What’s Next is Everything: marketing with emerging tech
-
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…
-
“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…
-
Mastercard’s “Test Early, Scale Later” Playbook (No Shiny Objects Required)
Mastercard’s Cheryl Guerin (EVP, global brand strategy and innovation) lays out a simple operating system for emerging tech: get in early, learn fast, and only scale what earns its keep. As she puts it, “We test and learn within almost everything… We want to get in early, understand it, and then decide if it’s something…
-
Inside Pfizer’s plan to bring SEO and AI search in-house
Pfizer has moved its SEO and “AI discoverability” work fully in-house, building the capability in about 60 days, according to a LinkedIn post from its VP of performance media, Joshua Palau. That included new hires, among them Kinesso’s former director of SEO. The reasoning, per Palau: generative AI is reshaping how brands are “discovered, understood…
-
Vibe Coding: How Agencies Use AI Like Junior Developers
Agencies are starting to treat AI coding tools less like software and more like junior developers: you describe the thing, steer when it drifts, and something functional eventually appears. The article frames this as “vibe coding”—tools like Replit, Anthropic’s Claude Code, and OpenAI’s Codex letting non-engineers build internal tools and campaign assets without waiting on…
-
Wpromote’s AI Strategy: Let the Bots Pitch, But Keep the Keys
Kargo has rolled out “Project Kera,” a chat-style planning and buying interface (closed beta) aimed at making cross-channel activation feel less like stitching together five different dashboards. The pitch: one agentic layer that can pull together biddable and non-biddable inventory, with beta testers including Hershey, travel media network Navigator, and indie agency Wpromote. Kargo’s CEO…
-
How MLB is leveraging automation and data to enhance fan messaging
MLB is expanding its partnership with Adobe to help the league and all 30 clubs spin up targeted marketing campaigns faster—and at scale. The practical goal: use automation plus fan data to match messaging to how people actually follow baseball now (streaming, social, and yes, AI-powered everything). Rollout starts this season, with clubs tapping into…
-
Volkswagen’s New Art Director: An AI That Checks the Headlights (and the License Plate)
Volkswagen Group (10 brands, 6.6M vehicles delivered in the first nine months of 2025) partnered with the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center to tackle a very grown-up marketing problem: making thousands of brand-correct images without paying six figures for every photo shoot or waiting weeks for post-production and approvals. The output is an end-to-end system…
-
Gen AI Boosts Productivity, But Can’t Turn Novices Into Experts
Harvard Business School’s Iavor Bojinov and Edward McFowland III set out to test the workplace vibe we’ve all felt lately: “AI makes you feel like you can do anything. But can you do [a task] as well as people whose job it is?” In an experiment with 78 employees at IG Group, they looked at…
-
Fenty Slides Into Customer DMs (With an AI Beauty Advisor)
Fenty Beauty is taking its community-first strategy into messaging. The brand launched “Rose Amber,” an AI-powered beauty advisor on WhatsApp—its first formal partnership with the platform in the U.S.—so customers can chat with Fenty for product recommendations, tutorials, and reviews in something closer to a text thread than a product page. Inside the chat, users…
-
AI brain fry: What marketers need to know
That wiped-out feeling after “saving time” with AI now has a label: AI brain fry—mental fatigue that comes from using and, more importantly, babysitting AI tools past your cognitive limit. Research cited from Boston Consulting Group and UC Riverside (published via Harvard Business Review) surveyed 1,488 full-time US workers: 14% reported AI brain fry overall,…
-
The promise and problem of agentic AI in advertising
AI agents were everywhere around the Super Bowl this year—so brands are doing the obvious thing: chasing attention where the attention is. The twist is that both consumers and the industry are still figuring out what “agentic” actually means in practice, even as platforms keep shipping new tools. Google’s Ashish Gupta pointed to longer, more…
-
Agentic ad buying has moved from niche topic to top-tier anxiety for media planners
Agentic ad buying has officially graduated from niche curiosity to boardroom concern. In the IAB’s January 2026 Outlook Study, 40% of US ad buyers said that getting their arms around agentic ad buying and how campaigns actually get executed is one of their top worries for 2026—ranking right up there with the usual macro and…
-
Publicis Buys a Creative Crystal Ball (AdgeAI Joins the Fold)
Publicis Groupe just added another item to its AI shopping cart, acquiring Israel-based AdgeAI for an undisclosed price—funded from the $970 million deal budget it’s set aside for 2026. AdgeAI is a predictive creative analytics platform that uses machine learning to forecast which parts of an ad (video, images, text, GIFs) are most likely to…
-
America’s AI Mood: Heavy Use, Light Trust
A new Quinnipiac University poll says Americans are bringing AI into the daily routine—research, writing, school/work projects, and data analysis—but they’re keeping one hand on the eject button. Among nearly 1,400 respondents, 76% say they trust AI “rarely” or “only sometimes,” while just 21% trust it “most” or “almost all of the time.” Adoption is…
-
Louvre and Snapchat: six masterpieces come alive in augmented reality
The Louvre has teamed up with Snap’s Paris AR Studio on a free smartphone-based AR experience called The Incredible Unknowns of the Louvre. Visitors scan a QR code on the label of six selected works, which launches Snapchat and overlays reconstructions, animations, and explainers that surface details time (and museum lighting) tends to hide—like original…
-
AI Personas Meet Real-Time Culture: Agencies Test a New Insight Stack
Horizon Media, Dentsu’s Carat, and others are piloting a consumer intelligence setup built through a Slightly + Vurvey Labs partnership. The hook: Vurvey uses video surveys to create “people models” and AI personas that simulate customer behavior with claimed 93–95% accuracy—aimed at speeding product development, marketing decisions, and co-creation by turning human feedback into something…
-
Gap partners with Google Gemini to offer AI platform checkout
Gap is about to let shoppers complete a purchase straight inside Google’s Gemini, positioning itself as the first major fashion brand to wire checkout directly into the AI experience (per CNBC’s exclusive). The bet is simple: as shoppers drift from keyword search to conversational asking—“What do I wear to a wedding?” or “Help, job interview…
-
AI Agents: Plenty of Autopilot, Not Enough Seatbelts
MIT and a stack of academic collaborators reviewed documentation for 30 widely used “agentic” AI systems. TLDR: a lot of capability, not a lot of paperwork. Across eight disclosure categories, most systems provide little to no public detail on risks, safety testing, or governance. The gaps are basic. In many cases, it’s unclear whether you…
-
S4 Capital betting on agency subscription model
S4 Capital’s Sir Martin Sorrell is talking less about whether the billable hour declines, and more about what replaces it. The answer, at least for S4, is subscriptions. On the company’s latest earnings call, Sorrell described a model built around fixed annual fees that bundle senior talent with agentic workflows, brand-specific knowledge bases, and periodic…
-
Hendrick’s Unveils a New Gin With Immersive Theater Experience
Hendrick’s is rolling out its first new gin in nearly a decade, “Another Hendrick’s,” and it’s keeping the launch firmly in the real world—with a theatrical twist. The bottle blends the brand’s usual rose-and-cucumber base with orange blossoms and cacao beans. Instead of leaning on a standard media blitz, the brand built a global campaign…
-
ChatGPT Ads: Premium CPM, Spreadsheet Ops, Mystery ROI
OpenAI is getting ready to widen ChatGPT ad sales next month, and it’s already doing some course-correcting after a first pilot that left early buyers squinting at the dashboard. Agencies working with initial advertisers say the buying process felt decidedly “2009”—phone calls, emails, and spreadsheets—and the reporting hasn’t gone much further than views and clicks.…
-
Deel’s AI “Dream” Ad Nails the Hard Part: Humans
Deel’s latest 30-second spot, “Dreaming of Deeling,” leans into a literal dream sequence to sell a very un-dreamy topic: payroll. The ad follows a woman floating through clouds, pausing in front of a cityscape, then flying again as clouds morph into currency symbols—eventually joined by coworkers cruising along on their own personal cloud commutes. What…
-
Butler/Till’s agentic media-buying tests cut costs and time
Butler/Till just wrapped its first real-world test of an “agentic” programmatic buy for Geloso Beverage Group, working with PubMatic—and the numbers are hard to ignore. Across two flights (Dec. 2025–Jan.) running on CTV, online, and mobile app inventory from names like Samsung, Paramount, Vizio, and Tubi, the setup cut supply chain costs by 82% (with…
-
The Trade Desk Lets Claude Push the Buttons (Carefully)
The Trade Desk is testing whether advertisers can build campaigns using Anthropic’s Claude. Speaking at Marketecture Live in New York, CEO Jeff Green described a closed beta that lets a subset of advertisers create campaigns through a large language model. Details on what Claude actually does in the workflow are, for now, thin. Green’s broader…
-
Brand Safety’s New Headache: Deepfakes Wearing Your Logo
Gen AI is speeding up creative production. It’s also making it easier for a brand’s name, logo, or visual identity to show up in places it didn’t sign off on—and may never even see. Mod Op’s new offering, AI Risk Intelligence, is built around that blind spot. The agency’s premise: most misuse doesn’t go viral,…
-
New virtual reality experience brings an epic medieval adventure to life in London
Fever is adding another stamp to its London “VR expeditions” passport with The Last Stronghold: An Epic Medieval Adventure, launching 12 March 2026 at W12 Shopping Centre in Shepherd’s Bush. Built by Excurio with France’s Centre des monuments nationaux (CMN), it uses free-roam VR to drop visitors inside medieval Carcassonne—a UNESCO-listed fortress city—at its early-14th-century…
-
Stagwell Unveils New AI-Powered Search Platform
Stagwell has a new entry in the “optimize for the machines that answer instead of the humans that search” category. Called Search+, the platform—built by its Assembly unit with AI visibility company Emberos—is aimed at helping brands show up more favorably inside large language model outputs. The pitch: not just getting clicks, but shaping how…
-
Walmart’s “Ask Sparky” Is Ringing Up 35% Bigger Carts
Walmart says shoppers who use Sparky, its AI shopping assistant inside the Walmart app, rack up baskets about 35% larger than shoppers who don’t, according to newly appointed CEO John Furner on the company’s Q4 earnings call. Sparky lives behind the smiley-face “Ask Sparky” button and helps customers with product discovery (finding items, summarizing reviews)…
-
Spaghetti Monsters, De-Aging, and AI Twins: This Week’s Top 5 Brand Plays
ByteDance’s Seedance (now in its second generation) is the new video model fueling equal parts creative glee and IP panic. Creators have been stress-testing it with the internet’s favorite benchmark—Will Smith + spaghetti—except the latest flex is Smith fighting a spaghetti monster, posted by Magnific AI founder Javi Lopez. AI producer Billy Boman summed up…
-
3,000 Drones Light Up Hollywood for Monarch: Legacy of Monsters
Apple TV celebrated the season-two return of “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” by staging a 12-minute drone spectacle above Hollywood Forever Cemetery that basically said, “Why buy a billboard when you can rent the sky?” The show put Godzilla, Kong, and a new creature, Titan X, into the Los Angeles night—part premiere party, part public art…
-
Samsung pushes Galaxy on social with with AI-generated material
Samsung is promoting its new Galaxy AI phone with a social-first video push that leans heavily on generative AI—sometimes subtly, sometimes not. One spot on X shows skateboarders cruising with groceries, with visuals that read a bit like polished stock footage; Samsung flags it at the end with: “This content was generated with the assistance…
-
The AI Olympics Ad You Couldn’t Find (And That Was the Point)
Liquid Death ran a real, AI-generated Winter Olympics spot that looked so “is this even a real ad from the brand?” that viewers spiraled into Reddit and shaky TikTok replays trying to prove it existed. The ad features an AI figure skater pitching Liquid Death sparkling water as the less “artificial” choice—then promptly goes off…
-
Carl’s Jr. Revives Iconic Ads with AI Twist and Nostalgic Appeal
Carl’s Jr. is leaning back into the “bikinis and burgers” era after previously trying to retire it. The reboot started back in 2025, with a Super Bowl-adjacent social push featuring influencer Alix Earle – which drove social engagement. The brand saw a 91% jump in Instagram followers per Metricool and 2.5 million TikTok views in…
-
Claude as a Timeclock: What 100,000 Chats Say About Productivity
Anthropic ran a privacy-preserving analysis of 100,000 real Claude.ai conversations to estimate how long people’s tasks would take with vs. without AI help. Claude’s own scoring says the typical task would take about 90 minutes unassisted, and that using Claude cuts completion time by roughly 80% on average. They also mapped tasks to O*NET occupations…
-
Stagwell Unveils Adtech, AI-Focused Incubator
Stagwell just set up an incubator fund aimed squarely at adtech and AI-powered marketing tools. The vehicle is called Quarter Creek Ventures, and the model is straightforward: Stagwell takes a minority stake in selected projects, then backs them with seed funding (amounts not disclosed) plus practical help getting products built and into market. Beyond the…