Pipeline 010: a ChatGPT ad click is worth about 26 cents, and four London startups hiring growth marketers

Growth & Demand Gen

So who is playing with ChatGPT ads? Is it worth it? There's a report that says a click is "worth" $0.26. I dunno. But - hey - someone has to pay for AI's enormous expanding waist. Or waste. Your call.

This edition is all about measurement, because the other thing in here is a survey where 36% of marketers said they kept funding a channel they believed was not working, purely because the reported numbers looked too good to cut. Put those two next to each other and you get a fair picture of how much budget gets allocated by dashboard rather than by evidence.

There is also a Federal Reserve paper about people commuting into an office to spend the day on Zoom. About half the office day, as it turns out. Economists now have a name for it. Of course they do.

The Read

Can Advertising Fund Free AI? Evidence from ChatGPT's International Advertising Rollout

Research · Maximilian Kaiser (WU Vienna) and Christian Schulze (Frankfurt School) · working paper, October 2026

A paid visit from a ChatGPT ad returned $0.89 in revenue on US traffic against $2.45 from a paid Google search visit, and converted at 0.37% against 1.17%. Of 87 advertisers buying both, 73 recorded no paid ChatGPT purchase at all. The authors put the parity price of a ChatGPT click at about $0.26, with a bootstrap range of $0.05 to $0.57. The sample is 1,898 online shops and nearly 10 billion sessions. Two caveats. The paid comparison is descriptive rather than causal, because advertisers chose to be there, and one of the authors advises the firm that supplied the data.

Advertisers Pull Meta Ads That Had Unwanted AI Glow-ups

Platforms · Trishla Ostwal, Adweek · 22 October 2026

Meta's updated ad terms add an AI Features section making advertisers solely responsible for what its AI tools create or change in their ads. Bookshop.org posted that an account update opted it into a generative feature and an illustration was added to an ad it had made by hand. The agency Exverus says it has pulled live ads to strip out added sitelinks, translations and generated images. Meta's position is that advertisers can switch off individual Advantage+ features in Ads Manager at any time. The terms were set for 30 October and Meta has since told Reuters they take effect on 20 November, so there is time to go through the settings.

36% of marketers keep funding channels they think don't work, Funnel finds

How we work · Luís Rijo, PPC Land · 31 October 2026

36% of marketers said they carried on investing in a channel they believed was failing because the numbers looked too good to cut, and 61% said they had picked a metric because it told a more favourable story. Only 10% report high trust in their attribution model while 49% rely mainly on platform-reported data.

One More Thing

Remote Work from the Office

Odd but true · Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Staff Report 1211 · October 2026

Roughly half of the days people spend in the office are spent entirely on video calls or working alone, according to a survey of college-educated Americans. Two New York Fed economists argue that measuring only working from home misses up to three quarters of how much remote work is actually happening, because a lot of it happens at a desk in the office. The causes they name are mundane and fixable: teams split across buildings, nobody coordinating which day everyone comes in, and people dialling into a call instead of booking a room.

The Money

London rounds from the last three weeks, and who is actually hiring marketers off the back of them.

Nous, $17m

AI household admin · Heartcore Capital, with Mosaic Ventures, Chalfen Ventures, Joyance and Bain Future Back · 26 October

Nous builds an agent that handles household admin, so switching providers, cancelling subscriptions, chasing refunds and filling in forms. It is the clearest hiring signal on this list: two growth seats open at once, a Growth Lead and a Growth Associate, on a board of eleven roles that is otherwise mostly product and engineering. Consumer product, fresh money, nobody yet owning acquisition. The round is not labelled in the announcement, and Mosaic is described as an existing seed investor.

Machenta, $40m seed

Robot learning · co-led by Creandum and Union Square Ventures · 27 October

Machenta trains robots to learn a physical task from a single demonstration, entirely in simulation. The team is about a dozen people in King's Cross and they are hiring a Community & Growth Lead, explicitly their first community hire, owning community strategy, events, hackathons, tutorials and conference presence. Deep tech at seed rarely hires marketing this early, so a $40m round with a growth seat in the first dozen people is a genuinely greenfield brief for whoever takes it.

Azoma, $11.2m Series A

Agentic commerce optimisation · led by Puma Growth Partners, with dunnhumby and others · 21 October

Azoma measures how a brand's products surface inside AI shopping assistants and tells them what to fix. Headcount has gone from 12 to 40. There is no role with marketing in the title, but the one growth-department opening is an Education Program Manager & Evangelist covering accreditation, training and thought leadership, which is a content and evangelism job under another name. A category-creation company tripling its headcount is usually about six weeks from posting something more conventional.

Also raised, with no marketing roles open on their boards this morning: Supa (£21m seed, co-led by 2150 and OpenOcean, and an entirely empty job board, so one to check again in a few weeks), LO:TECH ($12m Series A led by MMC), Opply ($7.5m led by Chalfen), Easol ($30m Series A extension), Querio ($5m) and Potential Sciences (an undisclosed seed backed by the UK Sovereign AI fund).

Product Marketing

Product marketing now carries the highest median advertised salary of any marketing discipline in the US, at $163,998, and vacancies are up 18% on the year. So, y'know, WHOOP WHOOP etc. etc.

Which sits oddly next to the week's other story, where Canva is merging its product, growth and platform teams into one Product Org. Two things can be true at once, as my teachers never once said. The discipline is being paid more and asked for more often, and at the same time the box it sits in on the org chart keeps getting redrawn, usually by someone who wants fewer boxes and guess what - doesn't understand what the f-ck it is.

There is also a nice piece of detective work on Intercom's pricing page, where the seat price has been moving between $19 and $29 since late September. Who doesn't love experimentation out in the wild?

The Read

U.S. Marketing Hiring Recovers in Q3 2026 as Entry-Level Jobs Show Signs of Rebound

Careers · Taligence LLC with Aspen Technology Labs · 5 November 2026

Product marketing vacancies rose 18.0% year on year, second only to growth marketing at 20.2%, and product marketing carried the highest median advertised salary of any discipline at $163,998 against $97,500 across all marketing roles. New York had 3,546 live vacancies, up 22.0%. The sample is 83,916 active full-time in-house listings pulled from employer career sites and applicant tracking systems. Two caveats: this is advertised pay on the postings that disclose it rather than what people actually earn, and Taligence is an executive search firm publishing data on senior marketing hiring.

Aussie Adobe assailant Canva announces layoffs in re-org affecting 22% of staff

Org design · Simon Sharwood, The Register · 4 November 2026

Canva is combining its product, growth and platform teams into a single Product Org, cutting management layers and pulling more product teams to its Sydney headquarters. 1,271 employees, about 22% of the workforce, face redundancy, a changed role or a request to relocate, and the company has not said how many jobs go. Melanie Perkins told staff that growth had slowed for the first time in a decade. Canva said last year that it had 260 million monthly users and $3.5bn of revenue, so this is a structural call rather than a cash one. The merged org is the bit to read closely if you care where product marketing reports.

Intercom's $19 Essential seat price is one arm of a live pricing test

Pricing · Rob Litterst, PricingSaaS · 21 October 2026

Intercom's Essential seat price went from $29 to $19 on 28 September, back to $29 on 3 October, then showed $19 again later in the month. PricingSaaS found an experiment marker in the page source named team-self-serve-essential-price-reduction, with variant and allocation data attached, which reads as a live price test served to different visitors rather than a series of repricings. Intercom has not confirmed it, and PricingSaaS sells pricing intelligence, so the reading is theirs. Still, a 35% swing on a public seat price is a useful reminder of how much of this is now tested rather than decided.

One More Thing

Canva fires 22% of its workforce, but its severance package is winning the internet

Odd but true · Shubhangi Chowdhury, The American Bazaar · 5 November 2026

The package attached to Canva's restructure has become the story in its own right: at least six months' salary wherever you are, twelve months of LinkedIn Premium, twelve months of healthcare where that benefit exists, help with CVs and interview practice from Canva's own talent acquisition team, an opt-in alumni directory, and $10,000 grants for anyone starting a business or a community project, with no equity taken. You also keep the MacBook. Commenters on Instagram have been asking how to apply to be made redundant, which is a first. Actually maybe it isn't. Side note - I know someone at McAfee who has been trying to get made redundant for the last 25 years. Still no luck.

The Money

London rounds from the last three weeks, and who is actually hiring marketers off the back of them.

Nous, $17m

AI household admin · Heartcore Capital, with Mosaic Ventures, Chalfen Ventures, Joyance and Bain Future Back · 26 October

Nous builds an agent that handles household admin, so switching providers, cancelling subscriptions, chasing refunds and filling in forms. It is the clearest hiring signal on this list: two growth seats open at once, a Growth Lead and a Growth Associate, on a board of eleven roles that is otherwise mostly product and engineering. Consumer product, fresh money, nobody yet owning acquisition. The round is not labelled in the announcement, and Mosaic is described as an existing seed investor.

Machenta, $40m seed

Robot learning · co-led by Creandum and Union Square Ventures · 27 October

Machenta trains robots to learn a physical task from a single demonstration, entirely in simulation. The team is about a dozen people in King's Cross and they are hiring a Community & Growth Lead, explicitly their first community hire, owning community strategy, events, hackathons, tutorials and conference presence. Deep tech at seed rarely hires marketing this early, so a $40m round with a growth seat in the first dozen people is a genuinely greenfield brief for whoever takes it.

Azoma, $11.2m Series A

Agentic commerce optimisation · led by Puma Growth Partners, with dunnhumby and others · 21 October

Azoma measures how a brand's products surface inside AI shopping assistants and tells them what to fix. Headcount has gone from 12 to 40. There is no role with marketing in the title, but the one growth-department opening is an Education Program Manager & Evangelist covering accreditation, training and thought leadership, which is a content and evangelism job under another name. A category-creation company tripling its headcount is usually about six weeks from posting something more conventional.

Also raised, with no marketing roles open on their boards this morning: Supa (£21m seed, co-led by 2150 and OpenOcean, and an entirely empty job board, so one to check again in a few weeks), LO:TECH ($12m Series A led by MMC), Opply ($7.5m led by Chalfen), Easol ($30m Series A extension), Querio ($5m) and Potential Sciences (an undisclosed seed backed by the UK Sovereign AI fund).

The Money - London

None of these are ours this week. They are all London startups, and all four were live this morning.

Growth Lead, Performance Marketing — Plasma

London, on-site · £100K – £150K plus tokens

Plasma is building a stablecoin payments network and a consumer money account on top of it, and the listing is unusually honest about what you are walking into: a live product with real spend, and the paid engine that scales it sitting entirely with you, channels, budget, creative and measurement included. The interesting part is that they want the person running the campaigns to be the person building them, so it is not a brief about managing an agency. It also asks you to take a crypto-native product to an audience that is not crypto-native, across Meta, Google, TikTok and YouTube, and to work on what happens after the click, so landing pages, onboarding and referrals, with product and design. There is a second half to the job, which is building the function itself, the tracking and reporting and playbooks that the next few hires inherit. They raised a $24m Series A led by Framework Ventures and later $373m in a token sale, the office is in London with relocation support and visa sponsorship, and they publish the band, which still puts them in the minority.

Performance Marketing Lead — Omnea

London, hybrid, Tuesday to Thursday in the office · no salary published

Omnea sells an agentic operating system for procurement, with Spotify, PayPal, Adyen and S&P Global as customers, and it is hiring the first dedicated owner of performance marketing. The listing makes a distinction I wish more of them made: you are not starting from scratch, because paid campaigns and the website and the social channels all exist and work to varying degrees, but nobody's actual job is to work out what produces pipeline and then make more of it. So you own the number for digital channels, you own the dashboards in Dreamdata off HubSpot and GA4, and you own tracking from first touch to closed won. Paid strategy is yours with an agency doing the build, which means setting the brief and deciding together where a six-figure annual budget goes, with LinkedIn as the primary channel and audiences built from closed-won data rather than off-the-shelf lists. They say plainly that it is wrong for you if you want to run one channel and hand the numbers off. More listings should do that. Backed by $75m from Khosla, Insight and Accel.

Performance Marketing Manager — Dex

London, hybrid · no salary published, the listing says above-market

Dex runs an opt-in talent marketplace that interviews senior software engineers about what they actually want and introduces them to a small number of matched startups, which means it has to acquire both engineers and hiring companies, and paid is where most of that happens. They run Google Search, LinkedIn and Meta today and want to expand formats and markets, and you own those channels day to day, so structure, budgets, bidding, audiences and the daily optimisation. The line in the listing that I like is that channels are judged on the quality of the people they bring in rather than on clicks or cheap signups, which is the right measure for a marketplace and a hard one to hold to. Creative comes from an in-house creative lead, writers and UGC creators, so briefing and testing their work is part of the job, as is managing the paid agency and gradually bringing that work in house. It is an individual contributor seat reporting to a Head of Growth, so there is someone to learn from. $5.3m seed led by Notion Capital, announced in April, and the role was posted on 30 October.

Growth Marketer — Spruce

London, hybrid, split between London and Bristol · base £50K – £70K, equity, quarterly bonus

Spruce builds software for UK heat pump installers, covering LiDAR surveys, floor plans, proposals, e-sign, pipework drawings and the MCS compliance paperwork, and it has over 900 customers after a bit more than two years. This is an early, broad growth hire working closely with the founder, and the brief is mostly experiments: setting up and running the full set of growth tests, anything that gets the product in front of more installers quickly, and binning what does not work. The target they name is adding thousands of installers over the next eighteen months while driving towards the next fundraise, so the number is a real one rather than a vanity metric. The listing says outright that this is not an easy job, and expects you to spend time with installers on site. The team is 32 people across two cities, together in person two or three days a week and all together every fortnight, and the band and the bonus structure are both published, which at seed stage is rare.

See you next Sunday.

Gareth

The Money - New York

Two of these are ours and two are not. All four were live this morning.

Founding AI Growth Marketer, legal-AI startup (ours)

New York, five days in the office · $160K – $240K base plus equity

An early-stage legal-AI company building an agent for contract review, with enterprise customers already signed and a very high rate of conversion from proof of concept to purchase, which is the sort of number that makes a growth hire straightforward to justify. This is the first growth marketer and the brief is genuinely end to end, so paid across Google and LinkedIn, organic, SEO and AEO, Reddit, lifecycle and partnerships, with the content made personally rather than briefed out, so product videos, ad creative, landing pages and campaign copy for legal, procurement and GTM ops buyers. The part that makes it unusual is the expectation that you build a fleet of agents yourself to run structured experiments at scale, which means light scripting and prompting are part of the day rather than a nice-to-have. You get full autonomy over strategy, tools and budget, working directly with the founders, and the seat is expected to grow into leading the team. They are looking for five to eight years, someone who has worked at an AI-native company or run an AI-native agency, and the band is wide enough to reflect that spread.

B2B Growth Marketing Lead, AI detection company (ours)

Brooklyn, five days onsite · $140K – $170K base

The company builds AI detection software that tells you whether text or images were made by a machine, and publishing houses and law firms are among its commercial customers, with inbound demand already strong. This is its first enterprise-focused growth hire, which in practice means you own the commercial engine from the ICP down: defining the buyer and what a qualified lead looks like, generating demand through paid, SEO, content, events and outbound support, converting and nurturing with landing pages, email and retargeting, agreeing definitions and handoff with sales, and moving budget to whatever closes. It is a hands-on individual contributor seat reporting to the Head of Growth, with the chance to build a team later, and they are open about wanting someone who has done a true nought-to-one build, either at an early-stage startup or by spinning up a B2B segment inside a B2C company. Four to eight years. US work authorisation is required and relocation to New York is supported.

Growth Marketer — Qualitate

New York City · no salary published

Qualitate automates primary research, from study design and expert recruitment through AI-moderated interviews to synthesis, and turns it into time-series data on more than 10,000 public and private companies for hedge funds, PE firms and corporate strategy teams. It raised a $25m Series A led by Insight Partners in October and every one of its 29 open roles is in New York, so this is a company hiring in one place on purpose. The role is explicitly hands-on execution rather than strategy: designing and writing creative for paid social and landing pages, shipping a steady cadence of experiments across paid, LinkedIn, X, email, AEO and SEO and outbound, optimising the channels that already work and testing new ones against pipeline targets, and running landing page and conversion experiments. You would work across sales, design, engineering and research, and they want analytics fluency in HubSpot, GA4 and the rest, with three years or more in growth, marketing or design at a startup or creative agency. There is an existing backlog to work through, which is a good sign that someone has been thinking about it.

Marketing Manager — Clark

New York City, fully onsite five days a week · no salary published

Clark builds AI that does audit fieldwork rather than assisting with it, and more than 35 CPA firms already use it, off the back of an $11m seed round announced on 2 November. This is the marketing hire that sets the vision, so the strategy across digital, content, events and partnerships, the brand voice and messaging, the campaigns that drive demand and lead acquisition, the website and collateral and case studies built from scratch, the paid programmes, and PR and analyst outreach. It is as broad as the title suggests, which at this stage is the honest version of the job. They ask for two years or more in B2B tech, SaaS or startups, so this is a real step up for someone early rather than a safe senior appointment, and you would work alongside the founders with direct accountability for the numbers. They are explicit about being fully onsite in New York, five days, with no hybrid option, and about the pace that goes with it. They are hiring three other marketing-shaped seats at the same time.

See you next Sunday.

Gareth