THIS WEEK SUMMED UP
We’re cheering for modern-day sports heroes, pausing to watch ads, and hoping ChatGPT remembers our birthdays.
Read time: 1 minute and 24 seconds
THREE PARTS THAT MATTER
Marketing
Have you noticed Peacock’s pause ads? When you hit pause to grab snacks, boom, your friends on the couch get a nudge to order pizza (or buy insurance). We love this clever way to fill dead time—here’s hoping other streamers roll out something similar soon.
As third-party cookies crumble, advertisers are experimenting with AI tools and agile modeling. But *retail media networks* offer intriguing opportunities, too: their first-party data generates verifiable real-world insights that could make audience planning even easier.
Or, if you’re Walmart, you could just pay $2.3 billion to acquire budget TV maker Vizio and its Platform+ ad business, which includes data from over 18 million Vizio SmartCastOS users.
Culture
It’s prime time for women’s sports, especially basketball. Last week, Caitlin Clark broke the NCAA women’s career scoring record (with a 3-point shot from the logo, no less). This weekend saw the first-ever *NBA vs. WNBA* 3-Point Challenge, pitting Sabrina Ionescu against Steph Curry. Ionescu lost narrowly (26-29) but still *nabbed a score* that tied the highest in this year’s all-NBA 3-point contest.
Nike, a sponsor for *Inonescu* and Clark, hustled out ad campaigns for both athletes immediately after their historic performances. Marketers: always carpe the diem!
Speaking of money-making opportunities, back in 2019, OL Reign, then the team led by Megan Rapinoe, was sold for $3.5 million. This spring, the Seattle Sounders are slated to pay the OL Groupe *$50 million* for the club. Um, does anyone have a women’s soccer team we can invest in?
Technology
ChatGPT’s memory is getting better. A new feature, currently available to a subset of users, allows the chatbot to store information and recall it in future conversations. Watch your backs, Siri and Alexa.
First Perplexity, then *Arc* (and its viral launch video): these “browsers that browse for you” claim to be the future of search. If that’s the case, should you bet on a publisher-as-app or publisher-as-API strategy? Alexandre Jas, head of digital products at Euronews, has a great analysis here.
WHAT ELSE WE ARE READING