Curling, crawling and selling the movie

IT WAS 4:05 A.M., and I was settled in for an epic feast of sport — specifically, the mixed doubles curling preliminaries at the Winter Games in Cortina. While I sat gripped by the high-stakes sweeping on a sheet of ice in northern Italy, Mr. Crawler lay beside me, snoring with the rhythmic intensity of a bunged-up elephant. He was, as usual, blissfully unaware that history was being made.

Still, all was not lost. He was always able to catch it later on Peacock, which streamed every event live and made full replays available on demand soon after they aired — a small mercy for those of us unwilling to keep Central European Time indefinitely, or, in Mr. Crawler’s case, unwilling to keep any time that involves a pre-noon start.

By Sunday evening, there was another “small sporting event” that people seemed rather excited about. Between you and me, I was only in it for the ads — a purely professional interest.

Speaking of commercials, Anthropic enjoyed something of a mic drop last week with its latest spot, insisting that it, at least, won’t be running ads on its chatbot, Claude. It was a pointed elbow in the ribs of OpenAI’s plans to bring advertising to ChatGPT. If the hit wasn’t obvious to everyone, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made it so when he punched back shortly thereafter. Oh dear.

But what truly caught Crawler’s eye was the tempest in a teapot that it’s stirred up in the ad community, particularly on LinkedIn. Some say it’s a bit rich to take an ad out to denigrate ads — already predicting that Anthropic will eventually eat its words. After all, we all remember a certain streaming platform that once made a similar vow, only to crawl it back later on. And who can blame them?

The industry sages are now in a right old tizzy. Lou Paskalis raised a fair question: If platforms like Claude say no to ads, and consumers migrate to ad-free environments, then where exactly are marketers supposed to go to reach the best new prospects?

Judging by the trade coverage coming out of this year’s IAB Annual Leadership Meeting, the industry believes it’s entering another one of those “standards wars,” which we’re all so good at starting but terrible at finishing. This time, it’s around a wave of new protocols — which means a new set of initialisms — particularly ARTF and AdCP. It’s already been described as the ad tech industry’s drift into the four-letter era. I explained this to Mr. Crawler, who seems to have been in a “four-letter era” of his own ever since I suggested he might try his hand at the vacuuming.

For an industry so fond of announcing the next chapter, Crawler couldn’t help noticing that no one seemed quite sure how this one is meant to end. As Jay Friedman rather smartly put it recently, what remains unclear is the story itself: what, precisely, marketers, buyers, agencies and traders will be able to do once all of this is implemented that they cannot already do today. “Sell the movie,” he suggested, “not the lens, film and editing software.”

As an aficionado of editing software, I’ll try not to take that personally. Still, neither the trade press nor the industry seems able to explain “agentic advertising” in terms Mr. Crawler might reasonably grasp. The case studies so far read less like evidence than aspiration, hastily circulated and generously seasoned with buzzwords to thicken the sauce.

Never mind.

Crawler is a satirical take on the biggest ad tech news of the week. It’s penned by editors of The Current, which is owned by The Trade Desk. Have your own take? Reach us at [email protected].