Every published Top AI Stories item tagged with Advertising, PR & Marketing Services, newest first.
Alphabet's third-quarter results showed revenue up 25 percent to almost 128 billion dollars, but search revenue was flat and search volume grew 12 percent, down from 17 percent the quarter before. Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler said each AI Mode query earns less than a comparable web search, with fewer and cheaper ads, and asked advertisers for time. The stock fell about 12 percent the next day. Reddit, reporting on Thursday, said search referrals fell by more than a million a week on average in October, and that it will move to a mainly logged-in site, partly to protect the data it licenses to AI companies. Its US daily users slipped from 53.2 million to 50.7 million in a quarter.
Governor Josh Shapiro signed the Artificial Intelligence Deceptive Advertising Act on Thursday. Any ad, whether an image, video, audio or text, that "has been significantly modified or generated by artificial intelligence" must carry a disclosure in the same format as the ad itself, wherever it was made, so national campaigns airing in Pennsylvania will need labels too. The Verge points to wide loopholes: "significantly modified" is undefined, parody and anything "evidently fictional" are exempt, and the wording suggests only content that creates a false impression about a product is covered.
In an October 16 update spotted by Android Authority, Google removed the sentence "We don't show you personalized ads based on your content from Drive, Gmail, or Photos." The new wording covers data a user shares with other Google services, which is what Personal Intelligence does: the opt-in feature hands personal app data to Gemini and to AI Mode in Search, where sponsored results appear. Google told Ars Technica that ads "will not be based directly on your Gmail inbox or Photos library" and that sensitive information is never used for targeting. Ars reads that statement as confirming that summaries drawn from that data can inform ads in AI search.
Canva released Canva Craft on Thursday, its first image-generation model built in-house, to all users through its Dream Lab tool. It works in two stages, first planning element placement, scale and text, then rendering at up to 2K resolution in more than 30 aspect ratios. Canva trained it on millions of human-made templates from its own library rather than on photographs. It debuted fourth on Design Arena's crowdsourced leaderboard, behind three OpenAI image models, and cheaper Craft-fast and Craft-ultrafast versions are due later.
Campaigns and political groups have spent more than $137 million on midterm ads made at least partly with AI, according to Wesleyan Media Project data reported by The New York Times. In the 2024 cycle the group found under $50,000 of such spending. It has identified 220 AI-made ads across 34 states, and only 27 percent carried a disclaimer; just 30 states require one. Republican candidates and groups placed 81 percent of the ads and 88 percent of the spending. Nearly half show deepfakes of real politicians, often tying local candidates to national Democrats, though some campaigns use AI only to cut production costs. The election is a little over two weeks away.
OpenAI is testing Sponsored Agents, which let a shopper who clicks an ad in ChatGPT open a separate, clearly labeled conversation with an agent the advertiser pays for, then click through to the business. OpenAI says that conversation stays distinct from ChatGPT's own answers and from the chat the user started in. Advertisers can also build campaigns from a prompt in ChatGPT Work, and ChatGPT Ads plugs into HubSpot and Shopify, its first partners in customer relationship management and ecommerce. Testing is limited to selected United States advertisers.
Fewer than 200 days after launch, OpenAI reports that ChatGPT Ads is running at an annualized rate of $1 billion across tens of thousands of advertisers. Self-serve buying through Ads Manager opens across India, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, adding to the more than 40 countries already served through sales teams and partners. OpenAI casts advertising as the pillar that keeps a free tier open to more than 1 billion weekly users, and says ads are labeled, kept separate from answers, and never drawn from private conversations.
A new Google commercial reimagines the Founding Fathers writing the Declaration of Independence using Google Workspace — Docs suggestions, Meet calls, e-signatures, and Gemini taking notes — under the tagline "Group project, but make it 1776." Reception split sharply: praised on YouTube, panned elsewhere as "tone deaf," with historians arguing AI is the wrong metaphor for revolutionary collaboration. Critics also noted the ad itself appears partly AI-generated, feeding a broader debate over AI in creative and civic work.
India's MoEngage, a customer-engagement platform used by more than 1,350 brands across 75 countries, acquired San Francisco startup Aampe in an all-cash deal reported in the tens of millions of dollars. Aampe's technology assigns a dedicated AI agent to each individual customer, tuning messages to one person's behavior instead of to a broad audience segment. The wager is that per-person agents replace the decades-old practice of marketing to segments — and help MoEngage pull enterprise accounts off Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Adobe Experience Cloud.
Google announced four new Gemini-built ad formats for its AI Mode and AI Overviews surfaces: Conversational Discovery ads that respond to user questions, Highlighted Answers within AI-generated lists, Gemini-authored Shopping product explainers, and "Business Agent" chatbots that live inside ads. The formats roll out over the coming months and are exposed primarily through Performance Max, AI Max for Search, and AI Max for Shopping campaigns. The announcement formalizes ads as a revenue layer atop the agentic-search interface Google has been beta-testing for two years.
KC Green, the cartoonist behind the 2013 panel where a dog reassures himself amid flames, says he never licensed the image to Artisan — the AI BDR startup known for prior provocative billboard campaigns — which adapted the dog's line to read "my pipeline is on fire" on a New York subway ad. Green said he is consulting legal representation; Artisan responded publicly that it has "a lot of respect" for his work and is reaching out directly. The episode lands amid mounting copyright friction around AI vendors using viral artwork in their own marketing.