Author: Sam Bradley

Synthetic audiences have become a common tool within media agencies, but buyers drew a line at using them in programmatic buying. WPP Media’s latest move may redraw that line.

The British agency holding company’s media arm struck a partnership with Givsly, a tech company founded in 2019, to use synthetic audiences based in part on charity donation data to target media buys in the United States.

According to Tara Sadlak, group director of media delivery at WPP Media, early tests carried out across four beauty and fashion campaigns show a 2% lift in video completion rates, suggesting that more accurate targeting had led to higher engagement rates among audiences. Sadlak declined to name the brands in the test.

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Le Monde blocks almost every bot that tries to hit its site. Now it’s starting to think about what happens when its paying readers show up via AI agents instead of a browser.

The French news publisher now blocks almost all non-human traffic unless there’s a licensing deal in place, including Google’s AI training crawler Google Extended.

Speaking to Digiday at Fastly’s Xcelerate event in London last week, Le Monde CTO Paul Laleu, said the company is “figuring out” how to maintain its subscription partnership with readers who use AI agents rather than its homepage or app. He’s interested in early technical standards that would let an AI assistant tell Le Monde, in effect, “I’m fetching this article for a user who already pays you,” so the site can decide what to show. “I can recognize that user and be able to say: ‘this one is a subscriber, I can give him the content because he’s paying money for it,’” said Laleu. “I see that as part of the future of the web.”

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