What’s Next is Everything: marketing with emerging tech
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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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Google Ads Using Gemini to Predict the Conversions Its Lookback Windows Miss
Google introduced Qualified Future Conversion (QFC), a Gemini-powered metric in Google Ads that predicts the long-term revenue impact of top-of-funnel campaigns by connecting early actions — like brand searches — to expected future sales. Announced at Google Marketing Live in May 2026, it supplements rather than replaces existing conversion metrics like attributed branded searches. The…
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HelloFresh’s AI-Built Times Square Ad Ran on Its Own Back Catalog
In June, Hightouch rented Times Square to show off ads its clients built with its new AI-powered creative tool. HelloFresh’s spot was trained on the brand’s own back catalog — and what the meal-kit company actually wanted from it wasn’t scale, but the speed of the next revision.
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Hilton’s Playbook for the “Irrational Affinity Business”: Give Up Control
Hilton is giving away 1 billion Hilton Honors points in a social-first sweepstakes fronted by Paris Hilton and Formula One driver Lando Norris, whose McLaren team has been a Hilton partner for more than 20 years. Global CMO Mark Weinstein frames it as a way to “be back in culture and conversation, in a way…
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Michaels’ Ask Mike Sells the Project, Not the Keyword
Michaels says shoppers who use Ask Mike, its Gemini-powered assistant, convert at more than double the rate of those using traditional search. The more interesting claim is about basket composition: people asking for a birthday party get a project, while people searching “floral fabric” get fabric.
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Samsung TVs Get an AI Shopping Agent. Checkout Still Requires Your Phone.
Glance and Samsung formed a partnership to turn the living room screen into a personalized, AI-powered shopping destination — an agentic commerce experience rolling out across millions of Samsung smart TVs in the United States. Built on Glance’s proprietary AI platform and running on Samsung’s Tizen OS, it lets viewers create personalized shopping feeds and…
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xpln.ai Puts a Number on How Much Attention an Ad Actually Needs
Attention intelligence platform xpln.ai launched Ideal Attention Time, a metric that tells advertisers the minimum attention their creative needs to achieve basic business outcomes like product understanding and brand recognition. The startup, founded in 2022 with an attention measurement product and an attention targeting product, is working from a simple premise, per CEO and co-founder…
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Americans Are Adopting AI Fast. Understanding It Is Another Matter.
Stagwell’s National Research Group is out with a study finding that while Americans are adopting AI quickly, most still use it for basic tasks – and many aren’t sure what it is. 58% of those polled believe AI is “looking up the answer in a huge database.” Just 13% correctly said AI is guessing which…
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Google’s ATLAS Puts a Number on AI at Work: 21% of Tasks
Google’s first AI & Economy ATLAS report draws on 15 million de-identified interactions to describe what people actually do with AI. Adoption reaches 68% of occupations — but inside a typical job, AI touches about 21% of tasks, and fewer than 10% of work interactions automate anything.
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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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Walmart Trains the Shop Floor on AI — and Gets Apps Back
Walmart launched an AI certification program for associates with OpenAI in June, following a similar program with Google earlier this year. One of the first people through the new certificate was Darlene Lane, a 43-year company veteran and manager of learning and development, who says she now uses AI as a “thought partner” for building…
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Dept Builds a “Multiversal Assistant” and Won’t Bill Clients for the Glue
Dept is rolling out Deptify, an AI system accessed through a persistent assistant called “D.” The pitch is orchestration: D pulls context from whatever workflow tools a client already uses — Adobe Workfront, Asana, or something else — and routes people to the right tool for the job, instead of asking them to learn another…
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AI Is Becoming Loyalty’s Gatekeeper
Gale’s latest loyalty report is less about points and more about the chatbot now standing between a brand and the person it insists on calling a “relationship.” In “The Preference Economy,” Gale surveyed 3,000 consumers in the U.S. and U.K. and found that 56% are comfortable delegating all communications with a brand through AI. Nearly…
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Sephora Puts Checkout Inside Google’s AI Loop
Sephora expanded its partnership with Google to become the first prestige beauty retailer to enable shopping directly inside Google’s AI-powered platform through Google Agentic Checkout. In practice, this keeps shoppers on Google. They can ask beauty questions, research ingredients, compare recommendations in real time, build a routine, add products to basket, and check out without…
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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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MIT Tests AI Fake-News Help, Finds a Withdrawal Symptom
MIT Media Lab researchers ran a four-week experiment with 67 participants, asking them to judge whether news headlines and images were real or fake — sometimes with an AI chatbot helping, sometimes not. With AI assistance, participants were 21% more accurate at spotting misinformation. The catch is that the “help” appeared to come with strings:…
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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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Your Employees Are Using AI. They’re Just Not Telling You How.
A 31-year-old physician was using DoximityGPT — HIPAA-compliant and organization-approved — with a personal prompting template he said produced “astoundingly good results.” His colleagues were struggling with the same tool, and he believed the template would help. He still didn’t share it. The anecdote lands because it is so banal: nothing clandestine, nothing technically fancy,…
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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 Golden Globes’ AI Rulebook: Humans Still Need to Be in Charge
The Golden Globes published new eligibility guidelines for AI use that boil down to: AI won’t automatically disqualify a film or show, as long as “human creative direction, artistic judgment, and authorship remain primary throughout the production process.” The rules explicitly cover generative AI and put submissions on notice that the Golden Globes Eligibility Committee…
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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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Gen Z Keeps Using GenAI — And Gets Madder About It Anyway
Gallup’s latest “Voices of Gen Z” survey, conducted Feb. 24–March 4, 2026, with 1,572 U.S. 14- to 29-year-olds, sketches an audience marketers love to label “AI native,” then immediately complicates the label. Usage is steady: 51% of U.S. Gen Z say they use generative AI daily (22%) or weekly (29%). But the emotional weather has…
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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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Canva’s AI Report Says Marketers Are Using It Daily. Consumers Would Like a Label.
Canva’s State of Marketing and AI Report 2026 puts a number on the industry’s current mood: 97% of marketing leaders say they use AI in daily creative work, and 99% plan to increase AI investment this year. The audience, meanwhile, is not exactly clapping. According to the same report, 78% of consumers would rather see…