Monday Briefing: Your Next Ad Won't Have a Landing Page

Good morning, it's James here. OpenAI spent last week teaching ads to talk back, and Google spent it removing dials from your dashboard. Different companies, same message. The interface between your brand and your customer is being rebuilt, and nobody asked for your input.

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The Lead: Your Next Ad Won't Have a Landing Page

ChatGPT ads went international on Monday. OpenAI confirmed the launch in the UK, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, and South Korea (OpenAI), following the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Ads show to logged-in adults on the Free and Go tiers, and they're matched using "the topic of your conversation, your past chats, and past interactions with ads."

The expansion is the headline. The campaign type is the story. OpenAI is testing an ad format in Ads Manager called Agent, where clicking doesn't open your website. It opens a conversation with an AI agent configured by your business, with access to your product feed, your business profile, and lead capture forms (Search Engine Roundtable). Still limited to select advertisers, but the direction is unmistakable.

Why CMOs should care. Five new markets means real budgets can now test this at scale, and your landing page, the most heavily optimized asset in your funnel, may not exist in this channel. The post-click experience becomes a conversation your team scripts but doesn't control turn by turn.

The take. Every CRO playbook you own assumes a page. Start writing the one that assumes a dialogue. The brands that figure out what their agent should say, refuse to say, and hand off to a human will set the benchmarks everyone else chases in 2027.

Channel Shift: Google Is Deleting Your Settings

While OpenAI builds new surfaces, Google keeps stripping controls off the old ones. Two removals landed last week.

First, the AI Max migration now has hard dates. Beginning September 1, Google will automatically upgrade Search campaigns using campaign-level broad match or standalone Automatically Created Assets to AI Max, and it already stopped allowing new ones on August 3 (Search Engine Land). Dynamic Search Ads get a stay until February 2027.

Second, language targeting is going away. Starting late September, "the campaign-level language targeting setting will disappear," and Google will serve ads based on the language of your creative and signals about what the user understands (Search Engine Land).

This stacks on top of the bid strategy changes we covered last week. The pattern is consistent. Your levers become Google's inferences.

The move this week. Have your team pull the list of campaigns using campaign-level broad match or ACA before September 1. A migration you didn't schedule shouldn't become a performance mystery you can't explain in October.

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What I'm Watching: Retail Media's Maturity Gap

Walmart Connect finally shipped negative keywords for Sponsored Products in late July (Modern Retail). Advertisers can now block their ads from serving on low-performing or misaligned search terms.

Amazon has offered this since 2019. Even Sam's Club, which Walmart owns, had it years ago.

That gap is the tell. Retail media networks have spent three years asking for a growing share of your budget while missing controls that search marketers have taken for granted for a decade. Walmart closing the gap is good news, and it's also a checklist item for every other network pitching you. Ask each one which basic controls they're still missing before you sign the annual commitment.

The Reading List

• Brands are all in on creators. Meanwhile, the economics crash (The Drum). Mark Ritson with the week's most uncomfortable data. 86% of American marketers now use influencer marketing, up from 64.5% in 2020, while more than half of creators earn under $15,000 a year.

• Why Three is returning to its youthful roots post-merger (Marketing Week). Three's first brand platform since the Vodafone merger, "Let Fun In," built with Wonderhood Studios. A useful case in codifying positioning after consolidation.

• Google brings new AI agent capabilities to Ads and Analytics (Search Engine Land). Ask Advisor now answers natural-language questions about your competitive position and campaign trends. Worth knowing what it tells your team before your team tells you.

One More Thing

Ritson's creator numbers deserve a second look. Brands will put more than $12 billion into US creators this year while most of the supply side earns less than a part-time barista. Markets subsidized by hope eventually reprice, and when this one does, the proven creators will cost multiples of today's rates. If a handful of creators reliably move product for you, lock in longer deals now.

See you next Monday. Make it count.

—James