Rethinking Marketing and Advertising in the AI Era | Gravity

Turning Information Into Action: How Zach Oldham Is Rethinking Marketing in the AI Era

Advertising has been the revenue engine of the internet for two decades, making search, video and social media free to anyone with a connection. AI has so far developed differently, with the most capable tools reserved for people willing to pay a monthly subscription.

There are signs that the subscription-only arrangement will not hold. OpenAI introduced advertising to ChatGPT in February, and by August Reuters reported advertising through the AI platform hit a $1 billion annualized run rate. WPP Media projects that marketers will spend $100 billion on advertising within generative AI search by 2030.

Zach Oldham thinks those figures are conservative.

Oldham, 24, is the co-founder and CEO of Gravity, a San Francisco-based company that places sponsored suggestions inside AI platforms, applications, and agents. Gravity, which works with 30 AI platforms including ChatGPT, announced in August that it had raised $30.5 million in a Series A round led jointly by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Committed Capital.

The laws of Gravity

Gravity sits between brands and the companies building AI products. Any app where people talk with an AI agent or chatbot can plug in Gravity's technology to show sponsored suggestions, either to the person or to the agent working on their behalf. Brands pay for those suggestions, and the platform takes a cut for sending customers their way.

In other words, AI platforms get to earn from the commerce their products already generate. For advertisers, that turns AI into a performance marketing channel that is far more personalized than a typical digital campaign.

Evolving the revenue model for AI is an important step in making it more accessible. Zach sees cost as the biggest thing standing between AI and most people. The best models are expensive, and plenty of people won't pay for them. By his estimate, AI usage today is less than 1% of what it will eventually be.

His argument is that AI companies need revenue to keep building better products, and advertising lets them earn it without charging users. That means more free inference and free usage for everyone. Gravity builds the technology that makes it work.

Shoot for the stars, aim for the moon

Zach was born in England, where he spent the first 12 years of his childhood. His first business was built from Legos. When he was seven, he built a pinball machine out of the bricks, carried it to school and charged his classmates to play.

"I knew I liked building things," he said. Over the years, he developed an interstitial curiosity about how businesses work, which he saw as a way to build things far bigger than his Lego sets.

Zach moved with his family to Vancouver, Canada, when he was 12. He needed to find a way to pay for his new school uniform, so he took a job with a landscaping company, putting in 14-hour days with no breaks. The hours weren't the problem. Zach has always believed in hard work. What bothered him was that the work didn't add up to anything. He was trading his time for a paycheck without solving a problem for anyone, and he wanted his effort to go into building something.

He started exploring business opportunities online. He learned from YouTube videos and spent most of his free time online, trying whatever new technology he could get his hands on. He built ecommerce sites on Shopify and traded Bitcoin.

Experimenting with trading and ecommerce showed him that managing a business was only one half of the job. If he wanted to go bigger, he needed to learn distribution and marketing. "My rationale was if I learned marketing, then I could build any business," he said.

With a few friends, he taught himself how social media platforms worked and successfully made a handful of accounts go viral. That was enough to start landing clients in the music industry. By 14, he was running social media marketing for hip-hop artists and record labels. He managed their accounts directly, handling the posting and helping them build their audiences.

Most of the work happened on his computer at school and late into the night. He didn't do much homework, and he usually worked until 3 a.m. "I did normal kid things," he said. "But I thought I was just insane. I just liked this stuff."

Treating marketing like a science

Marketing for the music industry eventually revealed to Zach a widespread problem with marketing. He found that campaigns were designed solely to rack up views, and too much of the work optimized for vanity instead of giving people something they valued.

He wanted to work with companies that treated marketing as a science. Those companies tracked lifetime value and the profitability of their advertising, and they used marketing to grow a business instead of running one-off hype campaigns. Direct-to-consumer and ecommerce brands fit the description, and some already wanted to work with him.

Instead, he decided to build technology and services for them himself.

He created a software that tracked advertising profitability and gave brands deeper analytics on which marketing was working and which wasn't. Then, he built a company around it: Flax Labs. Still a teenager, he bootstrapped it to 45 people, used those analytics to run better-performing campaigns for clients and spent $200 million on ads along the way.

The agency years also changed how he thought about marketing. He had started out believing marketing was the way to build anything. Over time he came to believe the product comes first.

He still thinks distribution matters enormously. He just ranks it second, behind a product that is good and useful to people. "Marketing amplifies," he said. "If it's bad, it amplifies bad. If it's good, it amplifies good."

Starting over in San Francisco

A few years into running the agency, Zach started traveling around the United States. Compared with Vancouver, he found more infrastructure and more optimism around building, along with more talented people to work with. He felt he had exhausted much of what Vancouver could offer.

He moved to San Francisco to expand his marketing agency. He arrived with little preparation and no network. He booked a flight and was in the city three days later. "Things seem bold or scary, but we just had this attitude of: we're going to do whatever is best for the company," he said.

The city encouraged what he had been doing. People were interested when he told them what he had built. He liked San Francisco's techno-optimism and how fast he could talk through ideas with people who shared his interests.

"It feels like playing in the NBA," he said. "Not even for the competition, but just because people really care about what they do, and they do it well."

Within about a month, Zach decided to start something new. He hired a CEO to run the agency and set out to build a new company with his current co-founder, Leo Martinez.

Finding the gravitational pull

The new company didn't start as Gravity. Over its first few months, the team deliberated through 100 different versions of automated AI marketing tools, changing direction every few days. None of them felt right. He questioned the market fit, the long-term defensibility and the mission itself.

"I didn't think the overall mission or problem we were working on with some of these automated AI marketing tools was very altruistic, or something I was very interested in," he said.

Then they landed on Gravity, an idea simple enough to explain in three words: "Action creates information. If you just jump into something, you'll figure it out," he explained.

Gravity has grown quickly since. It now runs a full-stack ad platform: tools for advertisers to buy placements, tools for AI app developers to sell them and an exchange connecting the two. Its ads run inside chatbots and assistants including ChatGPT, Codebuff and Runable, and its customers include Vercel, MongoDB, Unilever, and Expedia.

For most of the last year, Gravity stayed quiet. Zach wanted the platform working well for advertisers before inviting more of them in. “We didn’t want to incorrectly set expectations and go and talk about a platform that wasn’t quite ready for thousands of people to onboard onto,” he said.

The next step is ads for AI agents instead of people. Advertisers give Gravity their product catalogs, and when an AI shopping agent searches a category, Gravity gives it a list of relevant options to weigh. Gravity plans to add direct payments so an agent can complete a purchase once the user approves.

One day, Zach says he’d like to open a Gravity office back in Vancouver, though he says the company has a lot more growing to do first.

Bringing Slash into orbit

Along the way, Gravity found a partner in Slash. The relationship started with a conversation between Zach and Slash CEO Victor Cardenas. “When Victor and I first met and spoke about our individual companies,” Zach said, “it was naturally a great fit for us to be working together.”

Now that relationship extends to Gravity’s customers. Advertisers who pay for their Gravity campaigns with the Slash Visa Platinum card can earn 5% cash back on eligible ad spend.¹, *

For Zach, being able to offer that is one of the better parts of running an ad platform. “I’m really excited that people can get such high cash back from their advertising,” Zach said. “It’s cool to be the ad platform and be able to provide people with that ability, because people value it.”

Gravity is one of many startups building with Slash. We're proud to support founders from day one with the financial tools they need to grow. If you're building something, we'd love to work with you. Get started today at slash.com/startups.