Signal Wars: WPP vs. Publicis in Adland
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Let's dive into it. It’s been one of those weeks in adland where you can’t open your feed without tripping over another AI launch. WPP Media Services dropped Open Intelligence, an LLM trained on first- and third-party data to create custom algorithms for clients. MiQ made noise with their own AI platform reveal at Cannes. And across the Croisette, every conversation seems to have the word “intelligence” tacked on like a badge of honor. The whole space feels like it’s moving at lightning speed: AI platform launches, strategy decks, pitch wars. You can’t swing a bat without hitting someone claiming to be the ChatGPT of media.
Here’s the thing: hype aside, we’re starting to see where AI really delivers immediate value in advertising. Creative gets a lot of attention, and sure, it’s an obvious beneficiary, but on the media optimization side, algorithms trained on meaningful signals are doing real work. Whether it’s improving bid strategies or auto-adjusting campaign variables based on contextual or attention signals, this is more than theoretical. And it’s the data powering those algos that’s becoming the real battlefield.
That’s why the back-and-forth between WPP and Publicis this week is so revealing. WPP is throwing shade at Publicis for allegedly pushing low-quality inventory through Epsilon. Publicis fires back, accusing WPP of inventing audits to distract from its own shortcomings. At first glance, it might seem like classic agency drama. But beneath the PR posturing is a deeper tension: which holding company controls better data, and who’s using AI to extract more value from it?
We’ve reached a point where owning the signal, especially proprietary ones like attention, is becoming as critical as owning the inventory. Google’s been training DV360 algorithms on attention-based third-party signals across its O&O properties for years. Now YouTube is leaning even harder into attention metrics to prove campaign efficacy. When Google gets religious about a metric, you know it’s about to be canonized across the industry.
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Talk soon,
Zack Rosenberg Get in Touch about engineering outcomes from video!
From My Feed: Most-Impactful Post of the Week
The average video ad gets just 8.2 seconds of attention, but brands using AI to match ads to real-time viewing context are seeing 3x longer engagement and 41% higher conversion rates. Content alignment isn’t optional anymore, it’s the new standard.
And no, I'm not talking about the chat app, but I'm sure it's gained some followers over the past few weeks. The era of IDs is ending, and not quietly. As cookies crumble and privacy rules tighten, the advertising industry is undergoing a major transformation. We are moving from deterministic, ID-based targeting to a world powered by ambient, real-time signals. These signals, such as device type, content, time of day, and even attention, offer a richer, privacy-safe foundation for personalization. But to make sense of them, we need more than a DMP or a taxonomy chart. We need AI.
At Qortex, we see this shift as an opportunity to rethink how intelligence flows through the ad stack. It is not about finding one perfect signal. It is about connecting many imperfect ones into something smarter. The winners in this new ecosystem will not be the ones who hoard IDs, but the ones who orchestrate a symphony of signals: media, cultural, contextual, and emotional. AI is the conductor, interpreting inputs in real time and making thousands of micro-decisions per moment. That is the future—not just addressable but intelligently in the moment.