What’s Next is Everything: marketing with emerging tech
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Unilever’s World Cup Math: 50,000 Creators and a Super Bowl Every Two Days
Unilever, the official personal care brand of the FIFA World Cup 2026, says it has activated 50,000 creators and influencers worldwide at the tournament’s midpoint — from soccer star Trinity Rodman down to hyperlocal micro-creators — plus thousands more at House of Fresh pop-ups in New York City, Miami, and Mexico City across 10 days,…
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Dollar Shave Club Drafts the Founding Fathers Into the Razor Wars
On July 1, Dollar Shave Club rolled out “250 Years. No BS. Still Free,” a set of digital ad spots made in-house with generative AI. The setup: America’s forefathers, rendered in hyper-stylized Revolutionary War imagery, fighting “big razor monopolies.” It is the brand’s pricing grievance, but in a tricorner hat. The campaign also promotes $2.50…
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Walmart Trains the Shop Floor on AI — and Gets Apps Back
Walmart launched an AI certification program for associates with OpenAI in June, following a similar program with Google earlier this year. One of the first people through the new certificate was Darlene Lane, a 43-year company veteran and manager of learning and development, who says she now uses AI as a “thought partner” for building…
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Dept Builds a “Multiversal Assistant” and Won’t Bill Clients for the Glue
Dept is rolling out Deptify, an AI system accessed through a persistent assistant called “D.” The pitch is orchestration: D pulls context from whatever workflow tools a client already uses — Adobe Workfront, Asana, or something else — and routes people to the right tool for the job, instead of asking them to learn another…
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AI Is Becoming Loyalty’s Gatekeeper
Gale’s latest loyalty report is less about points and more about the chatbot now standing between a brand and the person it insists on calling a “relationship.” In “The Preference Economy,” Gale surveyed 3,000 consumers in the U.S. and U.K. and found that 56% are comfortable delegating all communications with a brand through AI. Nearly…
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Sephora Puts Checkout Inside Google’s AI Loop
Sephora expanded its partnership with Google to become the first prestige beauty retailer to enable shopping directly inside Google’s AI-powered platform through Google Agentic Checkout. In practice, this keeps shoppers on Google. They can ask beauty questions, research ingredients, compare recommendations in real time, build a routine, add products to basket, and check out without…
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McDonald’s Tests “Archy” at Five Drive-Thrus
McDonald’s is testing an AI-powered drive-thru ordering system at five U.S. locations, moving the familiar ritual of shouting lunch through a speaker box one step closer to automation. The system is called ArchIQ, though a franchise owner says its nickname is “Archy,” because even automation apparently needs a mascot. It was shown at McDonald’s 2026…
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L’Oréal Wants ChatGPT to Stop Learning Skincare From Reddit
L’Oréal has a new OpenAI partnership aimed at two things marketers now pretend are separate: product discovery and content production. The deal plugs OpenAI’s models into L’Oréal’s in-house generative system, CreAItech, and lets the company provide up-to-date product information to the models behind ChatGPT. OpenAI leadership has been keen to say this does not mean…
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WPP Media Tests the Synthetic Audiences for Programmatic Buying
WPP Media is testing “synthetic audiences” for programmatic buying in the U.S. through a partnership with Givsly, a tech company founded in 2019. The audience segments are built partly from charity donation data: where donations happen, how often, and to what kinds of causes. The pitch is simple enough. Instead of relying only on open-web…
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Olly Rewrites Product Pages for the Chatbot Shopper
Supplement brand Olly says it is seeing a shift in how people arrive at its DTC site: more shoppers are asking ChatGPT-style questions (“best sleep supplement,” “best women’s multivitamin”) and landing directly on product pages instead of politely entering through the homepage like it’s 2016. Jennifer Peters, Olly’s director of DTC, marketing technology and digital…
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State Farm Uses AI to turn a Static Brand Placement into a Social Media Character
State Farm is using the NBA Finals to test faster social content with a new spokescharacter: Stan the State Farm Stanchion Pad. Yes, the padding behind the hoop. During Game 4 of Knicks vs. Spurs, Stan is set to post real-time commentary on X, attempting to turn a piece of long-standing courtside branding into an…
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JPMorgan Wants AI Agents That Don’t Need a Bathroom Break
JPMorgan Chase says it plans to deploy “long-running autonomous” AI agents later this year — systems meant to move beyond one-off prompts and instead manage multi-step workflows across different software tools. Derek Waldron, the bank’s chief analytics officer, says these agents can run for “an hour or two,” compared with the “two or three minutes”…
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Disney Lets Generative AI Into the Parks, on a Short Leash
Disney is putting Adobe Firefly to work inside its parks and hotels pipeline, using custom AI models trained on Disney-owned characters to help Imagineers produce concepts and prototypes for rides and attractions. The setup runs through Adobe Firefly Foundry, which combines Adobe’s “commercially safe” AI models with Disney character training data from franchises including Frozen,…
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Walmart’s AI Push Runs Into the Token Meter
Walmart executives are talking about AI the way retailers have long wanted to talk about personalization: as something that understands intent and language, not just item history. At Walmart’s Associates Week in Bentonville, CEO John Furner said AI is helping teams finish technology projects faster across the company. He also kept the brakes lightly tapped:…
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MIT Tests AI Fake-News Help, Finds a Withdrawal Symptom
MIT Media Lab researchers ran a four-week experiment with 67 participants, asking them to judge whether news headlines and images were real or fake — sometimes with an AI chatbot helping, sometimes not. With AI assistance, participants were 21% more accurate at spotting misinformation. The catch is that the “help” appeared to come with strings:…
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How Unilever is using AI to stay visible in a new era of food discovery
Unilever Foods is treating AI-driven discovery as a parallel universe to the supermarket aisle: one where visibility happens inside voice assistants, AI search tools, and large language models, not just search blue links or endcaps. Olivia Kirby, Unilever Foods’ director of integrated demand generation, says the company is using AI across marketing and product development,…
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Your Employees Are Using AI. They’re Just Not Telling You How.
A 31-year-old physician was using DoximityGPT — HIPAA-compliant and organization-approved — with a personal prompting template he said produced “astoundingly good results.” His colleagues were struggling with the same tool, and he believed the template would help. He still didn’t share it. The anecdote lands because it is so banal: nothing clandestine, nothing technically fancy,…
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Coca-Cola Gives José Mourinho an AI Twin for World Cup Content Duty
Ahead of the FIFA World Cup, Coca-Cola is launching a “José vs. Mourinho” social content series hosted not by José Mourinho himself, but by his AI “digital twin.” Mourinho is the incoming manager of Real Madrid, which apparently still leaves room for being rendered into scalable brand content. The twin was built by Coca-Cola, Footballco,…
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The Golden Globes’ AI Rulebook: Humans Still Need to Be in Charge
The Golden Globes published new eligibility guidelines for AI use that boil down to: AI won’t automatically disqualify a film or show, as long as “human creative direction, artistic judgment, and authorship remain primary throughout the production process.” The rules explicitly cover generative AI and put submissions on notice that the Golden Globes Eligibility Committee…
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The Jets Say 91% of the Front Office Now Uses Copilot Daily
The New York Jets, under new Chief Data & Analytics Officer Iwao Fusillo, are treating AI less like a side experiment and more like office plumbing. Fusillo, who started in January, told Sports Business Journal his remit spans both business and football analytics. His two priorities: building internal analytics apps for coaching, scouting, and business…
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Gen Z Keeps Using GenAI — And Gets Madder About It Anyway
Gallup’s latest “Voices of Gen Z” survey, conducted Feb. 24–March 4, 2026, with 1,572 U.S. 14- to 29-year-olds, sketches an audience marketers love to label “AI native,” then immediately complicates the label. Usage is steady: 51% of U.S. Gen Z say they use generative AI daily (22%) or weekly (29%). But the emotional weather has…
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When Product Ships Weekly, Marketing Becomes the Bottleneck
HBR’s premise is blunt: AI sped up engineering first, and marketing is now stuck doing quarterly-era coordination in a continuous-release world. Citing Anthropic research, the piece notes that software engineering accounts for “nearly 50% of all agentic activity.” That helps explain why product teams are shipping continuously, and why marketing — with its cross-functional handoffs,…
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Disney Put Floating Star Wars Posters Over Madrid, Because The Force Apparently Has an OOH Budget
Disney and Havas Creative staged an outdoor activation in Madrid for “The Mandalorian and Grogu” using movie posters suspended above city streets — a fairly literal nod to Grogu’s Force-assisted object moving. The posters were not “floating” through perspective tricks or VFX. According to Ad Age, they used a magnetic levitation system developed by Andtonic,…
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AI Agent Sprawl: When Everyone Gets a Bot, IT Gets a Headache
As tools like Anthropic’s Claude Cowork make it easy for nontechnical employees to spin up task-specific AI “agents,” some large companies are discovering a new flavor of shadow IT: too many bots, doing too many overlapping things, in too many places. The Wall Street Journal flags “AI agent sprawl” as the problem, fueled partly by…
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Canva’s AI Report Says Marketers Are Using It Daily. Consumers Would Like a Label.
Canva’s State of Marketing and AI Report 2026 puts a number on the industry’s current mood: 97% of marketing leaders say they use AI in daily creative work, and 99% plan to increase AI investment this year. The audience, meanwhile, is not exactly clapping. According to the same report, 78% of consumers would rather see…
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YouTube Moves the AI Label Into Daylight
YouTube says it will start automatically detecting and labeling videos with “significant photorealistic AI-generated content,” shifting away from the creator self-disclosure system it introduced in 2024. The automated labels begin rolling out gradually in May 2026, using internal signals YouTube has not fully specified. For anyone who has ever gone spelunking in a video description:…
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Agency Account Teams Are Turning AI Into Client-Specific Utilities
Coming back from maternity leave in 2024, Wendy Owen, (Senior Account Manager Publicis Pro) says the biggest surprise wasn’t staffing changes. It was how casually AI had slipped into day-to-day agency operations, especially in client services, where ambiguity and speed are basically the job description. In this telling, AI’s main impact isn’t “automation” so much…
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Hershey’s Wants Its AI Agents Measuring the Candy Spend, Not Just Buying It
While AI media-buying agents hog the attention, Hershey’s has been applying agentic tech to something less glamorous: media mix modeling. According to Digiday, the confectioner worked with Mutinex and Tracer.tech and spent a year building a system of several AI agents to produce campaign media modeling in weeks rather than months. The goal is to…
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Ipsos Tested AI Ads Against Human Ones. Viewers Mostly Shrugged.
Ipsos set up a tidy little test for generative video: take 20 :30 ads from major brands, show them to 3,000 U.S. consumers in a distracted, “real feed” viewing environment via Ipsos Creative|Spark, and see whether AI-made work can hang with the human stuff. Half the ads were human-created originals; the other half were generated…
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The Trade Desk Lets Claude Fill Out the Paperwork—Just Don’t Call It “Buying” Yet
The Trade Desk is talking to agency execs about Koa Agents, a set of agentic features meant to automate large parts of programmatic setup and troubleshooting. The system connects with whatever AI model a partner is using — including Anthropic’s Claude — through an interoperability layer called Open Agentic Kit. According to an agency exec…
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Zoom’s New Marketing Problem: Being Described Correctly by ChatGPT
Zoom CMO Kimberly Storin says a growing part of the job is now “optimizing how [Zoom] appear[s] in conversations with large language models like ChatGPT or Google Gemini.” Depending on who is making the deck, that work goes by answer engine optimization, AEO, generative engine optimization, GEO, or probably several other acronyms currently being laminated.…
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Pilots Are the New Procrastination – Insights from a recent 4As event
On Star Wars Day, agency leaders gathered to share perspectives on AI at Meta’s NYC offices in midtown Manhattan. The 4As convened independent shops, hold-co talent and platform builders for a frank conversation about AI in the agency business — what’s working, what’s hype and what’s about to break. The event traded in candor rather…
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Kohl’s Adds an AI Gift Finder for Mother’s Day, and a Data Chatbot for Employees
Kohl’s rolled out a Mother’s Day Gift Finder, a conversational AI shopping agent built with Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience, according to Retail Dive. The tool asks about a recipient’s hobbies, interests, and style, then serves up product ideas. Shoppers can also upload an image to find similar products, review product information, and…
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Dollar General’s Next AI Upgrade Is the Store Radio
Dollar General is expanding in-store audio ads to 6,000 additional stores across 48 states through QSIC, a platform that uses point-of-sale data, curated music, and AI-generated ads to plan and manage what plays over the speakers. According to Parade, the rollout will bring Dollar General’s total number of in-store audio locations to 12,000 by Q2…
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AI Citations, Demystified: The Robots Have Apparently Discovered SEO
Cyrus Shepard, founder of Zyppy SEO, went spelunking through 54 experiments, patents, and case studies and came back with a ranked list of 23 factors correlated with getting cited by AI search engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. The headline takeaway is unsexy on purpose: the top factors are URL accessibility, scoring 9.5, and plain…
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Marketers Keep Buying AI. The Skills Part Is Still Loading.
Digiday+ Research’s latest report, based on a survey of 142 brand and agency professionals plus interviews, shows AI investment moving from “nice-to-have” to “budget line item someone now has to explain.” Marketers reporting company investment in AI rose from 44% in 2022 to 57% in 2023, 71% in 2024, and 86% in 2025. The org…