Adobe Buys Semrush for $1.9B, Alembic's $145M Causal AI, Taco Bell Ultra
Howdy! In the latest episode of GTMN, Austin and Pranav discuss major M&A activity, the growing influence of AI in marketing, shifting strategies for Black Friday, and new features rolled out by major ad platforms like Google and TikTok.
Holiday Marketing and Black Friday Strategies
The conversation begins by noting that Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals seem to start earlier every year. A key point of discussion centered on Swiss sneaker company On, which recently raised its guidance and stated it would not offer Black Friday deals. This approach, focusing on premium full-price sales, innovation, and the intersection between performance and design, was praised as a model where the business doesn’t need to worry about sales pressure.
“If you’re a B2B brand please don’t do anything for Black Friday don’t do it”. — Pranav
We debated creative, “in the wild” viral marketing tactics for the Black Friday period, suggesting that brands should send people into the fray to convince consumers about their software, citing Ramp.com as a partial example. Pranav mused on the idea of a viral, though economically bad, Black Friday deal where a lifetime annual subscription was offered for 99 cents.
“Can you imagine being the market the head of marketing for that It’s beautiful No pressure on like trying to hit some madeup number just because it’s Black Friday season”. — Austin
The discussion also included news about Austin doing the “Taco Bell Ultra,” a 50K ultra-marathon involving nine Taco Bell items eaten over 30 miles, though it is not sponsored by the brand and is considered a “fat ass” community run.
Adobe’s Acquisition of SEM Rush and the SEO Evolution
Adobe has acquired SEM Rush for $1.9 billion. We discussed this major M&A move, with Adobe positioning the acquisition as a natural way to keep growing in a space important to existing customers, especially regarding AI search responses. The strategy is to integrate SEM Rush to boost Adobe’s analytics suite for brand monitoring and visibility for LLMs, defending against modern SEO/AEO players.
A key concern raised was Adobe’s historical struggle with integrating acquired products, a challenge faced by other major companies like Twilio (with SendGrid and Segment).
“I mean I guess my first question is like how good is SEM Rush on AEO compared to some of these new tools like Airops and Profound”. — Austin
The conversation highlighted that the legacy SEO tools (like SEM Rush and its alternative Ahrefs) are rapidly adapting to the new world of AEO (Answer Engine Optimization). Competitors like Airops and Profound are approaching content creation and visibility from different angles. Ahrefs, for example, is expanding beyond SEO/AEO into content workflows, recently introducing social posting and calendaring tools.
Alembic, Causal AI, and the Agency Model Renaissance
AI firm Alembic (a competitor to Paramark, Haus, and Recast) secured $145 million from Accenture and others. Alembic brands itself around “causal AI,” seeking to replace traditional probabilistic measurement in marketing effectiveness and measurement. They have a strategic partnership with Accenture to deploy this causal AI within the Fortune 500.
The efficacy of “causal AI” was debated, with skepticism that adding the word “causal” makes it so, as true cause and effect can only be determined through experimentation.
“The only way to get to cause and effect is experimentation”. — Pranav
This funding round signals a return to the services-as-a-product model, proving that as AI features become more complex, there is more room for agency-style or solution-style companies. AI makes building SaaS products easier, but it is hard to build a team that can weaponize AI to solve problems. Companies like Palantir (market cap $400 billion, P/E ratio 370-390) exemplify this model: deploying smart people equipped with AI/software engineering skills to build bespoke applications for clients after intellectually understanding the problem.
“A team of really smart people who can weaponize AI to solve problems”. — Austin
The Influencer Economy and the Dystopia of AI Likeness
The influencer and creator space is also seeing major shifts. Agentio raised $40 million for creator ads, starting with YouTube and expanding to other channels. They offer an AI-powered content review feature that checks creator drafts against the brand brief for compliance and safety.
We noted that the influencer space is currently messy, relying heavily on spreadsheets. However, AI presents a terrifying prospect: the potential for influencers to automate their work entirely by licensing their likeness and voice to brands for promotion. This shift means the brand is paying primarily for the audience, not the manual content creation.
This development is akin to a Black Mirror episode, raising concerns that if this happens at scale, culture could become controlled, turning everyone into a “mouthpiece for something else”. The current trend among YC companies is moving away from focusing on scaling email marketing to programmatically figuring out how to achieve video and social fame through AI tooling, signaling where the arbitrage has moved.
This pressure has led to two diverging marketing strategies:
1. AI Slop: Leaning into scaled AI usage (e.g., posting every day, mass emails), resulting in diminishing returns.
2. Hyper-Targeted ABM: Abandoning mass outbound strategies in favor of highly concentrated, multi-channel attacks on small, niche segments of users (Account-Based Marketing or ABM).
“Abandon the mass outbound strategy Doesn’t mean you won’t use tools like Unify but actually focus on a really small subset of users”. — Austin
AI Transparency and New Ad Platform Bidding Strategies
TikTok is taking the lead on AI transparency. They launched a blog post announcing new ways to spot, shape, and understand AI-generated content. TikTok is building transparency tools to automatically detect AI content, giving users the ability to tag content as AI or real, and giving creators the ability to claim original content. Furthermore, TikTok launched a $2 million educational fund for experts to create content about responsible AI. This contrasts with the strategy of Sora (which consciously made the decision to have all videos be AI-generated to maintain a completely virtual experience).
We discussed new ad platform features:
1. Google’s Journey Aware Bidding: Google launched an advanced bidding strategy that uses all conversion actions (e.g., lead, MQL, SQL, purchase, repeat purchase) to optimize bidding choices along the customer journey, similar to Meta’s “GEM” concept. A major challenge is the quality and formatting of CRM data required for this feature to work effectively.
2. Self-Serve Incrementality Testing: Google launched a feature making its native incrementality testing (similar to Meta’s Conversion Lift) self-serve. Previously requiring a dedicated Google Ads representative and high spend, tests can now be set up for as little as $5,000.
An incrementality test works by splitting a possible audience in half (test and control). The test group sees the new campaign (e.g., Journey Aware Bidding ads), while the control group does not. The difference in conversion rates between the two groups provides the measurable “lift”.
The value of testing was emphasized, especially against deterministic modeling. The conclusion was that probabilistic modeling is often more effective, and experimentation must be continuous and reproducible.
“If a test is successful is usually pretty obvious”. — Pranav
We concluded by noting the importance of basic measurement tools like the HDYHAU (a simple question asking users where they found the product or “how did you hear about us”) for early-stage companies to validate assumptions quickly, overriding concerns about pipeline slowdown.