As AI changes how people discover products online, marketers are rethinking the traditional digital advertising playbook. With AI-generated answers reducing clicks on search results and display ads, brands are looking for new ways to reach customers.

Seattle startup MediaPact wants to capitalize on that shift.

Founded in 2026 by online marketing veteran Lacie Thompson, MediaPact makes finding and signing ad deals quicker, painless, and accountable for both publishers and companies. It has raised $200,000 in a small friends and family round, and recently added companies like BroBible, Gadget Review and Penske Media to the platform.

We caught up with Thompson for GeekWire’s Startup Spotlight to learn more about her one-person startup, how AI helped her build the business despite having no coding experience and what surprised her most about launching in a market she thought she already knew.

In 50 words or less, give us your startup’s elevator pitch?

MediaPact is a marketplace and workflow for flat-fee direct media. Buyers discover publishers, newsletters, and creators, then negotiate terms, sign the IO (insertion order), and pay, all in one place. Seller inventory is standardized to list inventory in a searchable format. It is the direct media buy without the 40-email thread.

What problem are you obsessed with solving?

Flat-fee media is a massive market that still runs on emails, PDFs, calls, bespoke IOs and a Google Sheet named “final_FINAL_v3.”

Nine out of ten publishers I have interviewed described their flat-fee workflow as exactly that: manual email threads, hand-built IOs, invoices they chase for 60 days. Meanwhile, the buyer on the other side of that thread is sitting on budget and cannot find them.

Programmatic solved this for banner ads 15 years ago. Nobody has ever solved it for this type of media: sponsored articles, newsletters, or podcast reads. I am obsessed with making a direct media buy as easy as booking a flight.

What surprised you after talking to customers?

Two things:

Supply is not the problem. I have spent 15 years in this industry, so I can sign publishers all day. Demand is the hard part. Every marketplace founder reads The Cold Start Problem and still thinks they are the exception. I was not the exception.

The buyers are much more broad than I thought. I come from affiliate and performance. Those teams live and die on click-based measurement. While they often purchase flat-fee media, they sometimes avoid the risk of guaranteed placement because of over-scrutinized click-based attribution (especially on a last click).

One hyper-performance-based agency told me flatly that this was not for them. Brand marketers who understand top of funnel growth get it. They are typically at a mid-stage consumer brand that has plateaued on Meta and Google and needs somewhere else to go. Shopper marketers are also very focused on working with partners that can reach their audience, even if they are influencing in-store behavior in ways that are difficult to measure. Said another way, MediaPact is for the marketer who uses art, the marketer who uses science and the marketer who uses both. 

How has AI changed the way you build your company?

Two ways, and the second is a strategic angle for the platform, not just an operational efficiency.

The obvious one: I built and shipped (and am continuing to do so) the entire platform with Claude Code. React, TypeScript, Supabase, Stripe Connect, the whole thing. I have zero experience writing code, managing dev teams, or product management. And now I can ship features to production within less than a day. I don’t say this to boast, but rather to show that this is a structural change in who gets to start what kinds of companies.

AI is eating the click. When ChatGPT answers the question, nobody clicks. And the content is so trusted that conversion happens at 4.4 times the rate. So brands stop competing for rankings and start competing to be inside the source material that the models cite, which is high-authority editorial. That is not just SEO anymore. It is Answer Engine Optimization, and the only way in is to be in the content. MediaPact allows buyers to do this.

What’s one thing people misunderstand about your startup?

That it is for affiliate marketers. My résumé makes people assume rev-share, cookies, and last-click attribution.

It is the opposite. Flat fee, guaranteed placement, signed IO, and automated payment. Sellers get paid for their audience and their authority, not for whatever the attribution model felt like giving them that month. Publishers have been shortchanged by last-click for decades and everyone in our industry knows it.

What’s the toughest decision you’ve made in the past year?

Launching the company and determining the real TAM. 

My network is affiliate. Those are warm calls, fast meetings, and lots of enthusiastic nodding. It would have been very comfortable to build for them. But the customer discovery data pointed toward brand marketers, shopper marketers, and media planning and buying teams—audiences who don’t know me. 

Even though I know this challenge, I’m tackling it by figuring things out as I go, in the same way I did before: by building partnerships and relationships that grant me access to the right opportunities. 

What’s the one piece of advice you give to other entrepreneurs?

Ask for help. The key, though, is that you have to give help, you must be someone people want to help and that isn’t just granted—it’s earned over years. I naturally think of asking my network for help: my friends, my family, and my advisors. But now you can also ask Claude (or your preferred AI) for help. While it’s definitely not the same, knowing when to ask whom or what for help is probably the most powerful needle-mover. 

We’ll know our company has made it when… 

I’m the most proud when I know the platform has benefited someone. Usually when that’s the case, they want to tell their friends about it. That part of the growth cycle is always the most fun for me because I have the luxury of getting out of hustle mode and into innovation mode, pushing beyond the beta, dreaming big and taking things beyond my current scope. 

When sellers tell brands “just send it through MediaPact” without me anywhere in the conversation, that will be a milestone. The day the marketplace works without the founder in the middle is the day it is actually a marketplace.

T-Mobile plans to add richer profiles and interest preferences to T-Life, but it has not said whether that information will support advertising. Here’s what customers and IT teams should review.

The post T-Mobile Expands T-Life Profiles: What Data It Uses and How to Opt Out appeared first on TechRepublic.

T-Mobile plans to add richer profiles and interest preferences to T-Life, but it has not said whether that information will support advertising. Here’s what customers and IT teams should review.

The post T-Mobile Expands T-Life Profiles: What Data It Uses and How to Opt Out appeared first on TechRepublic.

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U.S. shoppers spent a record $26.4 billion across all retail sites during Amazon’s four-day Prime Day event, and for the first time, the people most likely to complete a purchase were those who arrived from AI chatbots.

It’s the latest twist in a high-stakes bet by Amazon. The AI assistants now sending retailers their best-converting customers are the same ones Amazon has worked to keep away from its own store, hoping to keep shoppers coming directly to Amazon.com and using its own on-site AI assistant instead.

Adobe reported over that weekend that visitors who clicked through to shopping sites from AI assistants were 40% more likely to make a purchase during the four-day event than those showing up through search, email or social media.

AI still accounts for a small fraction of total shopping traffic, but a trend is starting to emerge. In the past, shoppers sent by AI were the least likely to buy, according to Adobe’s data. The change suggests that ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and others are becoming more effective at giving shoppers the information they need to buy with confidence.

Those figures span all of U.S. retail — “Prime Day” has become much more than a day, and much bigger than Amazon alone. The distinction matters, because Amazon has taken a different path than many of its rivals. While Walmart, Target and others have opened their catalogs to outside AI assistants, Amazon has kept them out.

Agentic AI drives less than 1% of traffic across every major online store, but Amazon’s share is the lowest of the group, at about 0.4%, according to J.P. Morgan data.

That’s by design: Amazon sued Perplexity, for example, over its browser that shopped on customers’ behalf, and won a preliminary injunction barring the tool from the logged-in parts of its site, arguing that unauthorized shopping agents degrade a trusted experience. Perplexity is appealing.

Amazon has separately blocked ChatGPT’s crawlers from reading its listings — even as it has begun buying ads inside ChatGPT to bring shoppers back, a move first spotted by Marketplace Pulse founder Juozas Kaziukėnas and reported by Business Insider and Modern Retail.

On Amazon’s most recent earnings call, in April, CEO Andy Jassy said the company was in talks with the AI companies to come up with a better experience between Amazon and third-party agents to “find something that works for customers and all the companies.”

In the meantime, Amazon is focusing on its own AI assistant.

The tool — launched as Rufus and folded in May into a service called Alexa for Shopping — has drawn more than 250 million users, with monthly users up more than 115% over the past year, the company said. Customers who use it while shopping are more than 60% more likely to buy, and Amazon Web Services has said the tool drove nearly $12 billion in incremental sales last year.

Jassy said on the earnings call that third-party agents weren’t good enough yet — that they lacked a shopper’s history and often couldn’t get prices right — and that people would gravitate to whichever assistant knew them best. That’s the opening Amazon is going after with its own AI chatbot and related tools on Amazon.com.

“We are aiming to have it be the best shopping assistant anywhere,” Jassy said.

The strategy reflects one of the ways Amazon is increasingly making money. Advertising is now among its most profitable businesses. J.P. Morgan expects it to bring in about $83 billion in revenue this year and, because the margins are high, to account for roughly a third of the company’s operating income.

That advertising revenue depends on Amazon getting shoppers to browse its own site rather than handing the decision to an outside chatbot it doesn’t control.

The big question long-term is whether Amazon can maintain its own role as a primary destination for shoppers and avoid becoming just another selection on a chatbot’s shelf.