The Daily Marketing Brief · 2026-04-29 · 15 min
Send us Fan Mail Microsoft and OpenAI rewrote their contract on 27 April. OpenAI can now serve its products on any cloud, Microsoft has stopped paying it a revenue share, and OpenAI's revenue share to Microsoft is now subject to a cap. AWS and Google Cloud will be selling OpenAI models. The marketing-relevant point: the "all roads lead to Azure" assumption for OpenAI procurement is over. DeepSeek cut V4-Pro list prices by 75% through 5 May and dropped input cache hits across its entire API to one-tenth of the previous rate. V4-Pro output is now around $3.48 per million tokens versus roughly $25 - $30 for Claude Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5. The frontier-versus-good-enough cost gap has widened again. Stagwell and FreeWheel launched a unified, AI-led CTV buying platform on 27 April, anchoring it around supply-path optimisation and reduced ad-tech fees. It is a holdco rewiring its CTV stack at the infrastructure layer, not a new feature in a media plan. Avoca raised more than $125m at a $1bn valuation on 27 April to put 24/7 AI call handling, scheduling and follow-up into HVAC, plumbing, automotive and other services businesses. Customers include Turnpoint, 1-800-GOT-JUNK and Goettl.
Other episodes covering the same guests and topics, from across The B2B Podcast Index.
Ep 93: CEO of Redwood Research Buck Shlegeris on OpenAI/HuggingFace Revelations, Fixing AI Safety & Takeover OddsUnsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron · on OpenAI98 / 100
Paul Graham On Startups, Ambition, and Great FoundersY Combinator Startup Podcast · on OpenAI88 / 100
How SSW turned AI into ½ their pipeline - Ulysses Maclaren, COO of SSWSaaS Stories · on OpenAI86 / 100
Unscripted with Victor: Agentic AI, Fintech's Future, and the Death of the App EconomyVentures from The Valley · on OpenAI83 / 100
The Agile Insurer: How AI, People and Strategy Are Reshaping Insurance | 8 Industry LeadersMaking Risk Flow · on OpenAI80 / 100
How AI Will Change Competitive Advantage with Doug StephensThe Future Of Less Work · on OpenAI79 / 100OpenAI files confidential S-1 toward September IPO, Anthropic projects first profit of $559m at $10.9bn quarterly revenue, SpaceX prospectus reveals Anthropic's $15bn compute bill, Google ships Conversational Discovery ads at Marketing Live68 / 100Google ships Gemini 3.5 Flash and Gemini Spark at I/O, AI Max for Search graduates and retires Dynamic Search Ads, Google launches Universal Commerce Protocol with Shopify and Walmart, AI Ultra subscription drops to $10065 / 100OpenAI partners Dell to ship Codex on-premises, Anthropic overtakes OpenAI in US business spend on Ramp, xAI launches Grok Build at $300 a month72 / 100Google I/O 2026 opens with Gemini Intelligence and Googlebook, ChatGPT shifts ads to cost-per-click bidding, Snap kills Perplexity's $400m AI search deal, Coty hands Consumer Beauty content to Pencil70 / 100YouTube ships AI Custom Sponsorships at Brandcast, Salesforce commits $300m to Anthropic tokens, Anthropic moves to buy Stainless, Apple readies Gemini-powered Siri for WWDC72 / 100