Affiliate Idea Factory

Matt Wasserlauf, CEO, Blockboard

For years, the advertising industry had a convenient villain: fraud. It was real, it was measurable and it gave everyone something to blame when performance fell short of expectations. Brands hired verification vendors, agencies added line items to media plans and the industry collectively agreed that the problem was bots, not the system.

Fraud is still real. But as AI-driven automation removes layer after layer of manual execution from media buying, a different problem is coming into focus. Something harder to name, harder to fix and, for a lot of people in the supply chain, much more uncomfortable to talk about: structural waste.

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Publishers spent years learning how to engineer Google. Now they’re trying to do the same for AI answers – and sell it as a brand product. 

Germany’s BCN, the joint-venture commercial arm of three major publishing houses – Hubert Burda Media, Funke and Klambt – is rolling out a commercial product that helps brands get properly surfaced and described inside ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI assistants, not just on traditional search results pages.

Called AI Brand Voice, the offering bundles an AI visibility audit, content strategy, AI-optimized branded content and ongoing optimization across roughly 300 specialist titles, spanning technology, finance, beauty, health and luxury, including Chip, Elle and Grazia. BCN claims the JV reaches around 63 million users across the three publishing houses. 

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