Chain Reactions Live #0003: Google's AI Mode Ads Nobody Covered + Agent Orchestration for Growth

Google quietly shipped four new ad formats inside AI Mode, and almost nobody covered it. We did. Plus: a $13 CPC on ChatGPT ads, and Memrise's growth agent that lives entirely in Slack.CHAPTERS00:00 Cold open03:06 Welcome — Victoria joins, Polina returns04:24 What's on the show today05:30 WATERCOOLER: Sonnet 5's price hike and Fable 5's return07:38 Token-maxing culture and the hidden cost of the price hike10:16 Ford rehires the people it fired — to train the AI12:47 Why the most elementary AI framing gets the most buzz14:27 Benchmarking models on price, speed and quality before you buy15:12 Product Hunt's June: the top tools were integrations, not standalone AI17:30 The core stack nobody has replaced (and why Slack survived)22:14 The vibe-coded app problem: broken back ends, ToS exposure, $20 lessons26:01 Cannes Lions: the agency billing model everyone admits is dead28:02 Creator activations go niche — eyeballs over follower counts28:45 Why Victoria skipped Cannes, and the CEO as the next creator31:04 Celebrity clout vs. an actual event strategy33:40 AI's image rehab in marketing, and the founders paying for their own message36:06 SheaMoisture flipped the creator brief39:21 Why YouTube mid-roll ad reads stopped working40:42 Google's AI Mode ads — the story nobody covered43:03 Four new ad types, and what a business owner is actually signing up for44:43 A $13 CPC on ChatGPT ads46:10 Could ChatGPT just run an affiliate network instead?49:44 MARKDOWN: Lizzie Lawley, Head of Applied AI at Memrise50:20 From pilot, to AI companion platform, to Wombat, to Memrise53:39 The system map: every input feeding the growth machine56:00 Core principles: context first, cheapest capable model, disagreement as a feature56:36 "Months of work in hours" — what it actually saved58:36 The loops: synthesis, experiment shaping, prototyping, build ticket, human gate1:00:41 Live demo: "It's just Slack, baby"1:03:10 How the agent gets fresh context every single night1:06:04 OpenClaw V1, then real engineers rebuilt it1:07:06 The failures: how expensive it got, real quick1:08:32 The model pricing tier system, tier by tier1:11:19 Where the user interviews actually live (it's Google Docs)1:13:59 The bot that spammed banana emojis, and what it taught her1:15:54 Claude Design as a starting point for growth people who can't design1:17:35 Why we skipped Hot Button this week1:18:27 ADAHOLIC: the rules1:20:22 Round 1: Ed Sheeran, a posh restaurant, and way too many forks1:23:33 Round 2: red key, blue key, and a luxury pitch1:26:23 Round 3: "Yo... where's Dukey?"1:29:03 Round 4: the Mother's Day one1:32:26 Round 5: the car ad Arnav paused a second too late1:35:14 Round 6: puffballs, chrome nails and woodworking1:39:07 Round 7: "a better everyday life for the many people"1:40:41 Victoria takes the crown on her first appearance1:41:54 CloseTHIS WEEK'S GUESTLizzie Lawley — Head of Applied AI at Memrise, co-founder of Wombat. She built a platform handling millions of simultaneous AI interactions with cost-efficient model routing, and now runs agent orchestration for Memrise's growth team. Her system pulls from transcripts, app reviews, Zendesk tickets, past experiment synthesis, Athena and BigQuery, and runs a nightly cron job so the agents never work off stale context. Methodology follows Bob Moesta's jobs to be done. The team calls it BYOB — bring your own Bobby.Ads featured in Adaholic this week: Heinz, Kia, Budweiser, Honda, Pinterest, IKEA.