{"id":79994,"topic":"ai","source":"AdExchanger","title":"The Ad Spend Outlook Is Looking Up; Google Brings AI To MMM - AdExchanger","url":"https://www.adexchanger.com/daily-news-roundup/friday-11092026/","url_hash":"9905791d3d4048f397d0407165af387e0b1f0919","author":"","summary":"The Ad Spend Outlook Is Looking Up; Google Brings AI To MMM AdExchanger","content":"Ad-ding Up\nThe Earth will keep turning on its axis, The Simpsons will keep putting out new episodes and advertisers will keep on spending. These are all immutable truths.\nOn Thursday, the IAB released an update to its yearly outlook, forecasting 12.3% growth in ad spend this year. Back in January, it predicted only 9.5% growth.\nSo what changed? In short, a stronger-than-expected first half and a clearer read on the economy have given advertisers permission to open their wallets wider.\nThe biggest jumps in predicted spend were in social media and CTV, at 1.9% and 1.8% respectively. Commerce media came in third place, up 1.5% thanks in part to AI’s ability to bridge the gap between discovery and purchase.\nIndeed, AI is reshaping how buyers spend and what they prioritize, but no one has fully solved, or even properly optimized for, the new AI landscape yet. Right now, nearly half of advertisers (45%) say that their biggest measurement challenge is comparing AI-driven customer journeys to traditional ones.\nThey’re also still working out where AI adds value to their campaigns and where it doesn’t.\nSeventy-six percent of buyers cite optimizing content for AI discovery as an area of “increased focus,” the IAB reports, while only 69% say they’re focused on using generative AI in campaigns – a 9% drop from January.\nMMM Bop\nStop the presses: Google’s Meridian MMM tool is adding a chatbot interface. You know, like seemingly every other mar tech tool.\nMarketers can now query Meridian for suggestions on how to build their marketing mix models, Search Engine Land reports. The chatbot can also audit their data quality and troubleshoot errors in MMM setups.\nIn addition, Meridian’s GeoX geotesting feature is exiting beta. GeoX lets marketers segment campaigns by geography, measure performance in those regions and push the findings into their models – the kind of MMM functionality that’s become table stakes for incrementality testing.\nOn top of that, Meridian is also now allowing marketers to inject upper-funnel signals, like Branded Google Query Volume, into their models alongside lower-funnel conversion signals. The idea is to get a better handle on how harder-to-attribute channels like TV and DOOH end up impacting conversions.\nAnd moving along to non-Meridian news, Google is integrating its Data Manager into Google Analytics and DV360. It’s also adopting the IAB Tech Lab’s ECAPI standard to make its Data Manager API more interoperable with other platforms.\nThe Meridian updates are noteworthy because Google continues to develop its open-source MMM whereas its rival for ad budgets, Meta, seems to be stepping back from its own open-source MMM tool. In July, several sources at ad agencies and measurement vendors told AdExchanger that Meta is no longer aggressively pushing its Robyn MMM solution.\nParty Foul?\nInvitation app Partiful has officially broken through from funky little startup to household name, as evidenced by the shoutout it got during Season 2 of “The Pitt” earlier this year. But the company hasn’t quite figured out how to monetize yet, save for the small fee it gets from people who use the platform to sell tickets or buy premium designs.\nWhich means it’s probably only a matter of time before the big social platforms do what they do best, as in, rip off the newcomer’s core business model by absorbing it into their own offerings.\nEnter Snapchat, which is getting in on the party-planning boom. On Thursday, Snap announced a new suite of event-planning features designed to schedule gatherings, send invitations and collect responses, Bloomberg reports.\nDoes that mean the party’s over for Partiful?\nNot necessarily. Snap can copy features, but Partiful’s real advantage is its brand and the community it’s built. And the fastest way to monetize these things is with advertising, of course.\nAs Marketing Brew noted back in March, Partiful has already experimented with ads. But rolling out ads too aggressively could alienate its core Gen Z and millennial audiences, the same people who abandoned Facebook Events years ago.(That is, if Partiful’s connections to Palantir haven’t done that already.)\nBut Wait! There’s More!\nOmnicom’s CFO weighs in on the “disappointing” loss of PepsiCo to Publicis. [Digiday]\nAdvertisers can now buy ads in ChatGPT through Amazon’s ad tech platform. [The Information]\nJimmy Kimmel says his interview with Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico will be broadcast on YouTube instead of ABC because the FCC “threatened” the TV network. It’s the second time this year that a late night host has had to move an interview with Talarico to YouTube after claiming to have been threatened by the FCC. [The Guardian]\nYou’re Hired!\nAI marketing ops startup Gradial appoints Lynn Girotto as CMO. [release]\nRobert DeSalvo returns to Perion as managing director of the Americas, a role he previously held in 2025. [Linkedin]\nHere’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.","image_url":"https://www.adexchanger.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/ad_.spend_.machine.cartoon-detail-1-e1709005357571.jpeg","lang":"en","published_at":"2026-09-11T04:03:30+00:00","fetched_at":"2026-09-11T06:15:05+00:00","status":"read","starred":0,"extract_state":"ok","summary_auto":"Ad-ding Up\nThe Earth will keep turning on its axis, The Simpsons will keep putting out new episodes and advertisers will keep on spending. 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These are all immutable truths.\nOn Thursday, the IAB released an update to its yearly outlook, forecasting 12.3% growth in ad spend this year. Back in January, it predicted only 9.5% growth.\nSo what changed? In short, a stronger-than-expected first half and a clearer read on the economy have given advertisers permission to open their wallets wider.\nThe biggest jumps in predicted spend were in social media and CTV, at 1.9% and 1.8% respectively. Commerce media came in third place, up 1.5% thanks in part to AI’s ability to bridge the gap between discovery and purchase.\nIndeed, AI is reshaping how buyers spend and what they prioritize, but no one has fully solved, or even properly optimized for, the new AI landscape yet. Right now, nearly half of advertisers (45%) say that their biggest measurement challenge is comparing AI-driven customer journeys to traditional ones.\nThey’re also still working out where AI adds value to their campaigns and where it doesn’t.\nSeventy-six percent of buyers cite optimizing content for AI discovery as an area of “increased focus,” the IAB reports, while only 69% say they’re focused on using generative AI in campaigns – a 9% drop from January.\nMMM Bop\nStop the presses: Google’s Meridian MMM tool is adding a chatbot interface. You know, like seemingly every other mar tech tool.\nMarketers can now query Meridian for suggestions on how to build their marketing mix models, Search Engine Land reports. The chatbot can also audit their data quality and troubleshoot errors in MMM setups.\nIn addition, Meridian’s GeoX geotesting feature is exiting beta. GeoX lets marketers segment campaigns by geography, measure performance in those regions and push the findings into their models – the kind of MMM functionality that’s become table stakes for incrementality testing.\nOn top of that, Meridian is also now allowing marketers to inject upper-funnel signals, like Branded Google Query Volume, into their models alongside lower-funnel conversion signals. The idea is to get a better handle on how harder-to-attribute channels like TV and DOOH end up impacting conversions.\nAnd moving along to non-Meridian news, Google is integrating its Data Manager into Google Analytics and DV360. It’s also adopting the IAB Tech Lab’s ECAPI standard to make its Data Manager API more interoperable with other platforms.\nThe Meridian updates are noteworthy because Google continues to develop its open-source MMM whereas its rival for ad budgets, Meta, seems to be stepping back from its own open-source MMM tool. In July, several sources at ad agencies and measurement vendors told AdExchanger that Meta is no longer aggressively pushing its Robyn MMM solution.\nParty Foul?\nInvitation app Partiful has officially broken through from funky little startup to household name, as evidenced by the shoutout it got during Season 2 of “The Pitt” earlier this year. But the company hasn’t quite figured out how to monetize yet, save for the small fee it gets from people who use the platform to sell tickets or buy premium designs.\nWhich means it’s probably only a matter of time before the big social platforms do what they do best, as in, rip off the newcomer’s core business model by absorbing it into their own offerings.\nEnter Snapchat, which is getting in on the party-planning boom. On Thursday, Snap announced a new suite of event-planning features designed to schedule gatherings, send invitations and collect responses, Bloomberg reports.\nDoes that mean the party’s over for Partiful?\nNot necessarily. Snap can copy features, but Partiful’s real advantage is its brand and the community it’s built. And the fastest way to monetize these things is with advertising, of course.\nAs Marketing Brew noted back in March, Partiful has already experimented with ads. But rolling out ads too aggressively could alienate its core Gen Z and millennial audiences, the same people who abandoned Facebook Events years ago.(That is, if Partiful’s connections to Palantir haven’t done that already.)\nBut Wait! There’s More!\nOmnicom’s CFO weighs in on the “disappointing” loss of PepsiCo to Publicis. [Digiday]\nAdvertisers can now buy ads in ChatGPT through Amazon’s ad tech platform. [The Information]\nJimmy Kimmel says his interview with Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico will be broadcast on YouTube instead of ABC because the FCC “threatened” the TV network. It’s the second time this year that a late night host has had to move an interview with Talarico to YouTube after claiming to have been threatened by the FCC. [The Guardian]\nYou’re Hired!\nAI marketing ops startup Gradial appoints Lynn Girotto as CMO. [release]\nRobert DeSalvo returns to Perion as managing director of the Americas, a role he previously held in 2025. [Linkedin]\nHere’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.","excerpt":"Ad-ding Up\nThe Earth will keep turning on its axis, The Simpsons will keep putting out new episodes and advertisers will keep on spending. On Thursday, the IAB released an update to its yearly outlook, forecasting 12.3% growth in ad spend this year.","extraction":{"state":"ok","confidence":0.9,"error":null,"explanation":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 4984 characters.","diagnostics_url":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.adexchanger.com/daily-news-roundup/friday-11092026/","quality_profile":{"profile_version":"extraction_quality.v2","bucket":"high","confidence":0.9,"failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"retry_after_attempts":0,"reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 4984 characters.","operator_guidance":{"severity":"ok","recommended_action":"trust_full_text","next_step":"Use the extracted full text as the primary article source.","operator_label":"Ready","can_retry":false,"can_use_summary":false,"diagnostics_required":false},"content_depth":{"contract_version":"content_depth.v1","category":"full_text","label":"Full text","has_full_text":true,"has_summary":true,"content_length":4984,"summary_length":249,"usable_text_length":4984,"source_field":"content"},"legacy_collapsed":false,"signals":{"extract_state":"ok","extract_error":null,"extract_retries":0,"content_length":4984,"summary_length":249}}},"display_formats":["compact","card","full","digest_section","json"]},"daily_stack_record":{"title":"The Ad Spend Outlook Is Looking Up; Google Brings AI To MMM - AdExchanger","url":"https://www.adexchanger.com/daily-news-roundup/friday-11092026/","summary":"Ad-ding Up\nThe Earth will keep turning on its axis, The Simpsons will keep putting out new episodes and advertisers will keep on spending. On Thursday, the IAB released an update to its yearly outlook, forecasting 12.3% growth in ad spend this year.","source":"AdExchanger","date":"2026-09-11T04:03:30+00:00","content":"Ad-ding Up\nThe Earth will keep turning on its axis, The Simpsons will keep putting out new episodes and advertisers will keep on spending. These are all immutable truths.\nOn Thursday, the IAB released an update to its yearly outlook, forecasting 12.3% growth in ad spend this year. Back in January, it predicted only 9.5% growth.\nSo what changed? In short, a stronger-than-expected first half and a clearer read on the economy have given advertisers permission to open their wallets wider.\nThe biggest jumps in predicted spend were in social media and CTV, at 1.9% and 1.8% respectively. Commerce media came in third place, up 1.5% thanks in part to AI’s ability to bridge the gap between discovery and purchase.\nIndeed, AI is reshaping how buyers spend and what they prioritize, but no one has fully solved, or even properly optimized for, the new AI landscape yet. Right now, nearly half of advertisers (45%) say that their biggest measurement challenge is comparing AI-driven customer journeys to traditional ones.\nThey’re also still working out where AI adds value to their campaigns and where it doesn’t.\nSeventy-six percent of buyers cite optimizing content for AI discovery as an area of “increased focus,” the IAB reports, while only 69% say they’re focused on using generative AI in campaigns – a 9% drop from January.\nMMM Bop\nStop the presses: Google’s Meridian MMM tool is adding a chatbot interface. You know, like seemingly every other mar tech tool.\nMarketers can now query Meridian for suggestions on how to build their marketing mix models, Search Engine Land reports. The chatbot can also audit their data quality and troubleshoot errors in MMM setups.\nIn addition, Meridian’s GeoX geotesting feature is exiting beta. GeoX lets marketers segment campaigns by geography, measure performance in those regions and push the findings into their models – the kind of MMM functionality that’s become table stakes for incrementality testing.\nOn top of that, Meridian is also now allowing marketers to inject upper-funnel signals, like Branded Google Query Volume, into their models alongside lower-funnel conversion signals. The idea is to get a better handle on how harder-to-attribute channels like TV and DOOH end up impacting conversions.\nAnd moving along to non-Meridian news, Google is integrating its Data Manager into Google Analytics and DV360. It’s also adopting the IAB Tech Lab’s ECAPI standard to make its Data Manager API more interoperable with other platforms.\nThe Meridian updates are noteworthy because Google continues to develop its open-source MMM whereas its rival for ad budgets, Meta, seems to be stepping back from its own open-source MMM tool. In July, several sources at ad agencies and measurement vendors told AdExchanger that Meta is no longer aggressively pushing its Robyn MMM solution.\nParty Foul?\nInvitation app Partiful has officially broken through from funky little startup to household name, as evidenced by the shoutout it got during Season 2 of “The Pitt” earlier this year. But the company hasn’t quite figured out how to monetize yet, save for the small fee it gets from people who use the platform to sell tickets or buy premium designs.\nWhich means it’s probably only a matter of time before the big social platforms do what they do best, as in, rip off the newcomer’s core business model by absorbing it into their own offerings.\nEnter Snapchat, which is getting in on the party-planning boom. On Thursday, Snap announced a new suite of event-planning features designed to schedule gatherings, send invitations and collect responses, Bloomberg reports.\nDoes that mean the party’s over for Partiful?\nNot necessarily. Snap can copy features, but Partiful’s real advantage is its brand and the community it’s built. And the fastest way to monetize these things is with advertising, of course.\nAs Marketing Brew noted back in March, Partiful has already experimented with ads. But rolling out ads too aggressively could alienate its core Gen Z and millennial audiences, the same people who abandoned Facebook Events years ago.(That is, if Partiful’s connections to Palantir haven’t done that already.)\nBut Wait! There’s More!\nOmnicom’s CFO weighs in on the “disappointing” loss of PepsiCo to Publicis. [Digiday]\nAdvertisers can now buy ads in ChatGPT through Amazon’s ad tech platform. [The Information]\nJimmy Kimmel says his interview with Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico will be broadcast on YouTube instead of ABC because the FCC “threatened” the TV network. It’s the second time this year that a late night host has had to move an interview with Talarico to YouTube after claiming to have been threatened by the FCC. [The Guardian]\nYou’re Hired!\nAI marketing ops startup Gradial appoints Lynn Girotto as CMO. [release]\nRobert DeSalvo returns to Perion as managing director of the Americas, a role he previously held in 2025. [Linkedin]\nHere’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? 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On Thursday, the IAB released an update to its yearly outlook, forecasting 12.3% growth in ad spend this year.","full_text":"Ad-ding Up\nThe Earth will keep turning on its axis, The Simpsons will keep putting out new episodes and advertisers will keep on spending. These are all immutable truths.\nOn Thursday, the IAB released an update to its yearly outlook, forecasting 12.3% growth in ad spend this year. Back in January, it predicted only 9.5% growth.\nSo what changed? In short, a stronger-than-expected first half and a clearer read on the economy have given advertisers permission to open their wallets wider.\nThe biggest jumps in predicted spend were in social media and CTV, at 1.9% and 1.8% respectively. Commerce media came in third place, up 1.5% thanks in part to AI’s ability to bridge the gap between discovery and purchase.\nIndeed, AI is reshaping how buyers spend and what they prioritize, but no one has fully solved, or even properly optimized for, the new AI landscape yet. Right now, nearly half of advertisers (45%) say that their biggest measurement challenge is comparing AI-driven customer journeys to traditional ones.\nThey’re also still working out where AI adds value to their campaigns and where it doesn’t.\nSeventy-six percent of buyers cite optimizing content for AI discovery as an area of “increased focus,” the IAB reports, while only 69% say they’re focused on using generative AI in campaigns – a 9% drop from January.\nMMM Bop\nStop the presses: Google’s Meridian MMM tool is adding a chatbot interface. You know, like seemingly every other mar tech tool.\nMarketers can now query Meridian for suggestions on how to build their marketing mix models, Search Engine Land reports. The chatbot can also audit their data quality and troubleshoot errors in MMM setups.\nIn addition, Meridian’s GeoX geotesting feature is exiting beta. GeoX lets marketers segment campaigns by geography, measure performance in those regions and push the findings into their models – the kind of MMM functionality that’s become table stakes for incrementality testing.\nOn top of that, Meridian is also now allowing marketers to inject upper-funnel signals, like Branded Google Query Volume, into their models alongside lower-funnel conversion signals. The idea is to get a better handle on how harder-to-attribute channels like TV and DOOH end up impacting conversions.\nAnd moving along to non-Meridian news, Google is integrating its Data Manager into Google Analytics and DV360. It’s also adopting the IAB Tech Lab’s ECAPI standard to make its Data Manager API more interoperable with other platforms.\nThe Meridian updates are noteworthy because Google continues to develop its open-source MMM whereas its rival for ad budgets, Meta, seems to be stepping back from its own open-source MMM tool. In July, several sources at ad agencies and measurement vendors told AdExchanger that Meta is no longer aggressively pushing its Robyn MMM solution.\nParty Foul?\nInvitation app Partiful has officially broken through from funky little startup to household name, as evidenced by the shoutout it got during Season 2 of “The Pitt” earlier this year. But the company hasn’t quite figured out how to monetize yet, save for the small fee it gets from people who use the platform to sell tickets or buy premium designs.\nWhich means it’s probably only a matter of time before the big social platforms do what they do best, as in, rip off the newcomer’s core business model by absorbing it into their own offerings.\nEnter Snapchat, which is getting in on the party-planning boom. On Thursday, Snap announced a new suite of event-planning features designed to schedule gatherings, send invitations and collect responses, Bloomberg reports.\nDoes that mean the party’s over for Partiful?\nNot necessarily. Snap can copy features, but Partiful’s real advantage is its brand and the community it’s built. And the fastest way to monetize these things is with advertising, of course.\nAs Marketing Brew noted back in March, Partiful has already experimented with ads. But rolling out ads too aggressively could alienate its core Gen Z and millennial audiences, the same people who abandoned Facebook Events years ago.(That is, if Partiful’s connections to Palantir haven’t done that already.)\nBut Wait! There’s More!\nOmnicom’s CFO weighs in on the “disappointing” loss of PepsiCo to Publicis. [Digiday]\nAdvertisers can now buy ads in ChatGPT through Amazon’s ad tech platform. [The Information]\nJimmy Kimmel says his interview with Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico will be broadcast on YouTube instead of ABC because the FCC “threatened” the TV network. It’s the second time this year that a late night host has had to move an interview with Talarico to YouTube after claiming to have been threatened by the FCC. [The Guardian]\nYou’re Hired!\nAI marketing ops startup Gradial appoints Lynn Girotto as CMO. [release]\nRobert DeSalvo returns to Perion as managing director of the Americas, a role he previously held in 2025. [Linkedin]\nHere’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.","reading_time_min":4,"extraction":{"state":"ok","confidence":0.9,"error":null,"explanation":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 4984 characters.","diagnostics_url":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.adexchanger.com/daily-news-roundup/friday-11092026/","quality_profile":{"profile_version":"extraction_quality.v2","bucket":"high","confidence":0.9,"failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"retry_after_attempts":0,"reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 4984 characters.","operator_guidance":{"severity":"ok","recommended_action":"trust_full_text","next_step":"Use the extracted full text as the primary article source.","operator_label":"Ready","can_retry":false,"can_use_summary":false,"diagnostics_required":false},"content_depth":{"contract_version":"content_depth.v1","category":"full_text","label":"Full text","has_full_text":true,"has_summary":true,"content_length":4984,"summary_length":249,"usable_text_length":4984,"source_field":"content"},"legacy_collapsed":false,"signals":{"extract_state":"ok","extract_error":null,"extract_retries":0,"content_length":4984,"summary_length":249}}},"quality_profile":{"profile_version":"extraction_quality.v2","bucket":"high","confidence":0.9,"failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"retry_after_attempts":0,"reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 4984 characters.","operator_guidance":{"severity":"ok","recommended_action":"trust_full_text","next_step":"Use the extracted full text as the primary article source.","operator_label":"Ready","can_retry":false,"can_use_summary":false,"diagnostics_required":false},"content_depth":{"contract_version":"content_depth.v1","category":"full_text","label":"Full text","has_full_text":true,"has_summary":true,"content_length":4984,"summary_length":249,"usable_text_length":4984,"source_field":"content"},"legacy_collapsed":false,"signals":{"extract_state":"ok","extract_error":null,"extract_retries":0,"content_length":4984,"summary_length":249}},"actions":{"read":"/item/79994","export_markdown":"/api/items/79994/export?format=markdown","export_json":"/api/items/79994/export?format=json","diagnose":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.adexchanger.com/daily-news-roundup/friday-11092026/"}},"digest":{"id":79994,"title":"The Ad Spend Outlook Is Looking Up; Google Brings AI To MMM - AdExchanger","url":"https://www.adexchanger.com/daily-news-roundup/friday-11092026/","source":"AdExchanger","topic":"ai","published_at":"2026-09-11T04:03:30+00:00","excerpt":"Ad-ding Up The Earth will keep turning on its axis, The Simpsons will keep putting out new episodes and advertisers will keep on spending. 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On Thursday, the IAB released an update to its yearly outlook, forecasting 12.3%…","badges":["quality:high"],"links":{"read":"/item/79994","original":"https://www.adexchanger.com/daily-news-roundup/friday-11092026/","diagnose":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.adexchanger.com/daily-news-roundup/friday-11092026/"},"quality_warning":null},"export":{"title":"The Ad Spend Outlook Is Looking Up; Google Brings AI To MMM - AdExchanger","url":"https://www.adexchanger.com/daily-news-roundup/friday-11092026/","summary":"Ad-ding Up\nThe Earth will keep turning on its axis, The Simpsons will keep putting out new episodes and advertisers will keep on spending. On Thursday, the IAB released an update to its yearly outlook, forecasting 12.3% growth in ad spend this year.","source":"AdExchanger","date":"2026-09-11T04:03:30+00:00","content":"Ad-ding Up\nThe Earth will keep turning on its axis, The Simpsons will keep putting out new episodes and advertisers will keep on spending. These are all immutable truths.\nOn Thursday, the IAB released an update to its yearly outlook, forecasting 12.3% growth in ad spend this year. Back in January, it predicted only 9.5% growth.\nSo what changed? In short, a stronger-than-expected first half and a clearer read on the economy have given advertisers permission to open their wallets wider.\nThe biggest jumps in predicted spend were in social media and CTV, at 1.9% and 1.8% respectively. Commerce media came in third place, up 1.5% thanks in part to AI’s ability to bridge the gap between discovery and purchase.\nIndeed, AI is reshaping how buyers spend and what they prioritize, but no one has fully solved, or even properly optimized for, the new AI landscape yet. Right now, nearly half of advertisers (45%) say that their biggest measurement challenge is comparing AI-driven customer journeys to traditional ones.\nThey’re also still working out where AI adds value to their campaigns and where it doesn’t.\nSeventy-six percent of buyers cite optimizing content for AI discovery as an area of “increased focus,” the IAB reports, while only 69% say they’re focused on using generative AI in campaigns – a 9% drop from January.\nMMM Bop\nStop the presses: Google’s Meridian MMM tool is adding a chatbot interface. You know, like seemingly every other mar tech tool.\nMarketers can now query Meridian for suggestions on how to build their marketing mix models, Search Engine Land reports. The chatbot can also audit their data quality and troubleshoot errors in MMM setups.\nIn addition, Meridian’s GeoX geotesting feature is exiting beta. GeoX lets marketers segment campaigns by geography, measure performance in those regions and push the findings into their models – the kind of MMM functionality that’s become table stakes for incrementality testing.\nOn top of that, Meridian is also now allowing marketers to inject upper-funnel signals, like Branded Google Query Volume, into their models alongside lower-funnel conversion signals. The idea is to get a better handle on how harder-to-attribute channels like TV and DOOH end up impacting conversions.\nAnd moving along to non-Meridian news, Google is integrating its Data Manager into Google Analytics and DV360. It’s also adopting the IAB Tech Lab’s ECAPI standard to make its Data Manager API more interoperable with other platforms.\nThe Meridian updates are noteworthy because Google continues to develop its open-source MMM whereas its rival for ad budgets, Meta, seems to be stepping back from its own open-source MMM tool. In July, several sources at ad agencies and measurement vendors told AdExchanger that Meta is no longer aggressively pushing its Robyn MMM solution.\nParty Foul?\nInvitation app Partiful has officially broken through from funky little startup to household name, as evidenced by the shoutout it got during Season 2 of “The Pitt” earlier this year. But the company hasn’t quite figured out how to monetize yet, save for the small fee it gets from people who use the platform to sell tickets or buy premium designs.\nWhich means it’s probably only a matter of time before the big social platforms do what they do best, as in, rip off the newcomer’s core business model by absorbing it into their own offerings.\nEnter Snapchat, which is getting in on the party-planning boom. On Thursday, Snap announced a new suite of event-planning features designed to schedule gatherings, send invitations and collect responses, Bloomberg reports.\nDoes that mean the party’s over for Partiful?\nNot necessarily. Snap can copy features, but Partiful’s real advantage is its brand and the community it’s built. And the fastest way to monetize these things is with advertising, of course.\nAs Marketing Brew noted back in March, Partiful has already experimented with ads. But rolling out ads too aggressively could alienate its core Gen Z and millennial audiences, the same people who abandoned Facebook Events years ago.(That is, if Partiful’s connections to Palantir haven’t done that already.)\nBut Wait! There’s More!\nOmnicom’s CFO weighs in on the “disappointing” loss of PepsiCo to Publicis. [Digiday]\nAdvertisers can now buy ads in ChatGPT through Amazon’s ad tech platform. [The Information]\nJimmy Kimmel says his interview with Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico will be broadcast on YouTube instead of ABC because the FCC “threatened” the TV network. It’s the second time this year that a late night host has had to move an interview with Talarico to YouTube after claiming to have been threatened by the FCC. [The Guardian]\nYou’re Hired!\nAI marketing ops startup Gradial appoints Lynn Girotto as CMO. [release]\nRobert DeSalvo returns to Perion as managing director of the Americas, a role he previously held in 2025. [Linkedin]\nHere’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? 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