Running ads on news content has historically made brands as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. But PMG and AI startup Mobian are flipping the script. By using AI personas that mimic a brand’s ideal customer, PMG programmed campaigns to navigate the choppy waters of controversial content with surprising precision. For an (unnamed) $10 billion health brand, they fed audience prompts and brand-safety constraints into Mobian’s agents, which then targeted suitable inventory via The Trade Desk.
What makes this more than just another AI party trick is the performance. With only 18% of the total campaign spend allocated to Fox News, the buy managed to deliver 34% of total conversions—and at 46% below the campaign’s average cost per conversion. That ratio will turn any media planner’s head, especially when combined with the AI’s ability to decode sentiment, stripping away assumptions and surfacing unexpected high-performing inventory.
This shift couldn’t come at a more critical time for publishers, who have been watching ad dollars vanish as fast as referral traffic. Global spend on news media is down a gut-wrenching 33% since 2019, per WARC. Fox alone reports tens of millions in ad losses due to legacy brand safety filters. With smarter, emotion-aware AI agents like Mobian’s and others from players like Scope3, media buyers and sellers may finally have a way to bridge the brand safety gap.
Full story at AdWeek.