Sam Altman Says Give It 1-2 More Years. We Aren't Waiting.

If you’re reading this, you already know the game has changed.

For the first time in twenty years, Google is not the top dog in digital advertising. Meta just took the crown — and OpenAI is already measuring the room for a third throne. Meanwhile, Google is quietly blowing up its own ad product to survive the shift, and the agencies that built their businesses around the old model are in full restructuring mode. And then there's this: Sam Altman went on CNBC this week and said the quiet part out loud. Companies are spending a ton on AI, some great things are happening, but there's also a ton of waste — and he expects it'll take another year or two before spend and outcomes are properly rationalized. That's the CEO of OpenAI acknowledging the ROI gap that every CMO is quietly asking their CFO about. This isn't a disruption story anymore. It's a redistribution story — and a patience story. The money is moving, the platforms are changing, the results are coming, and if your strategy is more than six months old, it needs a hard look.

Welcome to LRND™ Intelligence. Let’s get into it.

For roughly two decades, the answer to “who owns digital advertising” was Google. That ended in 2026. According to eMarketer’s latest forecast, Meta is projected to generate $243.46 billion in global ad revenue this year, edging past Google’s $239.54 billion — the first time Google has ever lost the top spot. The gap is being driven by Meta’s AI ad engine, Advantage+, which is growing at a 24.1% clip versus Google’s 11.9%. Add WhatsApp monetization, Reels performance, and Threads ad surfaces and you have a company with multiple expansion vectors that Google — still heavily dependent on Search — doesn’t have in the same form. The eMarketer analysts weren’t subtle about it: Meta has “scale, network effects, and habits” locked down, and that trifecta is hard to beat.

What it means for you: If your media budget was built around a Google-first world and you haven’t revisited the allocation in the last year, the numbers are telling you something. This doesn’t mean abandon Search — high-intent, bottom-of-funnel, Search still wins. But the performance dollars that are chasing scale and automation are migrating. Meta’s AI tools are making it easier to spend, easier to measure, and increasingly easier to justify. Your planning assumptions need to catch up.

On May 5th, OpenAI did something that should be on every media planner’s radar: it opened its self-serve ChatGPT Ads Manager to all U.S. advertisers, no minimum spend, no agency partner required. This came just 86 days after the platform launched as an invite-only enterprise product with a $200,000 minimum spend. The trajectory alone is remarkable. ChatGPT serves 2.5 billion prompts a day to 800 million weekly users — and the people using it aren’t scrolling. They are actively in the middle of a decision. The platform supports CPC and CPM bidding, has a conversion tracking pixel live, and counts Dentsu, Omnicom, Publicis, WPP, Adobe, and Criteo among its early agency and tech partners. OpenAI’s stated goal is $2.5 billion in ad revenue in 2026 and $100 billion by 2030.

What it means for you: The third major platform is officially open for business. The early window — when inventory is plentiful and costs are low — is closing fast. ChatGPT’s ad environment is categorically different from Google or Meta: users arrive with high intent, already mid-thought. That’s not a scroll placement, it’s a purchase conversation. The brands that understand this surface now will hold a structural advantage when it becomes a standard line item on every media plan. Test it while the door is still wide open.

Google knows the old model is breaking, and it’s moving fast. At Google Marketing Live and I/O 2026, the company unveiled a complete overhaul of how advertising works inside search — including new Conversational Discovery ads that embed inside AI Mode responses, a Business Agent for Leads that lets an AI agent have a live conversation with your prospect directly inside the ad unit, and AI-powered Shopping ads where Gemini generates custom product explainers in real time. AI Mode has crossed 1 billion monthly active users. AI Overviews top 2.5 billion. And here’s the critical number: the share of AI Overview citations coming from top-10 Google rankers dropped from 76% in mid-2025 to 38% by early 2026. Rankings and AI visibility have officially decoupled. Google’s VP of Ads didn’t bury the lead: “We aren’t just bringing ads to AI experiences in Search; we are reinventing what an ad is.”

What it means for you: The keyword-and-bid model that built an entire generation of search marketers is being retired in real time. The new game is structured data, conversation-ready content, and feeds — not bids on isolated keywords. If your SEO and paid search strategy hasn’t been updated since AI Mode launched at scale, you’re optimizing for a system Google is actively phasing out. The upside: brands that invest in clean product data, strong FAQ architecture, and AI-compatible content now will be positioned as the default answers when Google’s agents are doing the surfacing.

I run an independent creative, development, and media agency — LRND™ — so I’m watching this one closely. According to new survey data from NewtonX for Adweek, 32% of brands expect to handle nearly all of their creative in-house within 12 months. Another 23% expect to bring at least half inside in the same timeframe. Holding company revenues fell 1.2% last year even as worldwide ad spending grew 8.6%. The Big Six’s share of U.S. ad spending dropped from 44.6% in 2019 to 29.6% in Q1 2024. Horizon Media cut 50 roles in March in what they called a “skills optimization effort.” The narrative writes itself: AI makes production cheap, so why pay an agency markup to do what a tool can do for $50 a month? Here’s the part that narrative skips: production was never the hard part. Brand thinking, creative strategy, the judgment call on what actually works — that’s what agencies were always selling. The ones that let clients forget that have nobody to blame but themselves.

What it means for you: At LRND™, the in-housing wave hasn’t hurt us — if anything, it’s clarified our value. The brands pulling work inside are doing it for executional volume, not for the strategic and creative layer that moves the needle. What we’re seeing is a natural market correction: undifferentiated agencies are losing ground, while shops that sell outcomes and ideas are getting busier. If you’re a brand evaluating this move, be honest about what you’re actually bringing in-house. Tools and headcount can handle production. They can’t replace the creative judgment, outside perspective, and integrated thinking that a great agency partner provides. The best agency relationships were never about bandwidth — they were about brains.

Here’s the story underneath all the others: nobody can track where their sales are coming from anymore. AI Mode, AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, voice answers — all of these surfaces create a new form of zero-click conversion where someone gets a recommendation, closes the app, and walks into a store or goes directly to a URL. No UTM parameter. No last-click. No referral source. Research from Discovered Labs found that by early 2026, top-10 Google rankers accounted for only 38% of AI Overview citations — but those same brands are getting purchases they can’t trace back to the AI touchpoint. Meanwhile, a report from the IAB found that while over 70% of marketers have encountered an AI-related issue — hallucinations, bias, off-brand content — fewer than 35% plan to increase investment in AI governance or attribution oversight in 2026. The measurement gap is real, and most brands are flying partially blind.

What it means for you: Attribution was already imperfect. AI-mediated discovery makes it structurally broken in ways your current stack wasn’t designed for. The brands that win in this environment are doubling down on brand — not because soft metrics are back in fashion, but because when you can’t trace the conversion path, the best thing you can do is make sure your brand is the one the AI is recommending in the first place. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), brand authority, and AI visibility are not optional. They’re the new top of funnel.

Thanks for reading Issue No. 07 of LRND™ Intelligence. We’ll be back with more of what matters — no filler, no fluff.

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LRND™ is an AI-powered, independent creative, development, and media agency. We employ equal parts man and machine to deliver work that works.