We acquired @besteverai, the AI platform built for advertisers. Samba welcomes the Bestever AI team, including founder and CEO @appyg99, who joins as Director of Product leading our AI strategy. Every adtech company is racing to hand campaign management to AI agents. Our contrarian bet: the agents that win will be built on deep, first-party signals. Samba understands audience behavior at scale, including how 1.5 billion opted-in users watch TV and what they consume online. With this acquisition, we're turning that deterministic data into autonomous agents for brands and agencies. Samba is thrilled to have Apoorva and team building what's next with us. 🚀 hubs.ly/Q04mbhNp0

Scoop: Google has told advertising clients in recent days that it plans to bring ads to its AI chatbot Gemini, according to agency buyers familiar with the conversations. adweek.com/?p=1922458&previe…

Introducing the AI LUMAscape. The back story: Initially, we said we would never make an AI LUMAscape for the same reason there is no ELECTRICITY LUMAscape or CLOUD LUMAscape – we assume that AI technology will be ubiquitous and therefore undifferentiating. However, while that is likely true in the medium term, there is a period of time over say the next 3 years as the technology is taking hold where companies can differentiate on AI tech whether they choose to do so via building, partnering or buying. Also, the amount of reverse inquiry was off the charts and sometimes you just have to give the people what they want. The challenge: Creating an AI LUMAscape has inherent challenges. How do we vet the tech capabilities? What should be the criteria for inclusion? Won’t every company in Ad Tech want to be on it and if we did include every logo that would defeat the purpose (and make for some really small logos!). We set out this summer doing primary and secondary research and asking a lot of people smarter than us about how to construct it. We have something that we think makes logical sense. The punk: Terry posted a teaser a month or so ago in which he punked the industry by suggesting there where 3 categories of companies: 1) AI First, 2) Fast Adapters who either built or bought AI tech, and 3) AI Poseurs. Obviously, the last category was intentionally derogatory to instigate a response. And what a response! – the post went viral on the socials and hundreds of companies reached out to prove their AI bona fides in hopes of placement on the scape. This was by design as we use this reverse inquiry to get us from 80% finished to 90% finished, which is good enough to launch. We expect to improve it the rest of the way in the coming weeks based on your feedback. The caveat: There’s only one thing that we can say with certainty about this launch version of the AI LUMAscape: it is wrong. We know that for certain. Now we need you all – the market – to tell us where. Maybe we left off your deserving company, maybe we mischaracterized your capabilities – sorry, and let’s get on the phone so you can explain how / why so we can see how best to resolve it. Or maybe you would just like to chat about it – we’d like to hear from you. BTW, no guarantees that such interaction will produce an edit but it's helpful. We truly appreciate all reverse inquiry to help us make the scape the best it can be. Please direct all feedback to [email protected]. We will read every email. The criteria: The parameters we used to construct the scape are as follows: 1. Selection based on strategic relevance to advertising 2. Selection based on core business model focus, not scale 3. Broad categories reflect converging capabilities 4. One logo per company (unless your market cap is denoted with a “T”) 5. Corporate logos only, no division or product logos 6. Agentic / AI co-pilots not broken out separately Let the mayhem commence!

This is what Meta’s AI did to my top ad. 🫩

Imagine an apparel brand with 80,000 products trying to generate video ads for each of them! It's humanly impossible for large e-commerce businesses generate video ads at scale today. Excited to announce @BesteverAI Commerce today that solves this.

What's interesting is the amount of models that need to work together (and not fail) to make this work: - A Dreambooth-style trainer to teach the AI foundational model your person - Then an upscaler, that doesn't reduce resemblance - Then a video model to turn the image into a video - Then a voice text-to-speech model to create a voice audio file - Then a lipsync model that puts the video and voice together - Then last part that adds captions (not AI but still) It's a massive pipeline and not SO easy to make it work in an automated way without failing somewhere So the moat (if there is any?) is still really just duct taping AI models together to solve a problem for people Can people do this themselves? Yes, they could just go to the AI platforms and do each step themselves but I sell the orchestration of all that in a friendly and fun interface that does it all for you!

Join me @Appyg99 to discuss using AI to make ads that perform. This Wednesday at @Shopify NY at 6pm