What’s Next is Everything: marketing with emerging tech
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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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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…
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Duluth Lets AI Bid, But Keeps Humans on the Jokes
Duluth Trading Company is taking the agentic media buying trend and drawing a fairly human boundary: AI agents can handle tasks like bidding and creative iteration management, but anything resembling brand voice, humor, or “ethos” stays closer to people with pulse rates. Marketing director Ellie Uberto framed it during a live Digiday Podcast recording at…
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Behind the A.I. Boom, a Boring Business Is Soaring With Better Ads
DribbleUp, a sports equipment company, says it used to spend its own time and resources figuring out whom to target on Facebook. For the last two years, it has placed those ads “entirely through Facebook’s artificial intelligence tools,” according to The New York Times. Since then, the company says sales have outpaced marketing expenses. It…
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Ace’s Red Vests Get an AI Backstop
Ace Hardware has added an AI voice/text layer, called “Hey ARMA,” to ARMA, the long-standing handheld used by store associates. Rolled out in February, the tool serves up product recommendations, project guidance, and aisle-level inventory while associates are on the floor with customers. According to Forbes, it has handled more than 55,000 associate queries across…
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Dick’s Sporting Goods Is Turning Chatbot Small Talk Into CRM Fuel
Dick’s Sporting Goods is preparing to launch an AI-powered “digital coach” built with Adobe, positioning it less as the usual help-desk deflection bot and more as the “front door” to the retailer’s CRM. The idea: shoppers chat about what they’re buying, playing, training for, or trying to fix — a golf swing, for example —…
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Gen Z’s AI Habit Is Mostly a Phone Habit
Publicis’ Epsilon unit has a new readout in its “The Consumer State Of AI” report, and the headline is familiar: ChatGPT has the biggest overall share of the consumer LLM market. The more useful wrinkle is the generational split. OpenAI’s ChatGPT indexes even higher with younger cohorts, followed by Google’s Gemini and Google Assistant, according…
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Nearly 80% Of Businesses Struggle To Measure AI Search Impact
Branch’s new enterprise benchmark data suggests AI-driven discovery is no longer a side quest: 26% of companies say AI search delivered more than half their site traffic in 2025, and 49% expect to cross that threshold by late 2026. AI search’s share of traffic is rising faster than traditional search (up from 35% to 50%),…
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Brands May Actually Benefit From Advertising Next to AI Content, Per Study
A new study from OM Media Trials (Omnicom Media’s research unit) and brand safety vendor Zefr suggests the panic around ads appearing next to AI-generated content needs a little nuance. They surveyed nearly 5,000 people in the U.S. and Canada, testing reactions to ads placed after eight types of AI-generated video. The headline: some AI…
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AI Is the New “What Should I Watch?” Button
Nielsen/Gracenote surveyed 4,003 U.S. AI chatbot users (ages 13–79) and found chatbots are now edging out streaming-service recommendation rails as the go-to source for what to watch. Usage is accelerating across the board: 66% say they’ve increased chatbot use in the last 12–18 months, jumping to 80% for Gen Alpha—and more than half of Gen…
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Case Study: AR Tightens Coca-Cola’s Bottling Operations
Most of the XR hype still likes to hang out in consumer land, but this case study is a reminder that enterprise use is where the receipts are showing up first. AR and VR aren’t being used to entertain here—they’re being used to make front-line work easier: AR for line-of-sight guidance during tasks like assembly,…
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Coca-Cola Uses Optical Illusion in OOH Campaign
Coca-Cola’s “You Must Love Coke” OOH push found a way to show up in football stadium ecosystems where wearing (or displaying) red can range from “not advised” to “choose-your-own-adventure.” The trick: billboards and placements that contain *zero* actual red, yet still prompt viewers to “see” Coke’s signature color anyway—because their brains do the work. It’s…
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The Creative Majority Is Here, Relocating Agency Value
Nearly one in four people globally now participate in the creative economy. AI has made production near-universal. Platforms have flattened distribution. SXSW continues to pull together the group that reflects that shift—creators, brand operators, AI researchers, neuroscientists, agency leaders—all in the same rooms, working through what creative value looks like when high-quality production is no…
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Google: AI ads driving up to 80% sales lift for some brands
Google’s message is basically: AI didn’t kill search, it just made it chattier—and ads are coming along for the ride. Alphabet cleared $400B in revenue in 2025, with Q4 ad revenue at $82.28B (+13.5% YoY) and YouTube ads at $11.38B (about +9% YoY). So despite the “AI chatbots will eat search” anxiety, Google’s ad engine…
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Starbucks launches beta app in ChatGPT to fuel new drink discovery
Starbucks just launched a beta “app” inside ChatGPT designed to spark drink ideas when customers don’t feel like starting with a menu. To use it, people enable Starbucks via ChatGPT’s app directory, then prompt the bot with “@Starbucks.” It can suggest and customize drinks and even let users pick a store location—then it hands you…
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The $31.5% Question: When Does “AI” Need a Label?
AI disclosure in ads sounds simple until you start counting what qualifies: a generated background, a synthesized soundtrack, a digital human, a product demo that never happened. That nuance matters because labeling isn’t just a legal checkbox—it can be a performance tax. Research from NYU Stern and Emory University suggests AI disclosure can cut ad…
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Can AI-Assisted Market Research Be Trusted?
Semaine Health’s CMO, Joahne Carter, wanted to reposition the women’s health supplement brand without paying big-brand research prices—or waiting 3–6 months for the usual focus groups and quant. So she and Y2S Consulting founder Yogesh Chavda used an agentic AI workflow to pressure-test 15 positioning concepts using synthetic respondents. But Carter didn’t fully disclose the…
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$1M, 21 AI Spots, and a Ticket to Cannes: Luma’s “Dream Brief” Goes Public
Luma AI’s “Dream Brief” set out to get working creatives hands-on experience with the product. Over two months, the contest pulled nearly 400 AI-made ad submissions from 58 countries and more than 100 agencies, then a panel of heavy hitters narrowed it to 21 spots headed to Cannes Lions. The hook is simple (and very…
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AI adoption rises at work, but leaders use it most frequently
A new Gallup poll (via Axios) suggests the internal AI adoption curve has a familiar shape: leadership first, everyone else squinting at the change log. Even as companies debate whether to mandate AI or let employees experiment, the people at the top are the ones reaching for it most often—at least in organizations where AI…
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Nano Banana 2: When Product Shots Go From “All-Day Edit” to “Blink and It’s Done
WPP says it’s been testing Google’s newest Generative Media model, Nano Banana 2, through early access—alongside Unilever and The Coca-Cola Company. The headline result isn’t “cool AI stuff,” it’s practical: the team reports better reasoning and grounding, which translated into factually accurate outputs and high-fidelity visuals (read: fewer weird brand-label hallucinations and less time fixing…
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“Made by Humans” Becomes the New Flex
As AI-made “slop” clogs feeds, some brands are trying a different kind of label: not “made with AI,” but “not made with AI.” The pitch is simple—if consumers are increasingly suspicious of what they’re seeing, brands want to get in front of that skepticism by spelling out when people, images, and videos are real. Aerie…