Category: Examples
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PMG Put $500,000 Behind a Cannes Hackathon and Kept None of the Code
Up to $500,000 in prize money, roughly two dozen entrants, three briefs drawn from real client problems — and PMG keeps none of the code. The agency says the Cannes hackathon demonstrates what AI has done to technical development. It is also a look at who can build.
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Gap Splits Its AI Marketing Rebuild Across Google Cloud, Zeta and Publicis Sapient
Gap has partnered with Google Cloud, Zeta Global, and Publicis Sapient to transform its marketing approach. The collaboration aims to create a scalable, real-time marketing organization using integrated data and AI. Google Cloud provides the data foundation, Zeta builds the marketing stack, and Publicis designs the operating model. The initiative focuses on enhancing content relevance,…
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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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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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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…