The AI Platforms Race: From Curious to Customer | Behind the Numbers

Marcus Johnson (0:00)

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Nate Elliott (0:42)

Hey gang, it's Friday, August 28th and this is Behind the Numbers, the podcast from EMARKETER hosted by Marcus, who's now going to take over.

Marcus Johnson (0:50)

Used to be hosted by me.

Nate, Grace and listeners, welcome to Behind the Numbers, an EMARKETER Podcast, made possible by Awin. I'm Marcus and join me for today's conversation. We have two AI experts, one part-time host. We have living in, I think he's in New York right now. He's there sometimes. Principal Analyst, Nate Elliott.

Nate Elliott (1:08)

Bonjour, no Marcus.

Marcus Johnson (1:09)

Hello, we're also joined from California, Analyst, Grace Harmon.

Grace Harmon (1:13)

Hi Marcus, Mr. Beer.

Marcus Johnson (1:14)

Hello. All right, today's fact.

So this one, this was quite sweet, I think. Looking at distant stars means looking into the past, because light takes time to travel through space. So like when you look at the sun, or the light you get from the sun, it takes like eight minutes to reach Earth. And so technically, when you're looking out into the galaxies, the universes, you're looking into the past. It's so sweet, isn't it? Although kind of concerning, because if the sun had blown up, it might have been blown up already. We wouldn't know about it. Which was one of my other facts that I had from earlier this week, when I said that the sun was going to implode in five billion years.

Nate Elliott (1:58)

Have any of the Avengers ever tried to blow up the sun or save the sun from being blown up?

Marcus Johnson (2:03)

Maybe that's the new Doom movie.

Nate Elliott (2:04)

I just had to help you get the Avengers in the podcast again.

Marcus Johnson (2:06)

Thank you. Today's real topic, the AI platforms race.

So Nate, we were talking about, you just finished some research on AI platforms. It seemed to go relatively unnoticed. You could argue from people who aren't tracking this as closely as you are, but a lot of these platforms are starting to hit the one billion user mark. Take that as you will. Is that as a marker of significance or not? But that's something that you could say is a milestone in terms of AI adoption becoming pretty significant for a lot of these major platforms. That said, one billion isn't the goal. Folks are going to need a lot more users than that to really put their stamp on and make an impact in this space. What to you makes the next few years so important as you write in the piece, an industry defining for AI marketing?

Nate Elliott (2:55)

Well, for marketing in particular, it's important because the companies that win in the next year or two are going to be the ones who decide what advertising in AI looks like. If ChatGPT wins, then their ad formats, their targeting tools and everything else they do around advertising is likely to become one of the standards, if not the only standard for how we do this for years to come. If Google wins, then the standards for AI advertising will probably look a whole lot like the standards for traditional search advertising. If Claude wins, then perhaps a standard expectation will be that there aren't ads in AI at all. But whoever wins this race, this horse race over the next year or two, is going to have a really big say on what all of this looks like. And if we've learned anything from how this went in search and social and mobile and lots of other ad channels and formats, the companies that win in the first three to five years tend to stick around for a very long time and be the outsized player in the market for years to come.

Marcus Johnson (3:54)

Grace, any thoughts on this timeline? It's so interesting how the next few years will be so important, given that we weren't really talking about large language models until a couple of years ago.

Grace Harmon (4:02)

I think that Nate said it, it's going to be things like formatting, placement, cost measurement that are going to be decided by who the usage leaders are. I think you make a really good point about if it ends up being an established current advertising giant, like if it were to be Meta, which is unlikely, or if it was Google, it's going to be interesting to see how the threads of traditional advertising and digital advertising as we know it now might show up in AI advertising.