Amazon just partnered with ChatGPT to let advertisers buy AI inventory through Amazon's DSP — and ChatGPT still won't let Amazon crawl its product catalog. Meta charged advertisers a software fee for the first time in company history. Big tech captured 56% of all ad spend this year, up from 53% last year, and AI is the tailwind driving every bit of that growth. And OpenAI's IPO apparently isn't happening this year — which tells you everything you need to know about where they actually are.
This week, Shiv and Myles welcome Paul Boruta, Founder and CEO of Slingwave — an independent AI-native marketing decision engine built for eCommerce and DTC brands. Paul started at Overture and Yahoo, built and sold a startup in the YouTube space, and has spent the last several years building what he describes as a closed loop system that puts all of your marketing data — paid, organic, competitive, and contextual — into one model that gets smarter with every campaign.
Paul breaks down why the Amazon/ChatGPT partnership makes perfect strategic sense once you map the funnel correctly: Amazon and Google are the cash register, ChatGPT is excellent at the mid-funnel research and discovery phase where neither of them is particularly strong. He also makes a notable admission: 18 months ago he would have told you synthetic data for incrementality testing was too flawed to be useful. That's changed — and changed fast. And he explains why doing it wrong — one person, one deck, no validation, no closed loop — is worse than not doing it at all.
They also get into why real-time competitive signals changed the measurement game entirely — because advertising isn't turn-based, you and your competitors are all in market simultaneously — why sponsored AI agents live or die on the neutrality question, and why the old world of deterministic multi-touch attribution is melting fast and everyone needs to be retooling for what comes next.
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