AI, ad tech clouds, and the déjà vu of Google’s attention economy

Hey there 👋

Each week, I round up stories shaping the marketing, media, and tech ecosystem — with a light dose of irony to keep perspective (and caffeine levels) high. ☕

☁️ Amazon takes on Google in the cloud–ad tech war

Amazon unveiled AWS RTB Fabric, a real-time bidding infrastructure built inside its cloud platform.
The move positions AWS as a direct rival to Google Cloud, which has long courted ad tech firms with incentives and faster integrations.
It promises lower latency, lower costs, and an open marketplace where ad tech players can plug in modules like fraud detection or data enrichment, all running on Amazon’s rails.

Pulse Take: Some build ad networks. Amazon builds the network for ad networks.
🔗 DIGIDAY →

🔍 AI search reshapes SEO, and marketers panic

A new survey reveals that nearly 90% of marketers are worried about losing organic visibility as AI-powered search and LLMs take over.
85.7% are already investing in “SEO for AI.”
Your site might rank #1 today, but if AI answers replace clicks, the game changes.

Pulse Take: Wonderful. AI will sort the web by content no one reads, since we’re all too busy chatting with our digital butlers anyway.
🔗 Search Engine Land →

👟 Adidas tracks brand health through “share of search”

Adidas replaced traditional brand-tracking surveys with organic search data, now using share of search (SoS) as its main KPI across 38 countries.
The move cut tracking costs by 60%, delivered an eight-figure uplift, and proved that search volume strongly correlates with sales and market share.

Pulse Take: SoS doesn’t work for every brand, and I can’t help but wonder how long it’ll last, even for those it works well for, once SEO reshapes itself for AI, as in the story above.
🔗 WARC →

🛠️ When good marketing tools go bad

Rory Sutherland (VP Chairman of Ogilvy UK) reminds us that the tools we love — dashboards, martech stacks, and AI — can become liabilities when we forget the why behind the what.
Optimizing for what the tool measures often blinds us to what it can’t: human insight, intuition, and context.

Pulse Take: Tools are amplifiers, not substitutes. Good tool + bad question = bad outcome.
🔗 The Drum →

📚 Is Google making us stupid?”, 2008 feels brand new again

Back in 2008, The Atlantic asked whether constant web surfing was rewiring our brains for distraction instead of depth.
Flash forward: AI search, instant answers, zero clicks and the question remains eerily relevant.

Pulse Take: A reminder: trends come fast, but history repeats itself, and in today’s world, it just happens faster.
🔗 The Atlantic →

That’s the pulse for this week.
If you made it this far, congrats!

— Alessia Cappello
International Markets & MarCom | adjinn
(Curated from adjinn’s internal “Friday Pulse” newsletter, which provides me my weekly excuse to read industry news before anyone else does.)