Tag: artificial intelligence
-
Google Hired Three Creative Chiefs to Make AI Spots — and Filmed Them Doing It
Jayanta Jenkins ran at least 300 iterations of his spot in Google Flow. Tiffany Rolfe had to fact-check the historical details the model invented for hers. Google put three A-list creatives on its AI tools, pointed them at small businesses, and filmed the trial and error for release alongside the ads.
-
Etsy’s 36% Sales Boost: Insights from Google’s Holiday Guide
Etsy’s gross merchandise sales rose 36% across the 2025 holiday season, partly credited to Google’s AI Max, and it is the headline case study in the guide Google sent retailers on August 21. Independent measurement of AI Max points the other way, and Google’s own footnotes do not always match the claims.
-
Agency Leaders Predict Growth in Outcomes-Based Pricing, but Face Challenges.
Eighty-five percent of agency leaders expect to do more outcomes-based pricing. The consultancy that studied it says pure versions are “exceedingly rare” — what agencies more frequently agree to is an output fee with a performance measure bolted on. Sixty-nine percent name attribution as a barrier, and the same share name procurement.
-
Brands Will Let AI Rebuild the Shoot. They Stop at the Actors.
Nearly every marketing leader now uses AI in creative work, and 49% of U.S. consumers think AI has made content quality worse. Brands are settling on rules: use AI to rebuild footage they already own, and keep AI-generated actors away from anything a customer sees.
-
AI Roundup: Pelé’s Lost Goal, a Referee’s-Eye View, and a Cap That Hides You From Cameras
A goal from 1959 that no camera recorded, rebuilt with a stunt double and Gemini Omni. A World Cup engine that finds you a second team when yours goes out. A cap that spots a phone pointed at you and covers your face. Six campaigns, one dependency.
-
Butler/Till Pointed Its Buying Agent at iHeart’s, Skipping the SSP
Two AI agents — one built by the agency, one by the publisher — met over an MCP server and placed just under $10,000 of podcast and streaming audio inventory. No SSP in the middle. Butler/Till says CPMs came in 42% below the client’s own benchmark for direct buying.
-
Goldman Puts Advertising in the Group Where AI’s Jobs Drag Already Shows
Call center employment sits 39% below trend in the U.S., down 33% in Canada, 27% below trend in Germany. Goldman Sachs puts advertising services in the same group of four industries that have fallen sharply below historical trend across developed markets. Entry-level workers are hit at least 2x harder than other categories.
-
Perplexity Blocks Time’s Agent-Only Ads and Puts Publishers’ Trust Scores at Risk
Time built ads only AI agents can see. Perplexity has decided they will not count, calls the practice deceptive, and says publishers who run them risk a hit to their trust score. Its objection is to the ads existing, not to how they are labeled.
-
Monks’ Co-Founder: The Billable Hour Punishes the Agency That Uses AI Well
Every vendor at Ai4 was selling the same tenfold speedup, which Wesley ter Haar flags as a pervasive issue with AI tooling – when the speed is off the shelf, it is not a moat. The Monks co-founder argues the real constraint is the legacy model: agencies need to stop selling time, because getting faster…
-
AI Deepens Three of Four Innovation Bottlenecks. Only the Volume Problem Shrinks.
Give every innovation team the same models and the results diverge anyway. Five marketing academics traced four stages of the pipeline and found generative AI deepens the human bottleneck at three of them; narrowing ideation, flattering fluent pitches, and simulating consumers who behave far too rationally.
-
S4 Doubled First-Half Profit. Sorrell Says the Token Spending Has Been “Ill-Disciplined.”
S4 Capital’s margins widened to 12.3% and its first-half operating profit doubled. Its chair says the company has been ill-disciplined on token spending, and Goldman Sachs expects token consumption to rise 24-fold by 2030. Monks passes token costs to clients at no margin.
-
AT&T Built a Router That Sends 45 Billion Daily Tokens to the Cheapest Model
Open models already carry a quarter of AT&T’s AI work, and its chief data and AI officer expects that to reach 70% to 80%. Cost is one reason — savings of 80% to 90% in some applications. Control over the company’s own data is the other.
-
Zoom Is Spending on Creators to Get Cited by AI Search
Zoom wants to be read as an AI-first work platform rather than a meetings app, and it is buying creator partnerships to get there. Its CMO acknowledges there is no measurable link between creators and AI citations yet. Brands are now picking creators by who the LLMs quote.
-
Bayer’s Predictive Audience Models Are Beating Its DSP Targeting 4x in Small Tests
Bayer is testing models that spot customers before they churn and price bids by individual rather than cohort — four times standard DSP effectiveness, in small tests its media chief calls a scientific experiment. Its AI search playbook runs through medical journals, not media buys.
-
Japan Airlines Scores Well on Gemini, Poorly on ChatGPT. It’s Buying Ads to Close the Gap.
Japan Airlines has a measurable problem: Gemini talks about it well, ChatGPT barely does, and Reddit — where travelers argue about premium seats — hardly mentions it at all. Its agency turned that into a targeting input, and the airline is buying its first ChatGPT ads in August.
-
ESPN’s Poker Coverage Adds an AI That Watches for Tells — After Players Are Out
The World Series of Poker returns to ESPN with an AI that reads posture and blink rate for bluffs. It runs on players only after they’ve been eliminated — and its builder doubts it would find anything on a pro who has spent a career erasing tells.
-
Time Is Selling Ads That Only AI Crawlers Can Read
Time is running a second version of its site that only AI crawlers see — and selling ads inside it. Ally Bank’s sponsored copy went to ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot; Google’s search crawler got the page humans get. Nobody has decided yet whether that kind of ad needs a label.
-
Mod Op Built Its Own AI Layer Rather Than License Seats for 500 Employees
Building rather than licensing saved Mod Op an estimated $3 million, a number describing a bill the agency never received. Its Orion platform sits over the major LLM APIs, automating agency workflows and, eventually, client ones. Most of the usage is still internal. No client has asked for a login yet.
-
WPP’s $1.8 Billion Enterprise Unit Is Selling Operating Models, Not Campaigns
WPP Enterprise Solutions now has a product line: five AI services, 12,000 people, $1.8 billion in revenue, and Accenture and Deloitte in its sights. The offer is an operating model rather than a campaign — and its CEO says the 2027 scorecard won’t be a dollar figure.
-
ampm Trades Animatronic Snacks for an AI-Built Smorgasbord
“Too Much Good Stuff” has been ampm’s platform for more than 25 years, previously carried by animatronic snack characters and in-store humor. The new campaign from RPA drops both for a generated hyper-real environment built around photographed products — the chain’s first work using AI-assisted creative tools.
-
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:…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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%),…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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,…
-
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…
-
Smart Shelves and Smarter Spend: Retail’s AI Budget Boom
Retailers and CPG companies are no longer dabbling in AI—they’re bankrolling it. NVIDIA’s latest survey shows that 90% of industry leaders plan to hike their AI budgets in 2026, focusing heavily on open-source tools and agentic AI. Why? Because AI isn’t just handling analytics; it’s pulling serious weight in supply chain forecasting, customer personalization, and…
-
Chatbot Success: JCPenney’s GiftBot Case Study
JCPenney and dentsu X took on holiday chaos headfirst with GiftBot, a chat-based shopping assistant that made gifting less stressful and more personal. Designed using dentsu’s Intelligent Messaging tech and deployed across Facebook and Instagram via click-to-message ads, GiftBot provided real-time, tailored product suggestions based on user preferences like price, rating, and category. It even…
-
AbelsonTaylor Hits Fast Forward with AT Studio
AbelsonTaylor Group just rolled out AT Studio, its new production-centric division tailored to crank out high-volume healthcare marketing assets at a much faster clip—without dropping the ball on quality. Think of it as a hybrid assembly line and art studio: a production engine that fuses manual craftsmanship with AI-assisted workflows to churn out everything from…
-
Lowe’s AI Tool Doubles Conversions — and It’s Just Getting Started
Lowe’s is doubling down on e-commerce (and conversions) through its ChatGPT-powered assistant, “Mylow.” Already live online and in-app, Mylow has delivered double the conversion rate among users, surfacing not just on-brand product picks but also DIY tutorials and how-to guides. And they’re not stopping there. In 2026, shoppers may be snapping pics of their outdated…