Apple unveiled its iPhone 16 Monday at its Glowtime event, focusing on generative AI (GAI) and how engineers rebuilt its latest phone with enhanced processing capabilities.

"The next generation of iPhone has been designed for Apple Intelligence from the ground up," said Apple CEO Tim Cook. "It marks the beginning of an exciting new era. iPhone 16 raises the bar for what an iPhone can do."

The upgrades will give advertisers more options to expand experiences on the phones using AI images and videos because they support more processing power, although Apple did not discuss this during the event.

The iPhone 16s unveiled on Monday, and last year’s iPhone 15 Pro, are the only phones that can run the new software because older models are too slow to handle the tasks.

Apple built the iPhone 16 with a new chip, A18, more CPU and GPU cores, as well as faster Neural Engine for better AI processing and more memory -- something required for AI.

Visual Intelligence with AI for the iPhone 16 series only lets users search with the iPhone's camera by tapping the Camera Control button to learn more.

For aesthetics, it has an aluminum back, and a customizable button that can be used for camera controls.

In June, Apple explained how its AI will have a deeper understanding of content. Powered by Apple Intelligence, Siri becomes more deeply integrated into the system experience.

Siri became more natural, contextually relevant, and personal, with the ability to simplify and accelerate everyday tasks. It can follow along if users stumble over words and maintain context from one request to the next. Users gained the ability to switch between text and voice to communicate with Siri.

Emarketer estimates there are 132.5 million iPhone users in the U.S.

Apple leveraged the iPhone’s camera as a way to capture information and run web searches, and query GAI services like ChatGPT, but it's also using voice dictation through an updated Siri assistant to run on device applications such as searches and automations that usually require multiple steps, according to Emarketer.

The focus on privacy—running AI processes  securely on-device while using Private Cloud Compute to offload heavy workloads to secure servers—highlights the benefits of Apple’s highly integrated ecosystem which could push adoption in enterprise applications.

Let’s get ready for some football.. and pizza. This year as Little Caesars returns for its third year as the official pizza sponsor of the NFL, it is commemorating the year with fan-centered promos, free delivery and plenty of celebrity football players.

Now through Sept.15, the chain is kicking off the season with free delivery placed through the Little Caesars app or online at LittleCaesars.com.

Noting that  “football and pizza are a perfect match," Greg Hamilton, Little Caesars CMO, said in a release that the delivery promo will help “build on the momentum” of the partnership.

The chain has also tapped San Francisco 49ers tight end George Kittle and Detroit Lions wide receiver Amon-Ra St. Brown to star in a new network TV advertising campaign touting the pizza maker’s title as the Official Pizza Sponsor of the NFL. The initial spot highlights the fact that there is “no catch” to the chain’s free delivery offer, despite “catching” being a significant part of Kittle and St. Brown’s jobs. Later fans will see Minnesota Vikings wide receiver Justin Jefferson in additional spots as part of the Little Caesars/Pepsi relationship.

In-game fan activations will also take place in local markets throughout the season with participating teams such as the Detroit Lions, Kansas City Chiefs, Los Angeles Rams, Minnesota Vikings, New Orleans Saints, Philadelphia Eagles, Pittsburgh Steelers, Tampa Bay Buccaneers and San Francisco 49ers.

Returning this year is Little Caesars’ Pizza! Pizza! Pregame, which launches via app alongside the new Challenge program, which rewards guests who complete various challenges and order pizza also through the chain’s rewards app. Prizes include tickets to Super Bowl LIX.

The chain also brought back the Little Caesars Love Kitchen, a mobile restaurant on wheels that will appear at various NFL event cities, serving free pizza to communities in need.  

Google and antitrust enforcers will face off Monday in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, where the Department of Justice and 17 states will attempt to prove the company illegally monopolized ad-tech tools that power programmatic online display ads.

The showdown is set to start just one month after a federal judge in Washington, D.C. ruled that Google violated antitrust law by arranging to serve as the default search engine on browsers operated by Apple and Mozilla, as well as on Android devices.

The case against Google dates to January 2023, when the Justice Department and a coalition of states alleged that Google “corrupted legitimate competition" by monopolizing markets connected to “open web display advertising” -- essentially meaning programmatic ads served on sites operated by newspapers and other online publishers.

The Justice Department and states contend that Google's moves allowed it to enrich itself at the expense of publishers, who allegedly were deprived of ad revenue, and advertisers, who supposedly paid more than they would have in a more competitive market.

The government is seeking an order that would force Google to divest some or all of its ad-tech products.

Google denies that it acted anticompetitively, and also disputes the government's proposed market definitions.

U.S. District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled in June that the suit raised factual questions that required a trial.

The closely watched upcoming battle could be among the most significant antitrust fights involving the tech industry since the late 1990s, when the government accused Microsoft of monopolizing the browser market by tying Internet Explorer to the Windows operating system.

A trial judge in that case determined that Microsoft violated antitrust law and ordered the company to be broken up, but an appellate court reversed the divestiture order. Microsoft and the government ultimately reached a settlement.

A lengthy roster of potential witnesses in the upcoming trial includes YouTube CEO Neal Mohan, UM Worldwide global chief media officer Joshua Lowcock and Trade Desk chief revenue officer Jed Dederick.

At trial, the government will attempt to prove that Google's 2008 acquisition of DoubleClick for $3.1 billion enabled the company to unlawfully dominate programmatic advertising.

Google allegedly did so by tying DoubleClick's ad server for publishers and its then-new ad exchange to Google's advertiser network, according to the prosecution.

“By conditioning effective access to any one of its tools on customers also using Google’s other ad tech tools, Google locked publishers and advertisers into using its own ad tech tools rather than those offered by competitors,” prosecutors wrote in a pre-trial statement filed with Brinkema last month.

That filing calls attention to a widely quoted internal Google email in which an employee compared Google's control of the ad-tech stack to Goldman or Citibank owning the New York Stock Exchange.

“Google controls the tools used by both sides of advertising transactions: the tools publishers use to sell open-web display ads as well as the tools advertisers use to buy such ads,” prosecutors wrote.

“Google benefits from a privileged position as the middleman, extracting monopoly rents whenever open web display ads are transacted by advertisers and publishers on its exchange,” the government wrote, adding that the company charges supracompetitive prices for its AdX exchange.

Google counters that its actions “led to increased consumer choice, dramatically increased output, decreased prices, and greater opportunities for businesses of all sizes, especially small businesses.”

“Google endeavored to maximize value for ad space buyers and sellers (as well as users) by improving ad safety and security, user privacy, auction transparency, and the customer experience,” the company said in a pre-trial statement filed last month.

Antitrust expert Chris Hockett, who teaches at Berkeley Law, notes that monopolizing a market does not in itself violate antitrust laws. Instead, one key issue will be whether Google acquired or maintained monopoly power through anticompetitive means.

“The question in this case is going to be whether Google's arrangements preferred their own tools to such an extent that it improperly, unlawfully interfered with potential competitors,” he tells MediaPost.

He adds that even if Google is found to have taken a relatively large share of programmatic ad revenue as commissions, doing so would not in itself have been unlawful.

“We don't have antitrust laws that make it illegal for a firm that has high market share, or even a monopoly, to extract the benefits of that monopoly in the form of higher profits,” he says.

One of the key areas of contention will center the nature of the ad-tech market, according to NYU law professor emerita Eleanor Fox, an antitrust and trade regulation expert.

"The definition of the market will definitely be a very serious issue,” Fox says.

The prosecution specifically contends that Google monopolizes three markets: “publisher ad servers for open-web display advertising,” “advertiser ad networks for open-web display advertising,” and “ad exchanges for open-web display advertising.”

For its part, Google disputes the idea that the ad-tech stack can be broken up into three separate markets.

Instead, the company contends, the ad-tech stack is a “two-sided platform” that brings together advertisers and publishers -- comparable to the way a credit-card company manages transactions between consumers and retailers.

Google also challenges the idea that there is a distinct market for “open web display ads” -- defined by the prosecution as an image of text-based ad shown on sites of “open web” publishers and viewable on desktop or mobile devices.

The company says that proposed market doesn't account for competition from streaming services like Disney+, social-media services like Meta and retailers like Amazon.

“Reflecting the industry reality that different ad channels and formats can serve interchangeable purposes, every industry participant in this case testified that advertisers shift ad spend to different ad channels or formats including from or to website-based display advertising, based on return on investment,” Google argued in its pre-trial statement, which drew on deposition testimony.

The company added that its internal documents describe “numerous instances” in which it lost advertiser business to competitors like Meta because ad buyers “shifted spend in order to improve returns.”

Google also questions whether news sites that require passwords and subscriptions, like NYTimes.com, should be categorized as “open web.”

Assuming that ads on news sites as well as MSN and Yahoo are included in the definition of open web display ads, the market comes to around $32 billion a year out of total U.S. ad revenue of around $400 billion, according to ad industry economist Brian Wieser, CEO of consulting firm Madison and Wall.

In addition to disagreements about how to define the market, prosecutors and Google are at odds over the company's decision to bundle various components of the ad-tech stack together.

Prosecutors argue that the bundling decision hurt competitors, but Google counters that its move protects against spam and fraud.

“Integrated tools have important benefits for both ad space buyers and sellers,” Google wrote last month in a pre-trial filing. “Security and safety concerns are better and more reliably addressed when Google operates an integrated system.”

The trial could last for several weeks.

Landing page copy works best when it's simple.

Content written for a fifth- to seventh-grade reading level converts at nearly twice the rate of that aimed at people with professional reading skills, according to the 2024 Conversion Benchmark Report from Unbounce. 

And it’s getting worse. Complex copy now hurts conversion rates 62% more than it did in 2020, the study adds.

But it depends on the device. Mobile draws 82.9% of the traffic, but converts at a lower rate than desktop — 11.2% compared to 12.1%. 

It is also determined by industry. Health and wellness converts 22% better on desktop, but gets 7x more traffic from mobile devices. And professional services converts a 40% higher rate on desktop but draws over 4x more traffic from mobile.

Meanwhile, the study reports that email is the highest-converting channel, as shown by these rates:

• Email — 19.3%
• Paid social — 12%
• Paid search — 10.9%
• Display — 4.1%

The findings show “the importance of readability and shocking lack of investment in mobile-first landing pages relative to traffic volume, highlighting the importance of optimizing from all angles," says Steve Oriola, CEO of Unbounce. "As consumer behavior continues to shift, these insights provide marketers with the data they need to take a strategic but simple approach to conversion rate optimization.”

Unbounce analyzed data from over 57 million conversions across multiple industries.

An analyst group at Wedbush Securities led by Scott Devitt published a research note Thursday that describes what they believe to be the impact on Google after its second antitrust trial that starts next week.

The analysts believe the “overall risk to the business is limited based on the company's recent financial disclosures related" to its advertising-technology products.

The U.S. Department of Justice in 2023 filed a lawsuit against Google's parent company Alphabet. The DOJ sued Google, alleging that it engaged in “anticompetitive, exclusionary, and unlawful conduct to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies.”

The collection of advertising-technology products and services such as AdMob, AdSense, Google Ad Manager, Google Display Network Ads, DV360, and CM360 generated $20 billion of gross revenue and a bit more than $1 billion of operating profit in 2020, Wedbush analysts wrote.

The amount represents 11.0% of consolidated gross revenue and about 2.6% of consolidated operating profit for Alphabet.

“Based on our estimates and the growth rate of the reported Network segment, we think those products account for less than 8% of gross revenue today and under 2% of consolidated operating profit,” analysts wrote.

Not all believe any type of breakup will have a minimal impact on the advertising industry, but any change will take time to roll out, and agencies and advertisers will require time to adjust.

Google argues that advertisers and publishers are not locked into a string of technology that it either created or acquired to serve ads, making it difficult for other companies to participate.

Technology is interchangeable and interoperable -- enabling the highest bid for any placement to win, as explained in an earlier article published in August. For many years, Google also reinvested its profit back into the business, as so many others have done and continue to do.

Identifying ad inventory on a publisher site and serving an ad means the supply chain must mix and match a variety of ads with publisher sites billions of times daily each time a transaction is triggered and performed.

While the upcoming trial focuses on Google’s advertising-technology stack -- specifically Ad Manager, the platform that helps publishers and advertisers manage, buy and sell advertising on publisher sites -- the previous trial that ended last month focused on Google's distribution agreements. 

Those agreements set Google's search engine as the default placement across major browser developers, mobile device manufacturers, and wireless carriers.

Wedbush's report explains how those involved were required to submit a proposed schedule for proceedings regarding remedies by September 4, and then appear for a status conference on September 6.

Privacy advocacy groups are urging California Governor Gavin Newsom to sign a bill that would require browser developers to offer a tool that allows consumers to easily opt out of online behavioral advertising.

“This bill is vital to ensure that millions of Californians have a practical way to manage their privacy choices,” Consumer Reports, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Digital Content Next, and others say in a letter sent to Newsom late last week.

The California Chamber of Commerce says it plans to seek a veto, arguing that the bill “will lead to significant confusion and compliance problems as downstream businesses receive conflicting signals, and even more complicated as states adopt different standards for these signals.”

That group, along with the Association of National Advertisers and other business organizations recently urged lawmakers to reject the bill.

The best known universal opt-out mechanism is the Global Privacy Control -- a tool created by privacy advocates that sends opt-out signals to every site consumers visit.

Without such a control, people who don't want to receive ads targeted based on cross-site data can click on individual companies' opt-out links, or use a tool created by an ad industry organization to opt out of many ad-tech companies' behavioral-targeting platforms.

The advocacy groups say the site-by-site opt-out approach “is intensely cumbersome for consumers,” citing a 2020 Consumer Reports investigation concluding that many consumers have trouble opting out from companies' individual sites -- often because they can't find the opt-out links, or the procedure is burdensome, or the companies aren't complying with the law.

“AB 3048 will ensure that consumers have the ability to use their privacy rights by requiring that browser vendors and mobile operating systems include an easy to locate and use setting that enables the consumer to send an opt-out preference signal,” Consumer Reports and the other advocacy groups write. “This bill’s approach will help reduce opt-out friction and make it easier for California residents to control their data.”

California's Consumer Privacy Rights Act gives consumers the right to reject “cross-context” behavioral advertising -- meaning ads served based on activity across different sites. The law includes provisions discussing global opt-out signals, but those provisions appear ambiguous.

The state privacy agency has interpreted the statute as requiring companies to honor opt-out requests that consumers transmit through browser-based tools.

But ad and business organizations dispute that analysis. Instead, the groups contend, California's law allows companies to choose between placing opt-out links on their home pages or honoring a browser-based signal.

That structure "allows businesses the opportunity to implement the most effective method for their particular situation,” the California Chamber of Commerce, Association of National Advertisers, American Association of Advertising Agencies and other business groups argued in a recent letter to state lawmakers.

Some developers including Mozilla, Brave and Duck Duck Go have already built the Global Privacy Control into their browsers.

Google's Chrome doesn't include the specific “Global Privacy Control” setting, but offers a “do-not-track” setting, which sends a no-tracking request to all websites consumers visit, but the California privacy agency has suggested that this older “do-not-track” command isn't equivalent to an "opt-out preference signal.

Apple used to include a “do-not-track” setting in Safari, but disabled the setting in 2019 due to concerns that ad-tech companies would exploit the signal for device fingerprinting -- a tracking technique that identifies users based on characteristics of their browsers.

Volkswagen of America is adding ChatGPT to most 2025 Volkswagen models sold in the United States. 

Volkswagen is the first volume manufacturer that will offer Chat GPT as a standard feature. The automaker announced at CES in January that it was first adding it to vehicles in Europe in the second quarter of this year.

Starting Sept. 6, ChatGPT will be live in U.S. vehicles, first in 2025 Jetta and Jetta GLI models, along with 2024 ID.4 vehicles equipped with an 82-kWh battery, giving both existing and new customers access to an artificial intelligence database. 

Powered by Cerence Chat Pro, Volkswagen’s IDA voice assistant will deliver a sophisticated and user-friendly voice prompting experience, according to the automaker. ChatGPT-enabled voice assistance will be available to customers through a Plus Speech with AI subscription in Volkswagen Car-Net. 

For those concerned about data sharing and privacy, Volkswagen is emphasizing that ChatGPT does not access vehicle data. All session contextual data is deleted immediately to ensure maximum data protection.

ChatGPT functionality will be automatically activated for current owners of compatible 2024 ID.4 vehicles with an active Plus Speech subscription. 2025 ID.4 models, including those equipped with the 62-kWh battery, will be ChatGPT ready later this year. Most 2025 models will offer Plus Speech with AI as they enter the market. 

The ID.4 and ID. Buzz come with 3 years of Plus Speech with AI included at no additional cost, while the GTI, Golf R and Tiguan will have one year included with vehicle purchase. 

Owners of Jetta, Jetta GLI and Taos vehicles will have the option to purchase a Plus Speech with AI subscription through the myVW mobile app. ChatGPT will be included in the Atlas and Atlas Cross Sport models in 2026.

Cerence Chat Pro, an automotive-grade ChatGPT integration, enhances the original Plus Speech subscription using generative AI.  In addition to controlling navigation, infotainment and climate adjustment, Volkswagen’s IDA voice assistant will be able to answer general knowledge questions and engage in natural, human-like conversations, according to the automaker. 

This voice assistant is activated by saying "Hello IDA" or “Hello Volkswagen” (depending on vehicle model) or by pressing a button on the steering wheel. 

Previously, passengers could ask, "Hey, IDA, can you please set the temperature at 70 degrees?" However, the latest integration allows drivers and passengers to express themselves more vividly when seeking assistance. By simply saying, "Hi IDA, I'm chilly," the technology detects that the driver is feeling cold and will automatically activate the heating system.

When the car's local system can't fulfill a request, it wlll connect to the cloud, where Cerence Chat Pro processes the query, leveraging a multitude of sources, including ChatGPT, to provide responses to nearly every query imaginable. 

This allows the IDA voice assistant to handle complex, conversational questions beyond standard automotive functions—such as suggesting restaurants, road trip destinations, or creating stories to entertain those in the car—transforming the driving experience into a truly hands-free journey. 

The amount of invalid advertising traffic – or any activity that doesn’t come from a real person or a user with a genuine interest in an ad – rose sharply on connected television during the second quarter of the year.

A report from ad-verification company Pixalate found that the invalid …

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