What’s Next is Everything: marketing with emerging tech
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From Billable Hours to AI-Driven Value in Advertising
The ad game is looking a lot less like Don Draper’s boardroom and a lot more like an API call. As AI reshapes the fundamentals of media buying, creative development, and performance optimization, agencies are building platforms instead of just campaigns. Stagwell’s The Machine, Omnicom’s Omni, and WPP’s Open Pro are just a few of…
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Fembots, Football & Funny: What Viewers Want From Super Bowl Ads
Turns out Super Bowl viewers mostly want to laugh—with or without the help of an algorithm. A recent Harris Poll for Ad Age found that 71% of consumers are craving funny ads during this year’s Big Game, and humor is also what sticks, with 46% saying they’re most likely to remember a funny spot. Agencies…
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WPP’s “Super Agents” Want to Work for You
Earlier this month, WPP showed its cards at CES with a new internal tool called Agent Hub, a collection of AI-powered “super agents” living inside its WPP Open platform. Think of it as a bespoke app store populated with digital brains trained on the company’s formidable roster of branding, strategy, creative, and behavioral science experts.…
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Mari-Knows It All: Topps Fakes the Best ’80s Ad Career That Never Was
Topps is revisiting a sports “what-if” with the help of AI and a heavy dose of nostalgia. In its latest Bowman Draft campaign, the trading card brand reimagines a young Dan Marino—who was actually drafted by the Kansas City Royals in 1979—in a parallel ad-world where he’s more than a football great. In an alternate…
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AI Drama with a Side of Stroganoff
Noodles & Company gave fans more than just comfort food —they served up an AI-powered ad that doubles as a soap opera for the tastebuds. After the company put the popular Steak Stroganoff dish on hiatus, consumers voiced their displeasure and the brand tapped generative AI to dramatize actual complaints via short, theatrical scenes. Picture…
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YouTube Tops Reddit in AI’s New Citation Economy
Turns out LLMs don’t care if you have followers—they just want your transcripts. YouTube has leapfrogged Reddit to become the leading social source cited in AI-generated search results, according to new data from Bluefish, Emberos, Goodie AI, and Profound. That’s a sharp contrast from just months ago, when Reddit was still dominating AI responses thanks…
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Almond Breeze Roasts AI Hype with Help from the Jonas Brothers
Almond Breeze is tired of AI marketing nonsense—and they’re not alone. Teaming up with the Jonas Brothers, the brand kicked off 2026 with a three-minute comic mini-movie that turns the mirror back on runaway generative AI gimmicks. The film, created with agency McKinney and production partner Cylndr Studios, runs through a series of hilariously overproduced,…
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Brands Trust AI More Than Gen Z Does—And It’s Showing
AI is now a staple in the ad toolkit, but don’t assume younger consumers are thrilled about it. According to new data from IAB and Sonata Insights, 82% of ad execs believe Gen Z and Millennials feel upbeat about AI-generated ads. In reality? Only 45% do—down from 2024—and negative sentiment among Gen Z has nearly…
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Study Reveals AI-Only Ads Boost Engagement Over Hybrid Approaches
This one is going to be maybe a little controversial, or at least news that humans don’t want to hear. A joint study from NYU and Emory University has delivered a sharp rebuke to the idea that humans and AI make better creatives together. After testing GenAI ads across more than 100,000 impressions, the researchers…
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Equinox Picks a Fight With AI Slop
Equinox’s latest New Year campaign isn’t selling six-pack abs; it’s selling reality. Launched amid the usual January fitness frenzy, “Question Everything But Yourself” drops AI disinformation into your scroll in order to make a case for authenticity. Before revealing the actual campaign, Equinox teased followers with absurd AI-generated content: think babies water skiing, balloon-clad runway…
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AdAge Top 5 AI activations
From AI-generated cruise ads to YouTube fan parodies, brands (and unofficial creators) are leaning hard into generative content. Recent hot examples include a parody video pitting Netflix against Paramount in a fictional “Streaming Bowl”—complete with Harry Potter, Superman, and a stadium’s worth of IP cameos. Posted by creator Muhannad Nassar, the spot has racked up…
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Code and Theory’s AI ‘Machine’ Wants to Run Your Entire Marketing Stack
At CES this year, Code and Theory quietly introduced The Machine—an agentic AI operating system designed to live inside the tools marketers already use, not replace them. Built to bridge creative, media, and data workflows, The Machine connects directly with familiar platforms like Adobe, Figma, and Workfront, enabling teams to scale content production, audience analysis,…
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Rob Riggle’s AI Clone Hosts the Strangest Super Bowl Party Yet—With Guac
Just in time for Super Bowl LX, Avocados From Mexico is launching a digital experience that fuses comedy, sports prediction, and your snack table. Enter the “Guac Guru,” an AI avatar of Rob Riggle decked out like a mystical football sage, dishing out both playoff predictions and guacamole recipes. Powered by SportsDataIO and built by…
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Secret Level’s AI Holiday Special Is What Happens When ChatGPT Meets Claymation
Secret Level is back with not one but two AI-powered holiday specials that double as a time capsule for generative tech’s warp-speed progress. “A Very AI Yule Log 2” builds on last year’s fireplace-with-a-twist, using 630 surreal, 10-second AI-generated scenes stitched into 105 minutes of what can best be described as merry chaos. Made in…
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Zara Embraces AI for Fast Fashion Imaging
Zara is leaning into AI-generated imagery to speed up its fashion shoot process—without ditching human models entirely. The fast-fashion giant is using artificial intelligence to digitally swap outfits on real-life models, saving time (and likely, travel budgets) on multiple costume changes and locations. Models still get paid as if they’d gone through the full shoot,…
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Smart Shelves and Smarter Spend: Retail’s AI Budget Boom
Retailers and CPG companies are no longer dabbling in AI—they’re bankrolling it. NVIDIA’s latest survey shows that 90% of industry leaders plan to hike their AI budgets in 2026, focusing heavily on open-source tools and agentic AI. Why? Because AI isn’t just handling analytics; it’s pulling serious weight in supply chain forecasting, customer personalization, and…
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Chalamet on the Sphere: A24 Goes Vertical With “Marty Supreme” Stunt
In perhaps the tallest marketing flex of the year, Timothée Chalamet turned heads by scaling the Las Vegas Sphere for A24’s latest campaign promoting the film “Marty Supreme.” Perched atop the glowing orb—yes, actually standing on it—the actor delivered a straight-faced teaser as the Sphere lit up like a Ping-Pong ball, soundtracked by the iconic…
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Slop and Scroll: AI Filler Takes Over YouTube’s First Impressions
A new study from video-editing company Kapwing shows just how aggressively low-effort AI content—dubbed “AI slop”—is worming its way into YouTube’s recommendation engine. More than one in five videos served to new users falls into this category, which includes content created purely to rake in views with low production values and zero narrative. Among 15,000…
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Behind Lexus’ Whimsical AI Holiday Ad Campaign
Lexus is taking its holiday ad game into dreamier terrain—literally—by using AI to power a surreal winter drive that feels like it came straight out of a snow globe. The spot, created by AKQA, blends generative visuals with traditional art direction to tell a story that winds through frosted lakes, alpine trails, and twinkly forests—all…
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Chatbot Success: JCPenney’s GiftBot Case Study
JCPenney and dentsu X took on holiday chaos headfirst with GiftBot, a chat-based shopping assistant that made gifting less stressful and more personal. Designed using dentsu’s Intelligent Messaging tech and deployed across Facebook and Instagram via click-to-message ads, GiftBot provided real-time, tailored product suggestions based on user preferences like price, rating, and category. It even…
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Perrier-Jouët’s Immersive Campaign: A Holiday Sensation
Perrier-Jouët uncorked an interesting new experiential campaign, partnering with Publicis and immersive tech specialists to turn its bubbly brand into a multisensory spectacle. Two prime flagship locations—one in New York, the other in Los Angeles—were transformed over the holiday season using projection mapping, interactive decals, animated visuals, and an AR mirror that invited passersby to…
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AI Hackathon Reinvents Digital Product Placement
A new generative AI experiment called Halftime cooked up a peculiar cameo for Coca-Cola inside an old episode of “Suits”—without ever rolling film. Created in just 24 hours at an xAI hackathon by three college students, Halftime inserts digital product placements into TV scenes by building entirely new AI-generated moments. Instead of a traditional cutaway…
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Pandora Leans in to AI for Service and Personalized Shopping
Pandora turned to AI not for flash, but for function. With 40% of its yearly revenue riding on the holiday season, the jewelry brand needed scalable service without bloating its call center headcount. Enter Clara, a chatbot that now handles 60% of customer inquiries solo—a 20-point jump over its predecessor. The result? A 10% bump…
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Why Marketers Hesitate to Fully Embrace Agentic AI
Agentic AI has spent 2025 positioning itself as an all-in-one marketing team—thinking, writing, and executing campaigns with minimal human input. But despite the headlines, marketers aren’t exactly handing over the keys. The concept of agentic AI—AI systems with context, access to tools and decision making authority working cooperatively with little oversight—has intrigued brands, yet hesitation…
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Oreo’s AI Power Move: Meet AIDA, the $40M Content Machine
Mondelēz International – the company behind Oreo, Chips Ahoy!, Ritz, and more – is leaning hard into generative AI with a tool it’s calling AIDA (short for AI + Data). With an investment already topping $40 million, AIDA is designed to crank out marketing content faster and cheaper, while also tailoring ads to individual consumer…
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AR Meets Après-Ski: Snapchat’s Winter Village Goes Luxe
Just in time for the holidays, Snapchat has unwrapped its “Winter Village,” an augmented reality experience that brings luxury shopping into the app for users across several regions including the U.S., U.K., and France. Running through December, the activation puts three upscale brands—Chopard, Lancôme, and BOSS—front and center in immersive, branded AR spaces. Accessible via…
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AbelsonTaylor Hits Fast Forward with AT Studio
AbelsonTaylor Group just rolled out AT Studio, its new production-centric division tailored to crank out high-volume healthcare marketing assets at a much faster clip—without dropping the ball on quality. Think of it as a hybrid assembly line and art studio: a production engine that fuses manual craftsmanship with AI-assisted workflows to churn out everything from…
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Meet Nick Jolly: R&R’s AI Santa Can Bench More Than You
R&R Partners just unwrapped “Nick Jolly,” a tattooed, motorcycle-riding AI Santa who’s less about ho-ho-ho and more about flexing his algorithmic muscles. Designed as both a holiday stunt and a preview of the agency’s proprietary AI ambitions, Jolly lives on a microsite where curious visitors can shoot him a message and watch him respond in…
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Lowe’s AI Tool Doubles Conversions — and It’s Just Getting Started
Lowe’s is doubling down on e-commerce (and conversions) through its ChatGPT-powered assistant, “Mylow.” Already live online and in-app, Mylow has delivered double the conversion rate among users, surfacing not just on-brand product picks but also DIY tutorials and how-to guides. And they’re not stopping there. In 2026, shoppers may be snapping pics of their outdated…
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The Debate on AI Ads: McDonald’s Christmas Campaign Controversy
McDonald’s Netherlands pulled its fully AI-generated Christmas ad after it struck the wrong chord with viewers — both in the Netherlands and well beyond. The ad leaned into holiday chaos with a cheeky twist on “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” aiming to show McDonald’s as a calm-in-the-storm sanctuary. But what started as…
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AI Adoption Gap Between Executives and Employees
A new BambooHR survey of 1,500+ U.S. salaried employees shows the AI divide between executives and employees is more Grand Canyon than puddle. While 72% of VP-level execs use AI tools daily, only 18% of individual contributors (ICs) do the same. The gap isn’t just in adoption—it’s in values and perceptions. Execs see AI-generated work…
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Brands wrestle with authenticity vs. AI
As AI-generated marketing proliferates—and fumbles—some brands are reaping rewards by leaning hard in the opposite direction: showing off the real, the tactile, the definitely-not-CGI. A spec Pepsi ad from filmmakers Luke Barnett and Noam Kroll pokes fun at synthetic storytelling with a self-aware script featuring six repetitions of the word “real” in just 60 seconds.…
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“Kevin!” Everywhere: Disney+ Turns Home Alone Into a Holiday Pop-Up Tour
For the 35th anniversary of Home Alone, Disney+ and agency CALLEN are running a nationwide holiday campaign that doesn’t just rely on screens—it moves audiences through pizza shops, TSA lines, and living room remotes. From December 10 to 17, Prince St. Pizza locations nationwide were masquerading as Little Nero’s, complete with branded boxes and that…
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Svedka’s Super Bowl Strategy: Vodka, Robots, and a Dash of AI
For the first time in decades, vodka will return to Super Bowl ad breaks, as Svedka nabs a coveted 30-second slot just after halftime in February’s Big Game. This isn’t just Sazerac flexing its distribution muscle—CMO Sara Saunders says the vodka brand, which had been sliding, is back on the upswing since their 2024 acquisition.…
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A Royal First: Virtual Reality Christmas Address by King Charles III
In a first for the British monarchy—and certainly a surprise for anyone who still imagines royalty in black-and-white—King Charles III’s traditional Christmas Day speech is now available in virtual reality. Viewers with a Meta Quest 3 headset could watch this year’s address while “sitting” in a cozy virtual lodge or enjoying the broadcast in full…
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How Dollar Shave Club Uses AI for a Fresh Marketing Approach
Dollar Shave Club is back to joking about razors—and this time, it’s using AI to do it. The men’s grooming brand, best remembered for its snarky 2011 launch video, has returned to that “rebel-jester” tone with a new 60-second spot titled “We Put Our Money Where It Matters.” Created with Israeli agency Too Short For…