Category: Examples
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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…