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Greetings! If you’ve wanted to visit the South of France, this might be the week. The annual Cannes Lion ad festival, a time for ad folks from all quarters to gather, gets underway tomorrow. The impact of AI on advertising and media is sure to be front and center. OpenAI’s chief revenue officer, Denise Dresser, is scheduled to appear onstage twice, according to the official program, including on a panel with Google’s chief marketing officer, Lorraine Twohill. People from Google and Meta Platforms, the two digital ad giants, will be ubiquitous, as they always are at Cannes. For Dresser and other OpenAI folks, that should be a reminder that the two companies are the biggest threat to OpenAI’s hopes of creating a sustainable business in advertising. OpenAI has projected ad revenue rising from $2.4 billion this year to $102 billion in 2030, when it would be 36% of the company’s total top line. To put that into context, Meta generated $196 billion in ad revenue last year. OpenAI will need a lot of luck to achieve its projections. Ad giant WPP’s latest forecasts for the global ad market, released last week, put ad revenue from AI-related search and chatbots at $101 billion in 2030—roughly what OpenAI hopes to achieve on its own. But WPP’s projection includes what it estimates Google will generate from ads in AI Overviews search response, suggesting OpenAI will find it hard to meet its forecast. WPP projects AI-related ad revenues will hit $5.1 billion this year, while it sees traditional search ad revenues growing 8.4% to $267 billion. Kate Scott-Dawkins, business intelligence chief at WPP, noted that forecasting AI advertising revenue is difficult because of the lack of historical data. In other words, we don’t know how that market will evolve—but we should be very skeptical about OpenAI’s forecasts. Right now, Google and Meta are the ad firms likely to benefit most from AI. They are both using it to improve their ad sales efforts. Both have reported accelerating growth in their ad businesses lately. Meta’s first-quarter ad revenue rose 33%, for instance, double the growth rate of its year-earlier quarter. Ditto at Google, where search ad revenues grew 19% in the first quarter, roughly double the first quarter of 2025. Googlers and Meta folks should have fun at Cannes this week. Amazon MGM Studios is sending a clear message that its programming decisions are subject to the needs of Amazon’s other businesses. That’s the only conclusion to be drawn from the studio’s decision to drop its nearly completed film about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Amazon confirmed the decision, first reported by Puck, in a statement on Friday, saying it believed the film “will be better served if it were released by a different studio.” Amazon, of course, agreed earlier this year to invest up to $50 billion in OpenAI and also struck a deal to use OpenAI’s tech to power some of its cloud products. Not surprisingly, it seems Amazon doesn’t want to offend Altman, which would have made it awkward for its studio to release the movie. According to Variety, “the characters of Altman and [Elon] Musk are the least sympathetic.” Amazon has taken other steps to butter up important people via its entertainment arm. It agreed to a $40 million deal with First Lady Melania Trump on a documentary about her life. And last year Amazon Prime Video licensed streaming rights for the first seven seasons of “The Apprentice,” which was produced by President Donald Trump, among others. The good news is that there are other studios, such as Netflix, that may not be so worried about offending Altman. Start your day with Applied AI, the newsletter from The Information that uncovers how leading businesses are leveraging AI to automate tasks across the board. Subscribe now for free to get it delivered straight to your inbox twice a week.
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