Sam Altman is either a visionary genius, a pathological liar, or both. OpenAI wants to be a $100 billion ad business by 2030. Anthropic dropped a mysterious model called Mythos that's apparently too powerful for the public to use. And the AEO/GEO industry has officially jumped the shark.
This week, Shiv and Myles sit down with Debra Aho Williamson, founder and chief analyst of Sonata Insights and writer of the fast-growing Substack The AI Ad Economy. Debbie spent nearly two decades at eMarketer building and leading their social media research practice — she was one of the first analysts to identify social media as a force that advertisers needed to take seriously. Now she's doing the same thing with AI.
Debbie breaks down why the organic reach window in AI platforms is closing faster than most marketers realize — and why Facebook's playbook of giving brands free reach and then taking it away is about to repeat itself in AI. She also shares why she bought a product she'd never heard of after ChatGPT recommended it, what that means for brand discovery, and why the explosion of AEO and GEO vendors is a sign the space has already jumped the shark.
They also get into whether OpenAI's industrial policy paper is genuine concern or brilliant PR, why Trade Desk's new Performance Mode is starting to look a lot like the black box ad networks that came before it, and why Time Magazine pitching branded content as an AI visibility play is either genius or a harbinger of chaos — depending on who you ask.
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