$2.75B AI startup Hightouch poaches Google's agency whisperer Jitendra Kumar. Kumar's remit is to establish inroads with the gatekeepers of advertising's biggest budgets. 5 hours ago The future of brands gets decided here. Join the industry's top marketers at Brandweek for the ideas, insights, and connections shaping what's next. Get your ticket. Hightouch, the customer-data-platform-turned-agentic-marketing-system that in April closed a $150 million Series D, is bringing on Google's agency heavyweight Jitendra Kumar to make inroads with the industry's biggest agencies, brands, and tech partners. Kumar is a 20-year Google veteran; most recently, he oversaw U.S. agency partnerships for Google Customer Solutions. Now, as Hightouch's first head of commercial for advertising, Kumar will develop and manage partnerships with big agencies and brands, and help them apply data and AI capabilities across their media workflows. The appointment arrives at a moment of high momentum for the nascent company, which emerged from the startup incubator Y Combinator in 2018. Kendra Barnett is Adweek's senior tech reporter. Recommended videos

Daily research news online. The global MR industry's daily paper since 2000. Follow DRNO on... Former Google partnerships Head joins Hightouch. August 25 2026 Californian marketing data firm Hightouch has appointed twenty-year Google veteran Jitendra Kumar as Head of Commercial, Advertising. Hightouch's 'AI Decisioning' lifecycle marketing solution was launched in 2024, and builds an agentic marketing platform on top of a comprehensive enterprise context layer for each individual client. The platform then continuously experiments with messaging, timing and channel decisions to optimize them for every customer. Earlier this year, the company secured $150 million in Series D financing, valuing it at $2.75 billion. Kumar (pictured) most recently led Google's US agency partnerships - previous roles included Account Manager, Head of New Product Incubation and Head of Industry for verticals including Media & Entertainment and Healthcare / Pharma. In his new role he will lead Hightouch's work across agencies, brands and advertising platforms, focused on how first-party data + AI agents can reshape the media workflow. He will also support broader awareness and adoption of Hightouch's advertising capabilities, including Ad Studio. 'Jitendra understands advertising from nearly every angle,' says Tejas Manohar, co-founder and Co-CEO of Hightouch, 'and he has spent his career helping some of the largest marketers and agencies navigate major shifts in technology. We believe AI is going to fundamentally change how agencies and marketing teams operate. The opportunity isn't simply to automate the workflows marketers already have, but to give them entirely new ways to turn their data, strategy and creativity into action. Jitendra brings the experience and perspective we need as we build that future across advertising.' Web site: www.hightouch.com. All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated. Most viewed items in the last week... Each (*) indicates > 1,000 views. Select a region below...

ChatGPT ads arrive in Brazil as OpenAI adds conversion tools and carousels - unite.ai. OpenAI's advertising build-out has crossed into Latin America. The company's Ads Manager availability page, updated on August 6, 2026, now lists Brazil as available to advertisers, with Mexico marked "coming soon" - completing a market set that already spans the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan, Korea, Australia, and New Zealand. The expansion lands alongside a round of product upgrades. As Business Insider first reported, citing an email OpenAI sent advertisers on August 5, 2026, the company is adding campaign optimization for specific conversions such as sales and sign-ups, a carousel format showing multiple products from a single advertiser, and new measurement integrations with adtech firms Hightouch and Triple Whale. A company spokesperson confirmed the email's contents to the outlet. The new features fill out a stack that is becoming legible as a real product rather than an experiment. OpenAI's advertiser documentation already specifies cost-per-thousand-impressions and cost-per-click buying, a relevance-weighted second-price auction, and conversion measurement through Ads Manager Beta - the mechanics of a self-serve platform, now arriving at the pace ChatGPT itself keeps adding features for the free users who see the ads. OpenAI's advertising terms now define "sponsored agents" The clearest signal of where the ad product goes next sits in OpenAI's own paperwork. The company's Ad Tools Terms, published July 31, 2026, contain a full section on "Sponsored Agents," defined as "advertiser-sponsored conversational experiences that allow users to interact with an AI-generated representative for an Advertiser's business, products, or services." The terms treat such an agent as something the advertiser is responsible for, as if it had built the agent itself (content, configurations, actions, and output included) and fold any legal claim about it into the same indemnification framework that covers ordinary ads. That is contract language written for a format that does not publicly exist yet, alongside sections governing conversion tools, audience data uploads, and AI-generated creative. The limits OpenAI has put in writing. The ads remain a test with defined boundaries. Per OpenAI's help center, only Free and Go plan users see ads; Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Edu accounts do not. Ads are excluded for accounts identified as under 18, kept away from sensitive topics such as personal health, mental health, and politics, and advertisers receive only aggregate performance data such as views and clicks. Free users can also opt out entirely by accepting lower message limits and reduced feature access, an ads-free tier OpenAI describes as the standing alternative to paying for Plus or Pro. Mexico is the one announced market still waiting: OpenAI's availability page carries no date for it beyond "coming soon," and says advertisers elsewhere can register interest through its advertiser form as testing expands.