Steve Gillmor

Today's tips for Wednesday, March 4. * Amazon explores chatbot ad network, says The Information. * LLM developments: Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite; an AI Evangelist at Colgate-Palmolive; Perplexity v. News Corp. * AI tokens are set to transform marketing currency. * ChatGPT prompt: When do marketers start their ad buying with tokens? * Industry responds to Criteo’s OpenAI ads partnership. * Meta on the move: Measurement; AI licensing; Retail Media tools. * eMarketer on the walled gardens’ share of media buys today. * Incrementality and AI — from tvScientific CEO Jason Fairchild. * The Trade Desk launches OpenTTD. * Contextual ad startup Classify calculating bot traffic. * More: CloudX update; LLM prompts media buyers use; Eric Seufert on LLMs and ads ranking; Genius Sports, Magnite partner; Ad adjacency study. Read: https://lnkd.in/e6MkbWJm

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Mobile marketing is built on a measurement model that quietly enables fraud. In this week’s newsletter, I unpack how last-click attribution became the foundation of a multi-billion dollar distortion machine, rewarding “attribution theft” and punishing true demand creation. When you give 100% of the credit to the final click, you oversimplify reality and create incentives for click spamming and impression stacking. Billions get misallocated and fraudsters get paid. What’s worse is when that decisioning logic lives inside black boxes, marketers are forced to trust the same systems getting paid to decide whether they deserve the credit. I also outline a practical manifesto for marketers to take back control. Link in comments.

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Exciting Milestone at Forma Prime! I haven’t shared many updates since joining the Advisory Board at Forma Prime, but today marks a significant milestone worth highlighting. Forma Prime is celebrating its first IPO as Infleqtion, a leader in the quantum technology space, officially begins trading. This follows the successful completion of their merger with the SPAC led by veteran dealmaker Michael Klein. It is an incredible time to be involved with a team supporting such "deep tech" transitions. Infleqtion’s work—ranging from quantum computing to high-precision sensing for NASA and the DoD—is at the forefront of the next technological frontier. I’m looking forward to continuing my work with the Forma Prime board as we identify and scale the next generation of industry-defining companies. Read more about the debut on Bloomberg:

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How does a 92-94% reduction in external clicks sound? 🤯 That's the stark reality of Google's AI Mode for informational queries, according to a brilliant new meta-analysis from Growth Memo. A huge hat tip to Kevin Indig and Amanda Johnson👩‍🔬📈 for synthesizing 10 different studies to give us a clear picture of what's happening. If you're in SEO or marketing, this is need-to-know info. Here are my 5 key takeaways from their analysis: 💨📉 Clicks Vanish (Mostly): For informational queries, users get their answer in AI Mode and leave. A Semrush study found 92-94% of these sessions result in zero external clicks. 🛍️💳 The Exception is Shopping: Clicks aren't dead everywhere. Transactional and shopping-related prompts produce clicks almost 100% of the time. Users research in AI, then click out to buy. 🐢🤨 Users Are Slow to Adopt: People aren't flocking to AI Mode... yet. An iPullRank study showed only 2-5% of users tried it (while 30-47% engaged with AI Overviews). Google is clear on pushing it (as the first tab on Google Search), but it doesn't have product-market fit right now. 💬 vs 📄 AI Mode vs. AIOs: They aren't the same. AI Overviews (AIOs) are "fact sheets." AI Mode is a deeper, chat-style experience where users spend twice as much time. 📣👑 The New KPI is Brand Influence: If clicks are gone, what's the point? Branding. Studies show users spend 52-104 seconds reading the AI answers. Being cited, even without a click, transfers authority and reinforces brand recall for a future decision. The strategic implication is clear: We have to evolve our metrics. The goal is shifting from winning the click to winning the mention. This shift toward brand authority is precisely what we've been building for at Man of Many. As a trusted authority, recognized as Media Brand of the Year and 4x Website of the Year, our publication is exactly the kind of source AI models are programmed to prioritize. This is why our commitment to the 100% Human Initiative is so critical. It signals that our content is created by human experts, not bots. In a world where AI needs to cite reliable, original, and trustworthy sources, our human-first approach makes our content the gold standard for citation. For our brand partners, this means getting your brand featured in Man of Many is a key strategy to ensure you are part of the answer that Google's AI delivers. We help you build "AI Authority" and win the mention, transferring our trust directly to your brand and influencing decisions long before a click ever happens. Link to the full analysis in the comments. #SEO #AI #GoogleAIMode #DigitalMarketing #ContentStrategy #MarketingMetrics

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