Amazon rebranded its entire ad platform — there's no more DSP, the default is now a PMax replica, and they're calling it Amazon Ads Agent. Meta's Muse started crawling Amazon and got shut down within hours. OpenAI launched Dots as a small business tool overnight — apparently because Zuckerberg can't beat Sam Altman, not even on a Tuesday. And President Trump signed an executive order renaming AI to SI. Superintelligence. Because it's super.
This week, Shiv and Myles sit down with Mike Finnerty, US President of Mutinex — the agentic MMM platform that has spent the last four years doing what the measurement industry has been promising to do for 80 years, but never quite pulled off operationally.
Mike breaks down why every walled garden platform grading its own homework creates a math problem that doesn't add up — when you sum the self-reported performance of five or six platforms, the total is always higher than actual sales. It was the ad network problem of 2008 all over again. Mutinex's answer: inject a neutral third-party incrementality signal back into the bidding algorithms so platforms optimize for actual growth instead of their own metrics. And every single time they've done it, platform-reported performance has improved.
He also introduces one of the cleanest frameworks in the episode — read vs. write for LLMs. Until recently, everything AI did was read: research, information gathering, journey changes. What's happening now with Muse, Dots, and Amazon's branded conversations is write: actually taking actions on behalf of consumers. Someone's Muse agent negotiated a Facebook Marketplace deal without the other person knowing. The write era has started.
They also get into why the conventional wisdom that brand is a long-term investment is about to be flipped on its head — if your consumer doesn't say "I want a Stanley water bottle" before the agent fires up, the agent will just pick whatever's cheapest and available — why this holiday season will be the first where agentic transactions actually show up in commerce data, and why the entire marketing ecosystem should stop counting clicks and start asking one question: how much went in, how much came out?
Shiv and Myles will be at Ad Week — send a DM if you want to connect.
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