Tag: CPG
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Most European Ad Execs Expect Agentic Buying Within a Year. Most Still Keep People Steering.
An IAB Europe survey of 50 ad executives finds 58% expect agentic ad buying to be in operational use or at scale within a year. Yet 36 of 47 say their organizations have no agent operating day to day, or one that humans still direct, and agents mostly handle reporting.
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How Molson Coors Quadrupled Creator Engagement With Legal in 3 Lanes
Molson Coors revamped its creator marketing approval process in March 2026, transitioning to quicker, less formal briefs through The Shake Squad consultancy. This change, affecting 230 marketers across over 100 brands, has led to a fourfold increase in creator content engagement. The new system includes a legal team that streamlines decision-making and differentiates influencers from…
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Snickers Made a Candy Bar You Paste Into a Chatbot
Snickers made a candy bar for chatbots. Fans paste a digital bar into an AI assistant that has just told them a face tattoo sounds authentically them – the 2010 “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry” premise, rebuilt for a machine that agrees with everything.
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A Craft Distillery Got an Idea a Physical Shoot Would Price Out
A Michigan craft distillery doesn’t have a giant’s budget. Farley Oil and Smoke&Oakum made its bourbon spot with no physical shoot. The director says that didn’t make the ad cheaper. It made an ambitious idea worth pitching to a client this size at all.
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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.
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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…
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Unilever Scales to 300,000 Creators by Automating the Grunt Work
A year after declaring creators core to its marketing plan, Unilever has grown its creator program from 10,000 to 300,000 — and its executives are now deciding which parts of influencer marketing to hand to automated systems. “In most of the places where we are using technology, technology is used for us to augment the…
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e.l.f., L’Oréal, and Tarte Are Running the AI Playbook Other CMOs Are Still Writing
While many chief marketing officers are still working out how to fold AI into their workflows, beauty marketers have quietly become the reference implementation. Brands like e.l.f. Beauty, L’Oréal, and Kosé Corp. (owner of Tarte and Decorté) are using AI for data mining, content versioning, chatting with loyalists, and product discovery — and have restructured…
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This Month in AI Activations: Anime Strikers, Digital-Twin Dogs, and Ads That Take Your Order
Ad Age’s latest Top 5 AI activations roundup arrives in a month when Meta shipped Muse Image, the first model from its Superintelligence Labs, and Google pushed lightweight versions of its Omni video and Nano Banana image models to cut marketers’ inference costs — models that increasingly reach advertisers directly inside the ad platforms.
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Unilever’s World Cup Math: 50,000 Creators and a Super Bowl Every Two Days
Unilever, the official personal care brand of the FIFA World Cup 2026, says it has activated 50,000 creators and influencers worldwide at the tournament’s midpoint — from soccer star Trinity Rodman down to hyperlocal micro-creators — plus thousands more at House of Fresh pop-ups in New York City, Miami, and Mexico City across 10 days,…
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Dollar Shave Club Drafts the Founding Fathers Into the Razor Wars
On July 1, Dollar Shave Club rolled out “250 Years. No BS. Still Free,” a set of digital ad spots made in-house with generative AI. The setup: America’s forefathers, rendered in hyper-stylized Revolutionary War imagery, fighting “big razor monopolies.” It is the brand’s pricing grievance, but in a tricorner hat. The campaign also promotes $2.50…
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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…
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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…
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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…
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Fembots, Football & Funny: What Viewers Want From Super Bowl Ads
Turns out Super Bowl viewers mostly want to laugh—with or without the help of an algorithm. A recent Harris Poll for Ad Age found that 71% of consumers are craving funny ads during this year’s Big Game, and humor is also what sticks, with 46% saying they’re most likely to remember a funny spot. Agencies…
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Almond Breeze Roasts AI Hype with Help from the Jonas Brothers
Almond Breeze is tired of AI marketing nonsense—and they’re not alone. Teaming up with the Jonas Brothers, the brand kicked off 2026 with a three-minute comic mini-movie that turns the mirror back on runaway generative AI gimmicks. The film, created with agency McKinney and production partner Cylndr Studios, runs through a series of hilariously overproduced,…
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Rob Riggle’s AI Clone Hosts the Strangest Super Bowl Party Yet—With Guac
Just in time for Super Bowl LX, Avocados From Mexico is launching a digital experience that fuses comedy, sports prediction, and your snack table. Enter the “Guac Guru,” an AI avatar of Rob Riggle decked out like a mystical football sage, dishing out both playoff predictions and guacamole recipes. Powered by SportsDataIO and built by…
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Perrier-Jouët’s Immersive Campaign: A Holiday Sensation
Perrier-Jouët uncorked an interesting new experiential campaign, partnering with Publicis and immersive tech specialists to turn its bubbly brand into a multisensory spectacle. Two prime flagship locations—one in New York, the other in Los Angeles—were transformed over the holiday season using projection mapping, interactive decals, animated visuals, and an AR mirror that invited passersby to…
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AI Hackathon Reinvents Digital Product Placement
A new generative AI experiment called Halftime cooked up a peculiar cameo for Coca-Cola inside an old episode of “Suits”—without ever rolling film. Created in just 24 hours at an xAI hackathon by three college students, Halftime inserts digital product placements into TV scenes by building entirely new AI-generated moments. Instead of a traditional cutaway…
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Oreo’s AI Power Move: Meet AIDA, the $40M Content Machine
Mondelēz International – the company behind Oreo, Chips Ahoy!, Ritz, and more – is leaning hard into generative AI with a tool it’s calling AIDA (short for AI + Data). With an investment already topping $40 million, AIDA is designed to crank out marketing content faster and cheaper, while also tailoring ads to individual consumer…
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Brands wrestle with authenticity vs. AI
As AI-generated marketing proliferates—and fumbles—some brands are reaping rewards by leaning hard in the opposite direction: showing off the real, the tactile, the definitely-not-CGI. A spec Pepsi ad from filmmakers Luke Barnett and Noam Kroll pokes fun at synthetic storytelling with a self-aware script featuring six repetitions of the word “real” in just 60 seconds.…
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Svedka’s Super Bowl Strategy: Vodka, Robots, and a Dash of AI
For the first time in decades, vodka will return to Super Bowl ad breaks, as Svedka nabs a coveted 30-second slot just after halftime in February’s Big Game. This isn’t just Sazerac flexing its distribution muscle—CMO Sara Saunders says the vodka brand, which had been sliding, is back on the upswing since their 2024 acquisition.…
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How Dollar Shave Club Uses AI for a Fresh Marketing Approach
Dollar Shave Club is back to joking about razors—and this time, it’s using AI to do it. The men’s grooming brand, best remembered for its snarky 2011 launch video, has returned to that “rebel-jester” tone with a new 60-second spot titled “We Put Our Money Where It Matters.” Created with Israeli agency Too Short For…
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How Coca-Cola Blends AI and Emotion for Holiday Success
Coca-Cola is doubling down on artificial intelligence this season, launching “Refresh Your Holidays,” a global campaign built around a retooled version of its AI-assisted “Holidays Are Coming” ad. This 60-second spot opens on Santa cracking open a Coke and follows a fleet of holiday trucks lighting up the snowy streets—and attracting an unusually attentive pack…
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AI in Advertising: Consumer Reactions and Emotional Engagement
System1’s deep dive into generative AI advertising reveals something pundits love to debate but consumers don’t appear to care about: whether or not AI made the ad. In testing 18 AI-generated spots across three countries and 2,700 viewers, ads created with machine help actually outperformed traditional ones on emotional engagement, scoring 3.4 Stars against a…
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Pepsi Launches Prebiotic Soda, Shoppable From Your Couch
Just in time for holiday gustatory adventures, PepsiCo is cracking open the can on its new prebiotic cola. Following its acquisition of Poppi earlier this year, Pepsi is bringing functional fizz to the masses with a limited release of Pepsi Prebiotic Cola in Original and Cherry Vanilla. Each can clocks in at five grams of…
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Mercedes Brings the Heat, Moët Pops Bottles, and Peloton Hits the Strip
As the engines cooled off after the Las Vegas Grand Prix, brands were still revving up their marketing. Mercedes-Benz lit up The Sphere with a 360-degree illusion featuring its AMG GT lineup, rendered across 580,000 square feet of LED real estate. Designed by Merkley + Partners and Nexus, the activation cleverly used opposing perspectives to…