summaries for a 6.9% revenue fall and heads to mediation with Yahoo. Anthropic signs its first news licensing deal, with the AP, for election coverage.Also in this episode: The New York Times…
- Democrats win Congress: what changes for AI and privacy
Democrats won the Senate and are projected to take the House after the November 3 midterms, with the AP calling the Senate after Josh Turek's win in Iowa. Trump keeps his veto, but the result closes the Republican path to a federal law overriding state privacy and AI rules, leaving more than 20…
- Google switches off Search for K-12 students
Google will switch off Search and Gemini for K-12 student accounts until schools turn them on, though the Search that schools can enable still carries AI Mode and AI Overviews. An EU court adviser sets narrow limits on when a Gemini answer infringes press publishers' rights.Also in this episode…
- Google moves brand AI Overviews as buyers question search
Google has moved AI Overviews for many brand searches into the right-hand column of desktop results, where knowledge panels used to sit, as 18 media buyers tell Digiday that clients now question 10% to 30% of search budgets. Performance Max may also hand brand queries back to Search campaigns.Also…
- Affle agrees to buy Perion as FTC sues Toast over fees
Affle agreed to buy Perion Network for $11.70 a share in cash, about $420 million, a 34.5% premium, with Perion's cash covering more than half the price. The FTC and eight states sued Toast over hidden fees and $0 hardware claims, and the agency warned 25 health plan marketers of penalties up to…
- S&P turns negative on Meta over $225bn AI spending forecast
S&P Global Ratings cut its outlook on Meta to negative from stable, forecasting capital expenditure above $225 billion in 2027 and a $71 billion cash flow shortfall that year, and warning that Meta's ability to monetise AI is more limited than its peers'. In France, deputies voted 11 to 10 for a…
- Google and Bing agree one rule to opt out of AI training
Google and Bing said they will honour a shared robots.txt signal that lets publishers block AI training across several companies at once, with Microsoft also separating training from AI answer grounding. A one-site study put click-through from AI Overviews and AI Mode at about 0.9%, and found that…
- Amazon ad growth slows as DoorDash buys Instacart for $17bn
Amazon's third-quarter ad revenue grew 10.9% to $19.6 billion, down from 26% growth in the second quarter, after Prime Day moved into June. Reddit's ad revenue rose 54% to $847 million, but search referrals fell sharply, and the company said it will become a primarily logged-in site. DoorDash…
- Google ad growth slows as AI Mode ads reach 10 more markets
Alphabet's third-quarter revenue rose 25% to $127.6 billion, but advertising grew just 10.5% to about $82 billion as AI Mode squeezed search ad slots, and the shares fell more than 11% after hours. Hours later, Google said ads in AI Mode would expand to 10 more countries, with multiturn ads…
- Meta Pixel counts more sales as AI ads go undisclosed
From November 12, Meta switches on device-side conversion counting by default for Pixel datasets, a little over two weeks before Black Friday. A Resemble AI scan of 37,768 Meta ad files flagged 3,379 as AI-made, and only two said so in the ad copy.Also in this episode: Google's All Conversions…
- ChatGPT work requests fall to 32.2% as writing slips
OpenAI released version 3.0 of its Signals data on October 26, built from 1 million consumer ChatGPT messages a month. Work-related requests fell from 51.6% in July 2024 to 32.2% in September 2026, and writing fell from 34.1% to 21.4%. Practical guidance has been the largest topic every month…
- Streaming takes 48.7% of US TV ad spend on a fifth of ads
Streaming took 48.7% of US national TV ad spend in the third quarter on just 21.9% of impressions, iSpot found, as linear spending fell about 10% and streaming held flat. Pinterest opened its display and video inventory to Amazon, Google, Yahoo and DeepIntent buyers, with Magnite as its main pipe…
- Anthropic files for IPO with $16.3bn of revenue and no ads
Anthropic, maker of Claude, filed to list on Nasdaq as ANT on October 26. Its S-1 shows $16.3bn of revenue in the first half of 2026, up from $1.163bn a year earlier, all from usage and subscriptions, with no ad model. Amazon and Google, two of the biggest ad sellers, are its investors, suppliers…
- Midterm ads lift CTV prices as YouTube hits 15.8% of TV
About $12bn of political spending is pushing regional advertisers out of local TV before the November 3 midterms, with premium connected TV prices up from $34 to $43 per thousand and stations bumping brands for campaign buyers. Displaced budgets are moving to streaming and retail media, while…
- Spotify's direct ad sales fall €53m as auctions take over
Spotify's ad-supported revenue grew 9% to €482m in the third quarter, but the mix changed sharply: automated channels added €91m in a year while direct sales lost €53m. In Sweden, Viaplay's ad sales fell 0.6% organically as digital growth failed to offset linear TV's decline.Also in this episode…
- DAZN loses $979.7m as McDonald's quits the World Cup
DAZN's first consolidated UK accounts show a $979.7m loss on $3.8bn of revenue, with rights costing just over $3bn and its owner putting in more than $7bn so far. McDonald's ends its 32-year World Cup sponsorship after a campaign it says underperformed, and Formula 1 starts selling audio ads…
- Meta delays its AI terms, but the trust problem stays
Meta has pushed its revised Commercial Terms from October 30 to November 20, after publishers and advertisers complained to EU and UK antitrust authorities. The text is the same: advertisers stay solely responsible for Meta's AI ad edits, and the crawling clause still makes no robots.txt promise…
- Google AI answers hit 88% of searches as AI clicks stay thin
Google's AI Overviews now appear on 88% of the commercial keywords Semrush tracks, up from about 46% a year ago. Yet three new studies find AI assistants send a sliver of the traffic organic search does, with ChatGPT at 0.62% of Google organic sessions, and Ahrefs says Google is altering 5% to 20%…
- Meta makes advertisers answer for its AI ad edits
From October 30, Meta's revised Commercial Terms make advertisers solely responsible for whatever its AI creates or changes in their ads, including features Meta switches on itself, as agencies pull ads its AI altered. The same terms let Meta crawl advertisers' websites, and the News/Media…
- Meta grows ad revenue 26% as New Mexico fines it $25bn
A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion for misleading the public about privacy, with interest at 15% a year, about $10 million a day. Hours later, Meta reported ad revenue up 26% to $63.1 billion despite a $9.89 billion teen settlement charge, with partnership ads past a $15 billion…
- Netflix cuts its ad target as OpenAI automates ChatGPT ads
Netflix lowered its 2026 advertising target from $3 billion to $2.7 billion, blaming a slower rollout of ad tools, even as it launched a new pixel, conversion tracking and Trade Desk buying. OpenAI said that from October 30 it will switch on automatic creative enhancements for self-serve ChatGPT…
- Safari 27 blocks email IDs as search traffic falls to 12%
Apple's WebKit team confirmed that Safari 27 blocks third parties that turn email addresses into tracking IDs, naming no companies and granting no exceptions. Chartbeat found search fell from 21% to 12% of North American publisher pageviews in a year.Also in this episode: Google feeding rank…
- Targeted ads delivered spyware via a vendor Google listed
Citizen Lab traced zero-click spyware on at least 45 Al Jazeera devices to targeted ads bought by Discover-Tech, a vendor Google had listed since 2020. Between March and June 2026 it won 441.95 million impressions across 75,373 apps and 120,768 websites. Google has now cut it off.Also in this…
- DeepSeek prices AI web search as Cloudflare scores bots
DeepSeek opened its Search and Fetch tools to every developer at $0.75 per 1,000 calls, with billing from October 31, about one forty-seventh of what Microsoft charges for Grounding with Bing. On the same day, Cloudflare said it will score its Verified bots on whether they obey robots.txt and slow…
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