Ep 21: AI, IPOs & Advertising: What Happens When AI Giants Go Public?

AI continues to dominate headlines—but is the advertising industry becoming more cautious?

In this episode of Media Monitor, Kelly and Sean examine a series of major developments shaping the future of artificial intelligence and advertising. From Anthropic’s IPO plans and OpenAI’s advertising strategy to the surprising shift in AI conversations at Cannes Lions, the discussion explores how the industry’s perspective on AI may be evolving.

The conversation covers:

• Anthropic’s reported IPO ambitions and trillion-dollar valuation discussions
• xAI, OpenAI, and the growing competition among AI leaders
• What public markets may expect from AI companies
• Why advertising revenue is becoming increasingly important
• OpenAI’s early advertising performance
• The challenges of monetizing generative AI platforms
• How AI conversations have changed at Cannes Lions
• Why AI panel discussions have declined compared to last year
• The growing debate around human creativity versus AI-generated content
• The Pope’s recent comments on artificial intelligence
• Business leader enthusiasm versus employee concerns about AI adoption
• The emerging challenge of “AI slop” in the workplace
• Predictions for AI advertising over the next several years

As AI companies move toward public markets and face increasing pressure to generate revenue, advertisers, agencies, and marketers will need to understand how these platforms evolve—and what role advertising will play in their future.

Key Topics Covered

• Artificial intelligence
• AI advertising
• OpenAI advertising strategy
• Anthropic IPO
• xAI valuation
• AI monetization
• Cannes Lions 2026
• Generative AI
• AI adoption
• Advertising technology
• Marketing innovation
• Workplace AI trends
• AI business models
• AI search advertising
• Future of advertising

If you’d like access to the benchmark report or want to suggest a topic for the next part of the programmatic series, reach out to press@guideline.ai.

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to follow or subscribe so you don’t miss future conversations on advertising, media strategy, and cultural marketing moments.

And if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, a quick rating or review helps more people discover the show.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

You're listening to Media Monitor, where we break down what's happening in the media and the advertising industry and tell you what it actually means. Sean, welcome back. How's it going?

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Great. How are you, Kelly?

SPEAKER_01 0:20

Oh, I'm good. I'm super excited. We have a lot to cover today, Sean. It's a big day in the world. Uh well, not a big day. It's a big time. It's just a day.

SPEAKER_00 0:32

Just a day. We're just plugging away.

SPEAKER_01 0:34

But this day, in kind of like the scheme of things, you know, in the AI scheme of things, it's it's I don't know. I feel like right now there's so much going on in AI that we have to talk about it because things are changing so fast and we've we've got to capture this moment.

SPEAKER_00 0:54

Sure. Let's talk, let's talk AI. I feel like it's inevitable, right? Like at some point you're gonna have to talk about it if you're in advertising. And today's our day.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

Today's our day. Well, and you don't sound as as excited as I am. So I'm gonna bring the energy here and Venn diagram.

SPEAKER_00 1:09

Venn diagram.

SPEAKER_01 1:10

But so why today? Why do I want to talk about it? A few reasons. First, Anthropic filed their S1. They are targeting October for their IPO with a projected 1 trillion with a T valuation. I know, but they're not the only ones, right? So SpaceX, which you know you you think of as rockets, SpaceX is actually bigger than that. They've got XAI, you know, Grok is kind of nested into that. They're targeting a listing date of June 12th, and they have a valuation of north of a trillion. I think it's 1.75 trillion.

SPEAKER_00 1:49

Even more bananas.

SPEAKER_01 1:50

Right. And so, you know, with that, and we know open AI is in talks, and open AI being the only one who's really got like this kind of official ad strategy, I mean Grok kind of has it, but this has implications for our community. So we have to think about what's gonna happen in the world of advertising as it relates to these companies going public and potentially more of them running ads. In addition, we are three weeks out from Cam Lions. And for those who don't know, you know, this is like the Oscars of advertising. This is a fancy event held in June every year where the creative issue is.

SPEAKER_00 2:29

By the way, not just a fancy event, but it's a fancy event in a fancy place doing fancy stuff.

SPEAKER_01 2:35

It's like it is, yes, it's like so it's for marketing, advertising, creatives. They come together, they're on yachts, and they're talking, they're they're getting together. So we wanted to take a look at what's on the agenda for that. And spoiler alert, we want to see how much does AI show up in that agenda. So we'll talk about that. And then lastly, the Pope. The Pope is talking AI of the Catholic Church. That's right.

SPEAKER_00 3:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:07

And before we get into it, I I have to share a little anecdote, Sean.

SPEAKER_00 3:12

Absolutely. Go for it. So put my my business out there.

SPEAKER_01 3:17

I've I absolutely am. A few weeks ago, you were out of office, somebody needed your bio. I thought I could grab it, I didn't have it. So I'm stalking your LinkedIn, and I realized you went to Villanova. I did. I didn't know. So I immediately slack you and and talk to you about it because you know, on my husband's side of the family, like half of them went to Villanova, big wildcats community.

SPEAKER_00 3:41

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 3:42

And naturally our conversation evolves to the Pope, and you tell me something crazy.

SPEAKER_00 3:47

He's a wildcat himself. I yeah. So, you know, in the six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon kind of game, I am actually only uh, let's see, twice removed from the Pope. My college roommate's father was, you know, roommates and friends with the Pope back in in the Wildcat days. So not very far removed from from the Pope himself, his holiness. So that's that's my special connection.

SPEAKER_01 4:13

I I love it. I think you know, I think you were telling me he was he's wearing like Villanova gear.

SPEAKER_00 4:21

Yeah, he was uh I th I I forget how he got the hat, but they they gave him a hat like I want to say maybe like six, seven months ago. And like my LinkedIn feed from the official Villanova channel was literally nothing but like pictures of the Pope in the Villanova hat. Like people were going bananas for it, of course. And I think I again really wrong here, but I think there was also something involving the Knicks because there's a couple of Knicks uh players that are former former Wildcats. That's like a big deal.

SPEAKER_01 4:47

Big deal.

SPEAKER_00 4:48

So there's there's been a whole thing.

SPEAKER_01 4:50

Did you just shout out the Knicks on the first day of the NBA finals?

SPEAKER_00 4:55

I tried to, you know, I I ham-fisted it. I was reading an interesting article that they are now allowing the watch party to go down in Times Square for the for the first game, which is previously prohibited. Now they're saying actually it's cool. Go ahead. So that's pretty, pretty exciting stuff. So yeah, yeah, I'm I'm trying to maybe connecting it to last week with sports stuff. I'm gonna do every week I'm gonna try to be a little bit better about sports.

SPEAKER_01 5:21

I sent my son to school in head to toe orange and blue today. He's he's really repping it hard. So hopefully we we get that next week.

SPEAKER_00 5:31

My kids did not have arch or blue today at all.

SPEAKER_01 5:34

Well, we'll we'll keep tabs on these NBA playoffs, but let's let's let's shift gears. So I I think let's start first with can and the the agenda, because you called something out to me that I thought was really interesting about how it's changed since last year.

SPEAKER_00 5:52

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I feel like you know, from a from a vibes perspective, I just felt like the AI conversation from vibes seemed to be petering out. And so I like, of course, me being the the the numbers guy, the wanted to kind of jump in. I'm like the play by pay, you're like the color commentator to again sports reference, but like going into it, I was like, okay, well, let me let me try to find the program from last year. And so I was actually able to find it on the internet archive, they have it listed and was able to like cross-reference for this year and then just kind of like wanted to kind of get a quick, quick check on the panels to see if like my vibes felt correct. And I would say if if those are the only two data points, my vibes are correct. So this year, there is a total of seven panels across all of CAN dedicated to AI. What's fascinating though is that two of the seven are actually like, I don't want to say anti-AI, but almost like framing as to like how creative and like human-created endeavors can survive in an AI age, right? It's not the like heavy-handed, this is how you use AI. It's actually the alternative. And so there's like two of them that are presenting the like, as AI has continued to mature and infuse itself into the ad ecosystem, here's how we are different, here's how we position ourselves, right? And so there's there's two panels specifically on that. Last year, though, roughly a third of all content was AI related at CAN. And for context, by the way, there's usually like 150 hours of panels. You're basically looking at like 10-ish hours of AI content this year versus uh, you know, like 50 last year. So it's it's a measurable drop in terms of the focus and conversation. And I think it's like uh potentially two reasons. One is, you know, a lot of to your to maybe earlier comment of like things are going crazy leaps and bounds. I would say like, yes, the AI headlines have been growing by leaps and bounds, but when you look at like the innovation that's happening in advertising, I would say that has been kind of slowed, right? There was last year, a lot of the panels were focused in on video generation, right? With like, oh my God, look how fast this has evolved. You know, you no longer need to do creative, you can just have AI create all of your video content, all of these things, right? And then this year, much more muted, right? Chat GPT has kind of like backed out of their video generation kind of component, right? They're focused mostly on search. So it's like, if you think even that like there is a lot of movement, but some of it isn't always this forward progression. Some of it's actually taking a step back. And I think that's kind of some of the vibe that we're seeing is like the realities of on the ground AI stuff, meeting the like press release panel, here's all these cool things. And also just to caveat, right? Like thinking about the audience, you're talking to a whole bunch of marketers and creatives who've built their entire careers and lives on producing something themselves to say, this is what's unique or interesting. So, like AI is a very real threat to many of those folks there. So there is also a sensitivity that is like, hey, these this is an industry event that is very much focused on human-created endeavors, where AI is often a big threat to that. Whereas in other places, right, like a tech conference of like how are you building a better back end, right? There's a lot more receptivity to something like AI because you're like, well, yeah, like I'll use that all day to code and kind of help me, you know, structure my you know iterative loops in in Python so I don't have to code that. That's great. Yay, right? Like it's a different feel at CAN because it's a different audience who wants different things, both from AI and the overall industry. So I think it's a mixture thereof of why we've seen kind of a decline, at least in terms of the official panels. Who knows all of those conversations that happens on yachts, et cetera? What the, you know, it will eventually inevitably drift to AI, but I'm talking like structured, scheduled panels.

SPEAKER_01 9:37

Yeah, and you know, another I think it's a really good data point for us to consider, right? So a huge reduction in the number of coverage and then what in the panels that do exist, a reshaping of the dialogue to focus on how we can coexist with AI, right? And the other piece of can is like who's going, right? It's the big brands, the big dogs. It's not the mom and pops, you know, the the 10-person company that emerged that's living and dying by you know meta's AI tools to launch their campaigns. They're not they're not at CAN. So it's almost like, you know, how is this conversation shifting for the big brands versus the little guys? And you know, like, I mean, I for one, like I'm mad I didn't get a chance to make my own AI slop video before Chat GBT ripped it out of my clutches. Because that would be fun. But like, what am I doing with that? Like, what what is that what meaning am I gonna do? For loading yeah, just like just just for yeah, for me for memeing. For meaning videos, yeah, for meme videos. Not for meaning, but for memeing.

SPEAKER_00 10:49

Meme, yeah, no, not meaningless. But meaning meaningful.

SPEAKER_01 10:55

I never will get that chance. Never so I yeah, I mean, I think, and that's a little bit of like you know, segueing into the Pope's commentary. I think he was kind of saying, like, let's like let's just let's take a beat here, right? Like things were going really fast. I think he said that we need to disarm AI. We need to, you know, this is not a race, let's figure out how to use it to support everyone in the right ways, but like let's let's slow down before just blindly accepting this acceleration into our world. And so like I think that this is representative of a a segment of the community who's saying, No, we're gonna we're gonna shift back to where to our North Star and we're going to talk about it because we'll need to talk about it, but it's not gonna be a huge percentage of the content.

SPEAKER_00 11:46

Yeah, right. Yeah, I mean, I my to kind of swing it back to kind of industry specific stuff as well, is it was fascinating, right? Because who was there was anthropic during the Pope's encyclical. They they've kind of spoken with the Pope around kind of the future of AI and all of these things. And I shared with you a few articles that like went into depth depth about it, but like it's also maybe cynically a really brilliant marketing move in that anthropic was there, but open AI was not, right? And it's this like this ongoing debate now between like the good AI versus like the power hungry AI, which again, I don't I don't buy into either of those kind of things, but from a from a marketing perspective, right? There is there is a lot of that that's happening right now in terms of anthropic saying no to you know a government contract that they felt would kind of violate their ethics. A day later, open AI kind of signs it and says, yeah, we'll help out, et cetera. And it's like this this very interesting framing where Anthropic obviously can say no to business. They are doing very well for themselves, but alternatively, so is both of them, right? OpenAI is also doing very well, at least in terms of growth, right? We'll maybe talk a little bit about in a minute, like revenue expectations, things like that. But it is a fascinating dynamic that's at play. That I think we saw some of that in kind of the Pope's message, but also the Pope's unsaid message of like who is who was there and who was present in terms of the conversation. Um, and kind of anthropic was all over it, but open AI was kind of not to be found, uh, which I also thought was was a fairly interesting dynamic.

SPEAKER_01 13:22

Well, you kind of think about just the sentiment of folks who are interacting with AI. You've got like business owners, corporate executives, and then you have you know the day-to-day workers trying to figure out like how do I use this and grow with it? Is this unseating my job? You hear there's been a lot of talk about when AI gets mentioned at a commencement speech, we're in that kind of graduation season, right? The kids are booing. They're booing because they're they don't they can't find jobs and they're competing with a computer. And it's yeah, so I think you know, anthropic it was a really smart play to be there because they're speaking to the people.

SPEAKER_00 14:07

Yeah. Right. Yeah, to your point too, right? I I shared this with you earlier, but you know, I'm reading a book right now on open AI. And one of the interesting stats, kind of the to leave the book, is is in a recent survey, 96% of business owners in C-suite said AI will fundamentally change their company for the better, and they are all hands-on, everyone should be behind it. What was interesting, the same survey went out to rank and file workers, and 77% of them said that it actually increased their workload because they had both the existing work that they needed to do, expectations from the C-suite that with AI, so much of your job is automated that you can actually do more. But in reality, most of the time spent was kind of cleaning up and addressing what is now being kind of termed work slop, where it's this like kind of automation output of things that historically would have maybe taken slightly longer to do by person, but now it's fact-checking, going through, revising, making it feel more human in terms of communication, whatever it might be, and then ultimately outputting the same thing. Um, and 77% of workers said, like, actually, I'm working harder than I ever have with the addition of AI because it's not, it's not necessarily like in some cases, it's making me proproductive. In other cases, I'm being buried by additional tasks, additional work, additional things to correct, uh, where I'm actually having less time to do things, which I thought was an interesting dynamic that we've seen now. I've seen it across actually five or six, six surveys where it's kind of almost uh to a T the same dynamic. Like you have a very small cadre of folks saying that this is going to be revolutionary and change the world. And then you have a much larger percent of the population saying, let's slow down. There are things that we need to think through. We're in the weeds, we're in the details. This isn't as like cut and dry as you might think. Here's some things we need to think about. And so it's it's this ongoing dynamic that I've seen play out, but it's fascinating.

SPEAKER_01 16:00

I mean, I can't tell you how much I'm using the word slop this year.

SPEAKER_00 16:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:07

And I like I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_00 16:08

It'll be the word of the year by Webster or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 16:10

It's a hundred percent. But so I was I was curious how Webster handles it when it's like the add-on.

SPEAKER_00 16:16

Blank slop, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:18

It's it's fill in the blank slop is going to be word of the year for sure.

SPEAKER_00 16:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:24

But so okay, let's talk, let's talk numbers a little bit because you know, getting we kind of started this with we've got two of the major players in this space filing for IPO. OpenAI is like definitely gonna follow suit shortly. We made some predictions when they announced that they were gonna have ads earlier this year, and and now we have some some data, right? So how is it looking? How are they doing? Let's talk about it.

SPEAKER_00 16:50

Yeah, uh so at a high level, right? Uh without getting first into it, I think uh obviously as we think about IPOs, the companies are gonna have to show their books at some point, and they're gonna have to show for all of that capex of building the data warehouses, powering the AI, the RD that goes into them, which is which is incredible, right? Um, but also expensive, is being offset by what is the big question mark. In the case of Anthropic, I think we've seen recently in the last couple of weeks that they opted to increase their token costs significantly to a point now where a lot of companies are backtracking on their AI budgets, or in the case of I I could be wrong, but I believe it was Uber that kind of blew through their annual AI budget on tokens in just three and a half months because of both increased costs, but also as they were incentivizing people to use chatbots more, people were just creating chatbots for everything and it was just burning tokens. Uh so it didn't help then that Anthropic both increased the cost of tokens and people were then also incentivized to use them more. So universally, Anthropic has opted to kind of go for a revenue model that is both, hey, pay to play, but also for our more specialized services around kind of these like headless agentic solutions, all of this, we're gonna charge you a little bit more than we have. My guess is this is like a uh frog in a pot kind of situation, that they're just gonna slowly increase costs until they can kind of show by paper come IPO filing date that like they are nearing profitability. I doubt that they will be, but trying to close that gap, especially if we think about whatever X is gonna come out with, as well as whatever OpenAI is gonna come out with in terms of their profitability. My guess is that Anthropic is trying to close that gap to make them look the best financially in terms of soundness. So that was their their attempt.

unknown 18:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:41

And to your point, wait, but just real quick, two. It's a ton of work for companies who are running these tools to manage their employees' use of these tools. Like, what is the line that you draw to say you should have it proofread this email, but not that email, right? Like, and are you using it to proofread?

SPEAKER_00 19:04

A chat bot to rule all other chatbots.

SPEAKER_01 19:07

And I think we could be headed there, right? Like this feels very needed because like that line is just so gray. And it depends on your role and your level and internal versus external. And there's so many factors. So, okay, so pluck it off my operational policing soapbox. Sure.

SPEAKER_00 19:28

Because you know, until they release an org chart where it's like this is the manager AI that will ultimately make automated decisions about whether or not mini AI can make a decision about an email to Matt as Shokins. Um be great.

SPEAKER_01 19:43

We're doing it. It's happening. We're in the future.

SPEAKER_00 19:45

It's coming. Yeah. Uh yeah. So that was their revenue model. Open AI has opted more so to still charge for more premium accounts and features, but opted to kind of go the route of advertising. So that was kind of the dynamic, right? And that's I think kind of started the riff with Anthropic earlier this year, where come you know, January, Anthropic was out in the Super Bowl, out advertising, being like, we don't have ads, uh, versus you know, kind of OpenAI being a little more quiet about it, but announcing that we we are happily kind of rolling out ads. So we we see the data, right? We see ads bend. And what's interesting is that it's been mixed for what we can see from OpenAI. The month over month growth rates in terms of when it launched or when it was announced and launched, then like month two, month three, month four, have been astronomically growing, right? The first first month over month was 17,000% up, then 954% up, then 644% up. So one, obviously slight slowing, but then two, obviously these like skyrocketing rates. What's fascinating is when you look at other companies that have opted to launch an ad product, because we have those in our data kind of going back in time, the month over month growth rates are nowhere near open AI's. So on average, in that first month where open AI month over month grew 1700%, across other players that we looked at, the average growth rate was 340.

SPEAKER_01 21:14

But they were also coming from zero, right?

SPEAKER_00 21:16

Like all zero. Universally across the board, all zero went from zero to something. And then at that something, what was the month after it was kind of how the measurement. So yeah, so there's there's kind of been this this spike. And so, like on the positive, open AI's acceleration has has grown tons in our data. But what's interesting is when you look at the actual dollars, it's far lower at this point now. We're like in month three of it in our data. But as a month, uh sorry, I meant month five, apologies. Month five, yeah, I was like month three. I was like, I'm looking, I'm looking at month three here. But like month five, the dollar amount is still pretty low compared to other platforms at this point. Like if you looked at a TikTok or even Threads or Netflix or Amazon Prime Video, and I get some of them like Amazon Prime Video, they just turned on ads and they like had kind of the mechanism because they served ads elsewhere versus like OpenAI is actually building something from scratch, which is a much harder endeavor. So you can kind of like say waited against it, but either way, it is clear, even within our sm you know, uh kind of slice of the market, that this alone is not going to get them to profitability anytime in the near future in terms of what we're seeing from a dollar perspective. We're talking, you know, single-digit, low, double-digit millions of dollars when their hope was like by year end, they're a billion-dollar business. I am a bit skeptical that they are going to get there, you know, five months in with what we are seeing in our data. And again, coverage of like what we see in our data isn't the total market, but like our directions are usually pretty good that we can kind of get a good bead and we do forecasting around like revenue for other companies that like I feel confident enough to say this this isn't gonna get them to a billion dollars, even with what we have line of sight into.

SPEAKER_01 23:07

Well, I think I sort of have two reactions to that. One that kind of reinforces this plateauing and one that is a little more optimistic. The first, so the the plat on the plateauing side, I keep going back to how, you know, in the more like social advertising networks and and platforms, the the volume of ads that can be run from a single individual who can create multiple personas and accounts is how they can scale. Right? The like I can have multiple accounts where I'm running like like say I am a like fitness instructor nutritionist. I could have a food account, a workout account, like all these different things just from me. In chat, I'm just me. I'm just me asking questions, right? So, like that to me signals plateauing. The other end of it that could be more optimistic is you know, they went to market with a very simple ad, basic, right? More ad units, more creative types of ad units could emerge, could garner higher price points. I just don't know like what their plans are with that, but there's there's an opportunity, right? Like you can introduce more ad units, different types of ads. I like it just depends on if they do that and and how they charge for it. And and also like who's buying them? Like, are these ads effective? I I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 24:37

I I don't know either. But I I would at least say, like, where I would maybe close on my thoughts are like we're we're still very early in the game here, right? I don't think the Gen AI search ads of today will look anything like they do in five years. It's you know, it's all technology where you kind of like start from a place that kind of is vaguely like the technology that became before it. So the Gen AI search ads today look awfully similar to a search ad from just like SEO uh from yesteryear, right? It's not wildly different. Yeah, it's not wildly different. So you start someplace that you know, you build off the tech there, and in like three or four years, it becomes a fundamentally different look, feel, and becomes this unique channel where you're like, I have to invest in this, my strategy for this is different, my look is different, etc. Um, but we're not there yet. The other thing is that I've I've seen a bunch of studies that have tried to like reproduce the same results. And because it's probabilistic, you are not getting the same result every time you prompt, even if the prompt is identical. And so as a result, it's often very hard for advertisers to figure out like, will my ad get served here when it really needs to be versus when over here where it's not? And because it's probabilistic, sometimes it comes up, sometimes the response of the AI is different. And so, like, you are seeing some of that play out, I think, in terms of advertising advertisers' willingness to kind of invest in the platform.

SPEAKER_01 25:58

Yeah, well, I mean, so I think it was a good time to do a checkpoint. We have some data, we've got this event coming up, got the Pope talking about AI. Um, but where we are is kind of just like we still are feeling it out. It's it's less of it's less of a concept and more in practice, but we still don't have definitive answers yet. I mean, we're gonna find it out.

SPEAKER_00 26:23

100%.

SPEAKER_01 26:24

So all right. Well good good talking AI with you. I think you know you got excited in there. I saw, I can tell you.

SPEAKER_00 26:31

I tried. I tried for the listeners at home. I did I did it for them.

SPEAKER_01 26:36

You did it.

SPEAKER_00 26:37

I did it for them.

SPEAKER_01 26:38

I uh I'm gonna just go put on my Knicks hat and get ready for tonight's big game.

SPEAKER_00 26:44

Yeah. Go Knicks or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 26:47

Or whatever.

SPEAKER_00 26:48

Or whatever. I don't even know who they're playing.

SPEAKER_01 26:50

The Spurs!

SPEAKER_00 26:52

Yep, absolutely. Jeez.

SPEAKER_01 26:56

It's gonna be an uphill battle with you, Sean.

SPEAKER_00 26:58

Straight up. 90 degrees.

SPEAKER_01 27:01

All right. Well, thanks again for the time, and I will see you next week, Sean.

SPEAKER_00 27:05

See you next week. That's Media Monitor. Follow us and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts every Wednesday for a new episode. And as always, thanks for listening.