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Welcome to The Brief by Kuro House, where we cut through the noise and bring you the sharpest stories shaping marketing today. Whether you’re dialing in from your commute or catching up at your desk, we’re here to keep you ahead of the curve with the latest insights and industry moves. Let’s dive right in.
First up, let’s talk about OpenAI’s ad pilot—because the future of advertising may just be spelled C-H-A-T-G-P-T. According to Adweek, OpenAI is extending its ad pilot program beyond April, giving advertisers even more time to experiment with how ads might show up in its AI assistant. The pilot, which was initially set to end in March, is now expanding internationally, starting in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The current format serves sponsored messages after a ChatGPT response, but OpenAI is now asking advertisers for insertion order commitments—legal agreements that lock in spend and timelines. This signals a shift from open-ended testing to a more structured ad business. The platform has about 920 million weekly active users, most of whom aren’t paying, so the ad opportunity is huge. Early data shows CPMs around $60, and OpenAI is even building its own ads manager. But it’s not all smooth sailing: click-through rates are lagging far behind Google Search, and transparency about how ads are served is still a work in progress. With a minimum $200,000 ad commitment, OpenAI is clearly targeting big brands. The company is also pulling back from some experimental projects, like its Sora video tool and even shelving plans for an erotic chatbot, signaling a focus on scalable, revenue-generating products. It’s a fascinating pivot, and one that could redefine how brands connect with audiences in the AI age.
Switching gears to the world of connected TV, Uproxx is making a bold play for TV ad spend by launching TikTok-ready shows. At its first NewFronts event, Uproxx TV highlighted its position as a top 10 entertainment property on connected TV, with over 160 million monthly viewers—more than half of whom are watching on their TV screens. The company’s strategy? Leverage “super creators” like Love Island’s Chelley Bissainthe to bridge the gap between social and TV audiences. Their new show, Love, Songs, is designed to generate a stream of clips for TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts, ensuring that the content lives far beyond the TV screen. For advertisers, Uproxx is rolling out new formats like Premiere Moment Ownership, giving brands exclusive share of voice around cultural drops, and Dynamic Cultural Activation, which uses proprietary signal detection to align brands with real-time cultural signals. It’s a creator-first, multi-platform approach that aims to add incremental reach in a crowded CTV space—and perhaps offer advertisers a louder voice than they’d get with bigger players.
Now, let’s zoom out and look at the big agency holding companies, or “holdcos,” and the numbers making the case for what they could be. Digiday reports that agency CEOs are facing mounting pressure from all sides: AI, talent wars, new platforms, regulatory scrutiny, and even billionaire clients. The root cause? Somewhere along the way, agencies stopped focusing on making CMOs look good. The economic uncertainty from conflicts like the one in the Middle East is threatening nearly $50 billion in global ad growth this year alone, with CMOs already making contingency plans. Trust between CMOs and agencies is eroding, with marketers suspicious of agencies skimming from budgets, and agencies resenting squeezed fees. Only 35% of marketing practitioners in major markets passed a basic fundamentals test, suggesting agencies could reclaim their value by helping close this knowledge gap. But the practice of “principal media”—where agencies buy media for themselves and resell it at a markup—continues to poison trust, as agencies can’t offer independent advice if their own profits are on the line. Awareness of this issue is rising, with 96% of marketers now familiar with principal media practices, but that’s not the same as having control. The path forward? Agencies that can rebuild trust and truly support CMOs in navigating uncertainty could define the next era of the industry.
On the topic of AI’s impact in commerce, E.l.f. Beauty’s Ekta Chopra, speaking at Shoptalk in Las Vegas, weighed in on the fierce debate over how generative AI is changing shopping. Scot Wingo, CEO of ReFiBuy, argued that by 2030, 10% of commerce could be fully agentic—essentially, bot-to-bot transactions. But not everyone’s convinced. Analyst Andrew Lipsman pushed back, saying that while large language models are collapsing the traditional marketing funnel and changing product discovery, true bot-to-bot commerce isn’t the endgame. Even with automation improving efficiency, shoppers still need to move through the classic funnel stages: discovery, awareness, and ultimately, purchase. The real disruption, for now, is in how AI is upending the ways consumers find and consider products, rather than automating the entire shopping process.
That’s all for today’s Brief. As we’ve seen, the marketing landscape is being reshaped by AI, creator-driven content, and the ongoing dance between agencies and their clients. Whether you’re planning your next campaign or rethinking your media mix, staying informed—and adaptable—has never been more important. Thanks for joining us, and remember: the sharpest marketers are always learning. Catch you next time.
