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Welcome to The Brief by Kuro House, your daily dose of marketing intelligence. I’m glad you’re tuning in for a deep dive into today’s most compelling stories. From Amazon’s behind-the-scenes ad strategies to the AI-fueled shake-up in ad tech M&A, and from Omnicom’s new intent-driven search tools to Cloudflare’s unlikely heroics for publishers, we’ve got a lot to unpack. Let’s dig right in.
First up, an exclusive look at what Amazon is telling advertisers behind closed doors, courtesy of Adweek. At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Amazon Ads’ VP of global ad sales, Alan Moss, revealed how CES marks the start of upfront conversations with advertisers—where Amazon listens more than it pitches, aiming to truly understand agency and brand goals for the year. Moss laid out Amazon’s priorities: putting partners like agencies and tech providers front and center, expanding Amazon DSP’s reach across the open internet, and ramping up AI capabilities. A key highlight is Amazon’s Authenticated Graph, which lets advertisers reach audiences across the web using verified signals rather than probabilistic ones. Last year’s partnership with Roku gave Amazon access to 80 million authenticated households, and now, Amazon claims it can connect advertisers with 90% of U.S. households. This authenticated reach is becoming the backbone for performance marketing.
Amazon is also simplifying ad buying with its DSP, giving advertisers one-stop access to premium inventory and advanced controls. With new partnerships on the horizon—think Netflix and Disney—2026 is shaping up to be a breakthrough year for programmatic, with Amazon aiming to help advertisers capitalize on these relationships. Live sports is another growth area: Prime Video’s Black Friday NFL coverage, now expanded to NBA and golf, saw a 40% jump in advertisers and a 50% increase in non-endemic brands. Amazon’s AI-powered Live Event Optimizer is transforming how brands tap into live moments, streamlining what was once a fragmented, hard-to-capture opportunity into a seamless, self-serve platform.
On the creative side, Amazon is rolling out Creative Agent, an AI tool that analyzes a brand’s assets, customer reviews, and product features to generate creative briefs and storyboards. And coming in Q1 is Full Funnel Campaigns, a major launch for 2026: this agentic product recommends campaign setups across all Amazon ad products and automatically optimizes budgets, audiences, and tactics. AI is at the heart of all these innovations, and Moss predicts that 2026 will be all about applying and activating these capabilities at scale.
Next, let’s talk about the AI hype cycle and its impact on ad tech M&A, as analyzed by Digiday. There’s a lot of chatter in boardrooms: Is this AI boom just a rerun of the dotcom bubble, or are we headed for a more controlled shakeout? The data from 2025 paints a nuanced picture. While the year started with big deals—like T-Mobile’s $600 million acquisition of Vistar Media and $175 million for Blis—by Q3, M&A activity had cooled, with volumes down 8% year over year. The focus has shifted from “growth at all costs” to “consolidation and integration.” Private equity buyers are now rolling up orphan assets with strong tech but messy cap tables, stripping out redundancies, and using AI to boost margins rather than justify sky-high valuations.
AI is now table stakes for any ad tech company—70% of buyers in SI Global’s M&A report cite data and analytics, with half explicitly calling out AI and machine learning. But there’s skepticism: many so-called “AI” startups are just wrappers around large language models, without defensible IP or proprietary data. The deals that are happening are smaller and more targeted—like Verve Group’s €25.6 million acquisition of Captify, or WPP’s purchase of InfoSum. There’s a barbell effect: CTV scale on one end, AI-driven margin expansion on the other.
Pressure is mounting in PE portfolios, too. A significant chunk of 2020–21 investments are now “overdue,” and LPs are demanding real exits instead of more paper markups. As one investor put it, “The AI hype cycle has flooded the market with companies that look exciting but don’t have defensible models.” The winners in this environment will be companies with proprietary data or infrastructure that can plug into AI workflows—think clean-room operators, CTV data platforms, or workflow tools embedded in agency stacks. The rest will face bargain-basement consolidations or acqui-hires. In short, the AI buzzword is everywhere, but only those with real, defensible tech are commanding a premium.
Shifting gears, Digiday brings us a fascinating story about how Omnicom Media is working with Google to dig deeper into search intent in the AI era. At CES, Omnicom unveiled its “consumer prompt insights tool,” developed in partnership with Google. This agentic solution leverages a variety of search signals to give brands a much richer understanding of what consumers are really looking for. The days of simple keyword targeting are over; now, someone might search for “the best wet vac for cleaning up sandy wet spots”—a much higher-intent, context-rich query.
Omnicom’s chief intelligence officer, Joanna O’Connell, explains that this is about closing the information gap between brands and consumers. The tool aggregates data from Google Insights, Keyword Planner, Search Console, and Gemini, all in an agent-readable format. The result? Real-time visibility into what shoppers are searching for—not just branded terms, but the entire consideration set. Clients like Cox Automotive say it’s cut their competitive analysis cycle from weeks to days, enabling faster, more informed decisions across paid search, content planning, and retail partnerships.
This isn’t just a boon for search teams. By aggregating and categorizing these intent signals, brands can spot demand trends, generate new content, and restructure ads or site content to match what people are actually asking. Omnicom sees this as a catalyst for shifting budgets—emphasizing influencer marketing and ensuring content is discoverable within large language models. In short, it’s a step toward a more dynamic, intent-driven approach to search and content strategy.
Now, let’s turn to Digiday’s profile of Matthew Prince, the accidental guardian of publishing. As CEO of Cloudflare, Prince’s initial reaction to publishers’ concerns about AI crawlers was one of skepticism. But when he crunched the numbers, he was stunned: ten years ago, for every two pages Google scraped, publishers got one visitor; today, it’s 18 pages for every visitor, thanks to AI Overviews. With OpenAI, the ratio is 1,500 to one, and Anthropic is an eye-watering 40,000 to one.
Recognizing the existential threat to publishers, Prince hired Will Allen (ex-Adobe) to lead product development aimed at helping publishers defend against unregulated AI scraping. The result? Cloudflare’s pay-per-crawl tool, launched July 1, which allows publishers to block all unauthorized AI crawlers with a single click. This has given publishers leverage in negotiations with AI companies—now, as Nicholas Thompson of The Atlantic puts it, “Cloudflare supplied the key to lock the door. If AI companies want the blueberries, they have to knock and pay for them.”
Prince’s storytelling prowess has been pivotal in rallying both his team and the publishing industry around this cause. His public messaging crystallized at the DLD Conference in Munich, and since then, Cloudflare’s role has grown from infrastructure provider to a central mediator in the fight for fair compensation for content. Publishers now have more negotiating power, and the industry-wide principle that quality journalism shouldn’t be taken without permission is gaining traction. There’s some wariness—no one wants another monopoly—but for now, Prince is seen as a genuine ally. His personal investment in the future of the internet even includes buying a local newspaper, betting on a future where independent publishers retain value in an AI-driven content ecosystem.
That’s a wrap on today’s Brief. The common thread in all these stories? The marketing and media landscape is being reshaped by AI—not just as a buzzword, but in the nuts and bolts of how business is done, how value is created, and how power is distributed. Whether you’re an advertiser, a publisher, or a tech provider, the message is clear: defensibility, intent, and real innovation matter more than ever. Thanks for listening—stay curious, stay sharp, and catch you next time on The Brief by Kuro House.
