The Ad Stack took a backseat for a bit. I lost a beloved father-in-law, Johnny O. While plastic people tell you they're “a veteran of fighting wars and deep in the trenches” (in advertising), this dude was the real deal. Saw action, including bullets and many who paid the ultimate sacrifice; helping push the Chinese way the heck north of the 38th parallel.

Always up for a challenge, he went on to help raise five daughters. Passed on just short of his 96th birthday. Experiences such as these seem to steel your will to live. His was great. And so was he.

I can’t fly right now (but neither can most others). This necessitated a round-trip train ride (coach) between Chicago and San Diego. This hobbit's adventure bestowed upon me every non-sexually transmittable illness possible under the sun. I also had my iPhone boosted from me within three hours of arrival. Last I checked it was in Tijuana. My beloved spouse did me proud telling the would-be ransomers to “burn in hell” so I don't expect to see that phone again soon.

Here's a map of its last known location in case you're in the neighborhood in Tijuana and want to swing by and check up on it for me.

I returned three weeks ago with conjunctivitis, hearing loss, and most likely COVID. I was pressed to soldier on based on today's content, so let's get to it.

OpenAI Kills Sora, Pulling a $1 Billion Rug on Disney. The Body Is Still Warm.

This week’s most instructive case study in how the AI industry actually operates arrived via a four-sentence social post and a billion-dollar partnership that apparently had the structural integrity of wet tissue paper.

Efficiency is important.

Brevity, Cowardice, and the Four-Sentence Funeral

OpenAI announced it was “saying goodbye to Sora,” the short-form AI video app that went viral six months ago and hit one million downloads in under five days.

And by “saying goodbye,” they meant: no explanation, no timeline, no acknowledgment of the billion-dollar strategic partner currently in the room. Just a tasteful little corporate eulogy; light on facts, heavy on “your creations mattered.”

If you’ve ever wondered what it looks like when a company tries to quietly delete a product without triggering questions from investors, regulators, partners, or basic adult supervision, this is the template.

What they did not mention, because transparency is more of a vibe than a practice, was the detail that actually matters.

On Monday evening, Disney and OpenAI teams were actively working on a Sora-related project. Thirty minutes after the meeting ended, Disney was informed the product was being shut down.

Thirty. Minutes.

Not “end of quarter.” Not “sunsetting over 90 days.” Not even “we regret to inform you.” Thirty minutes. That’s not a transition plan. That’s a drive-by.

One person familiar with the situation called it a “rug-pull,” which feels generous. Rugs at least imply something was anchored to the floor.

And just to underscore the achievement here: this is Disney. The company that will litigate you into a different tax bracket for drawing Mickey Mouse from memory. OpenAI gave them less notice than a barista gives before calling last orders.

The Billion-Dollar Deal That Wasn’t (But Definitely Was, Until It Wasn’t)

Let’s review, because this part is doing a lot of work.

In December, Disney agreed to license Mickey Mouse, Cinderella, and the rest of the intellectual property GDP of a small nation to OpenAI. In exchange: a $1 billion stake, structured entirely in stock warrants.

No cash. Just vibes and a cap table.

Today, the deal is off. The partnership is over. The warrants are worth exactly what you’d expect from a product that no longer exists.

We are now living in a world where billion-dollar partnerships are announced (celebrated, and undoubtedly turned into at least three conference panels) can be unwound faster than a group chat argument.

If you’re keeping score at home: the lifecycle of this deal was longer in PowerPoint than it was in reality.

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What Sora Actually Was (Versus What You Were Sold)

In September, the tech press more or less declared Sora the future of video. The phrase “GPT moment for video” got thrown around with the kind of confidence typically reserved for things no one intends to revisit later.

In practice, Sora was an AI-first TikTok clone where users could scan their faces and generate hyper-realistic videos.

Which, predictably, turned into:

• Deepfakes of public figures

• Copyright violations at industrial scale

• And content moderation challenges that could generously be described as “aspirational”

Within days, the platform became a greatest hits compilation of “things you absolutely should not be able to generate on a consumer app.”

Nothing says “next-generation creative platform” like legal exposure across estates, unions, and half of global IP law.

Downloads dropped 45% by January. Turns out “unlimited synthetic video of anything” is less compelling when it immediately becomes a compliance nightmare.

The Real Reason: It Was Expensive and Inconvenient for the IPO Deck

OpenAI says it needs to “make trade-offs on products with high compute costs.”

Which is technically true, in the same way “we’re restructuring” technically means “we found the problem and it was this entire product line.”

Translation:
Sora was expensive to run, not meaningfully monetized, legally radioactive, and deeply unhelpful when you’re trying to convince public markets you’re a disciplined, enterprise-grade company.

You do not walk into an IPO roadshow with a loss-making deepfake video app and say, “Don’t worry, it’s for creators.”

You kill it. Quickly. Preferably before anyone updates the S-1.

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What Marketing Leaders Should Take From This (Other Than a Deep Breath)

For the past 18 months, you’ve been told AI video would revolutionize production. Sora was the demo. The proof point. The slide everyone nodded at.

That product is now gone.
The billion-dollar partner validating it: gone.
The consumer platform meant to drive adoption: gone.
The roadmap your vendors definitely referenced: also gone.

The lesson isn’t that AI video is dead. It’s that there’s a meaningful difference between a demo, a product, and a business; and the industry has been aggressively pretending those are interchangeable.

If your strategy depends on a platform existing, it’s worth asking whether that platform can survive a Tuesday morning internal prioritization meeting.

Because increasingly, that’s the only durability test that matters.

Build vendor relationships accordingly.
Structure contracts accordingly.
And the next time someone waves a billion-dollar partnership in your face as validation, ask the only question that counts:

“How long after our next call can this disappear?”

The future of AI video is real.

It just currently has the lifespan of a trending hashtag.

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The $85 Million Super Bowl Ad That DDoS’d Itself

A company acquired AI.com for a reported ~$70 million; one of the most expensive domain purchases ever. The thesis was simple and, on paper, kind of brilliant:

Own the literal front door to the AI industry.

They then did what any rational actor would do after spending $70M on a URL:
they dropped another ~$15M on a Super Bowl ad to send millions of people there all at once.

So far, this is less “mistake” and more “aggressively on-strategy.”

And then (immediately) the site broke.

Not “a little slow.”
Not “some errors.”
Fully fell over under the exact traffic spike they explicitly paid to create.

What Actually Broke (And Why It’s So Funny)

The failure point wasn’t some exotic scaling issue.

It was login.

More specifically: reliance on Google authentication as a critical dependency.

So the flow was:

1. Spend $15M telling America to go to AI.com

2. Millions show up

3. Everyone clicks “Sign in with Google”

4. Bottleneck → failure → dead experience

They didn’t get taken down by hackers.

They recreated a distributed denial-of-service attack… on themselves.

Paid media as chaos engineering.

Why This Is Actually Instructive (Not Just Embarrassing)

This wasn’t just a tech hiccup. It exposed three deeper problems that show up everywhere in AI right now:

1. Distribution > Product (Until It Isn’t)

They nailed awareness.

• Best domain imaginable

• Biggest stage imaginable

• Massive top-of-funnel spike

But distribution only works if there’s something durable on the other side.

Otherwise, you’ve just engineered the world’s most expensive bounce rate.

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2. The “Login Wall” Anti-Pattern

Forcing authentication before value is revealed is already risky.

Doing it at Super Bowl scale is… bold.

Users showed up curious and got:

“Before we explain anything, please authenticate.”

That’s not onboarding. That’s a conversion tax. Friction Blowtorch.

3. AI Hype Is Outrunning Infrastructure

This is the same pattern you saw with:

• Early GPT plugins

• AI image tools melting GPUs

• And now: consumer-facing AI hubs collapsing under attention

The industry is very good at:

Generating demand

It’s still catching up on:

Handling it

So… What Is AI.com, Really? (The Deeper Play)

Now let’s connect it to the bigger picture, because the crash is just the symptom.

AI.com Is a $70M Bet on Owning Intent

Whoever controls AI.com controls:

• Direct navigation (“type-in traffic”)

• Default mental model (“this must be the place for AI”)

• A ridiculous amount of unearned authority

It’s like owning:

• “Bank.com” for fintech

• “Travel.com” for tourism

Except this category is still forming in real time.

But the Product Isn’t Fully Decided Yet

Right now, AI.com is stuck between identities:

• Aggregator (hub for tools)

• Platform (build-your-own AI workflows)

• Identity layer (log in once, use everywhere)

• Lead gen funnel (capture and route users elsewhere)

And the Super Bowl stunt exposed that ambiguity brutally.

Because when millions of people show up at once, you don’t get to be vague.

Why the Login Broke the Illusion

The moment you hit “Sign in with Google,” the illusion collapses:

• It’s not a universal AI layer

• It’s not infrastructure

• It’s a product… borrowing someone else’s infrastructure

Which raises an uncomfortable question:

If Google controls the login… who actually owns the user?

The Most Likely Endgame

This isn’t really about building a destination.

It’s about one of three outcomes:

1. Acquisition
   Someone like Microsoft, OpenAI, or Google buys it to control the front door.

2. Traffic Arbitrage Machine
   Route users to tools, take a cut, become the Kayak of AI.

3. Default Homepage for AI
   If they can eventually build enough utility, AI.com becomes a starting point like a browser homepage.

The Ad Stack Moral of the Story

This whole episode is basically a perfect parable:

• Spend $70M on brand

• Spend $15M on distribution

• Spend… less time on product clarity and infrastructure

And then act surprised when reality shows up all at once.

The funniest part isn’t that it crashed.

It’s that the crash revealed the truth:

AI.com doesn’t have a scaling problem.
It has a what is this thing? problem.

And unfortunately, that’s a lot harder to patch than a login endpoint.

I hope you find this gumbo of value.

Feel free to share comments below. If you enjoyed this read, for the love of God please whack the bejabbers out of the heart icon at the top or bottom of the page so others can find this article. Re-stacking is great too.

Have a great week people!

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• Please forward this to three randos, dorks, colleagues, or someone you met today.

• Like and Re-stack it below so others can find it!

• Drop a comment. If you’re into it, if it sucks … perhaps drop a Haiku about programmatic AI. Your call.

The Ad Stack is now ranked #7 in the Satire category and # 7 in Advertising per Inbox Reads.

This week: The New Agency of Today

1. Who’s winning inside agencies

2. Who’s quietly screwed

3. What clients will demand next

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AI did not flatten agencies.

It sorted them.

What looks like a general acceleration is actually a quiet redistribution of power. Some people are becoming indispensable. Others are discovering that their relevance was attached to a process that no longer exists. Clients, watching all of this unfold in real time, are already recalibrating what they expect and who they are willing to pay.

This is not a future state. It is already happening inside the building.

1. Who’s Winning Inside Agencies

Anyone who understands how work actually moves now has leverage. Not in theory. In practice. These are operators who know how tools connect, where decisions get made, and how inputs shape outputs. They do not romanticize ideas. They shape conditions. They decide what the machine sees and what it never touches.

Power has shifted away from originators toward orchestrators.

The person who can frame the problem cleanly now matters more than the person who can generate the most interesting response to it.

Closely related are the translators.

People who can move between creative, technical, and commercial language without mystifying any of it. They can explain what the system does, what it cannot do, and why the output looks the way it does. They do not oversell certainty, but they do sell confidence. That combination is suddenly rare and highly valued.

Then there are leaders who can kill work quickly.

Speed alone is no longer impressive. Everyone has speed. What stands out now is subtraction. The ability to look at ten viable options and remove nine without ceremony. Taste plus decisiveness has become a form of authority. Not because it feels good, but because it keeps things moving without hiding behind process.

Finally, anyone who owns something that looks proprietary is winning, even if it barely is.

Internal tools. Custom workflows. Datasets. Frameworks with names. The actual defensibility matters less than the perception of it. In a world where output is cheap, anything that appears hard to replicate buys time, margin, and credibility. Agencies understand this, which is why so many of them are suddenly describing themselves like software companies while insisting they are not one.

2. Who’s Quietly Screwed

The people in trouble are not being laid off first. They are being ignored.

Specialists whose value was defined by a single output are feeling it already.

Roles built around execution rather than judgment lose gravity when execution becomes abundant. This does not hit the top or the bottom first. It hits the middle. The layer that once translated time into value now has less to translate.

Creative leaders who cannot explain their value are also exposed.

Intuition alone does not survive contact with instant output. When work appears in hours, “trust me” stops working as a leadership strategy. Taste still matters, but only if it can be articulated and defended in the same language clients now use to evaluate everything else.

Strategy is another quiet casualty, especially when it exists only as slides.

Insight that does not turn into rules, constraints, prompts, or decisions dissolves quickly. Thinking that lives at kickoff but never touches the system becomes ceremonial. Strategy that cannot operate inside the machine is treated as decoration, even if it is smart.

Then there are the people who were protected by process.

Meetings. Rituals. Review cycles. Layers of approval. Four account people because that’s how we’ve always done it. For a long time, friction created safety. It absorbed accountability and justified headcount. When speed increases, that cover disappears. The work shows up faster, and so does the question of who actually decided anything.

No announcement is made. The org chart just starts to feel thinner.

3. What Clients Will Demand Next

Clients have already seen what speed looks like. That novelty is gone. Faster is no longer enough.

What they want next is control.

Not control over every decision, but visibility into how decisions happen. They want access to the systems producing the work. Dashboards. Logic. Guardrails. Less black box. More shared surface area. If the agency cannot explain how the machine works, the client will eventually decide they should own it themselves.

They will also demand proof of judgment, not just performance.

“It worked” is no longer a satisfying answer. Clients will ask why it worked, why this output was chosen over others, and who is accountable when optimization produces something technically effective but strategically wrong. Someone will need to say no to the machine, and mean it.

Clients will also push for fewer people with clearer ownership.

Large teams made sense when time was the constraint. When output is instant, coordination becomes the bottleneck. Clients will prefer smaller groups with named responsibility over sprawling teams with shared accountability. They will pay for decisiveness again, because indecision is now the most expensive thing in the room.

Finally, they will demand distinctiveness on purpose.

Endless variation stops feeling impressive when everything starts to blur together. Clients will notice sameness before agencies do. They will want constraint, not abundance. Clear brand boundaries that survive optimization instead of dissolving inside it. The agency that can design those boundaries and enforce them will stand out quickly.

The New Shape of Power

AI did not remove hierarchy inside agencies. It rewrote it.

The winners are not necessarily more creative, more technical, or more visionary. They are clearer. They know where decisions live, how systems behave, and when to intervene.

The people in trouble are not wrong or untalented. They are simply attached to a version of value that depended on delay.

Clients are not confused about this. They are watching closely. They are learning faster than agencies expect.

The next phase will not be about who can produce more work, faster. That phase is already over.

It will be about who can choose less, explain it plainly, and stand behind it when the chart says otherwise.

I hope you find this mumbo jumbo of value.

Feel free to share comments below. If you enjoyed this read, for the love of God please whack the bejabbers out of the heart icon at the top or bottom of the page so others can find this article. Re-stacking is great too.

Have a great week people!

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Before you go ...

• Please forward this to three randos, dorks, colleagues, or someone you met today.

• Like and Re-stack it below so others can find it!

• Drop a comment. If you’re into it, if it sucks … perhaps drop a Haiku about programmatic AI. Your call.

The Ad Stack is now ranked #7 in the Satire category and # 7 in Advertising per Inbox Reads.

Dribs and Drabs

"Slop" Named Word of the Year

Every image I rendered was gross.

Merriam-Webster chose "slop" as 2025's word of the year specifically because of AI-generated content. "Like slime, sludge, and muck, slop has the wet sound of something you don't want to touch," CNN wrote the editors. One artist created "Slop Evader," a browser extension filtering web searches to only show results from before November 2022—before ChatGPT's release.

TL;DR vibe:

The holding company world is in full reorg + AI-stack sprint mode. Mergers, platform launches, reshuffled agency brands, branding, major layoffs, re-branding, and big account wins/losses are all part of the playbook in 2026. It’s a weird mix of tech build-outs and shrinkage of old creative identities.

Sponsor:

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CES 2026 Headlines: A Calm, Reasonable Trade Show For an Industry That Has Absolutely Lost the Plot

Also, What will 2026 agency life look like?

CES is where the future is unveiled annually in Las Vegas, a city chosen specifically because no one will remember what happened there. It’s the Consumer Electronics Show, which in advertising terms means “a week-long press release hallucination where brands announce products that will be quietly deprecated by Q3.”

This year’s CES headlines were… familiar.

Comfortingly unhinged. A greatest-hits album of buzzwords performed by executives who definitely rehearsed saying “AI-powered” in the mirror.

Let’s begin …

1. “AI Is Embedded in Everything”

Yes. We know. So is microplastics. This is not automatically good.

Every holding company showed up with a slightly different version of the same slide:

Omnicom. WPP. Publicis. Havas. Stagwell bought The Machine from Code & Theory** who has been Beta testing with other agencies. All proudly debuting platforms that promise to unify creativity, media, data, commerce, and probably your unresolved childhood issues into a single dashboard.

** C&T also did the rebranding for the Washington Commanders football team. Quite the diverse offering.

These platforms are always described as:

• “End-to-end”

• “Human-centered”

• “Transformational”

They are never described as:

• “Actually enjoyable to use”

• “Finished”

• “Not a reskinned middleware product with a new logo”

2. “Creativity at the Speed of Culture”

This headline appeared roughly 47 times, often next to a demo that took six minutes to load and featured a generative video of a person with a magical disappearing third arm.

Speed of culture, in practice, now means:

1. Auto-generate 10,000 variants

2. Test them against historical bias

3. Optimize toward the safest possible output

4. Declare victory

5. Win an award for bravery

Culture remains un-consulted.

3. “Hyper-Personalization at Scale”

Still undefeated as the most dangerous phrase in marketing.

CES demos proudly showed ads that adapt in real time to user behavior, location, mood, inferred intent, and whether Mercury is in retrograde. The promise: every consumer gets a message crafted just for them.

The reality: everyone gets the same beige nothing, rearranged slightly.

Personalization, as always, is extremely good at answering questions no one asked. “What if this banner ad knew you were tired?” Great. I am still not clicking it.

4. “The Death of the Traditional Agency Model”

This headline shows up every year at CES, like a seasonal flu.

The traditional agency model has allegedly died:

• Because of AI

• Because of creators

• Because of in-housing

• Because of consultancies

• Because of platforms

• Because of vibes

And yet, somehow, it keeps billing hours and showing up on org charts like a raccoon that refuses to leave the dumpster.

What has changed is the pitch. Agencies are now:

• “AI orchestration partners”

• “Creative systems designers”

• “Operating model consultants who also do TikTok”

Everyone still makes decks.

5. “Creators Are the New Media Companies”

This one is actually true, which is why it made everyone uncomfortable.

CES was packed with creator economy panels where brands nodded earnestly while realizing, in real time, that a 23-year-old with a ring light has better audience trust than their entire content studio.

Expect many AI-powered “creator simulators” to be announced before anyone asks whether that’s deeply cursed.

6. “Measurement Has Finally Been Solved”

Absolutely not.

Every CES claims to have cracked measurement. This year’s version leaned hard into attention metrics, emotion tracking, and “outcome-based” everything.

Which is great, except:

• Attention is not intent

• Emotion is not persuasion

• Outcomes are still defined after the fact

But the dashboard looks incredible.

7. “AI Will Free Humans to Be More Creative”

The most optimistic headline of all, delivered directly into a room full of people quietly wondering if their job will exist next year.

AI will free humans. Yes, mostly from:

• First drafts

• Versioning

• Mood boards

• Any sense of authorship

It will also free management from needing to understand how creative work actually happens. Which feels… related.

The unspoken CES truth: AI isn’t replacing creativity. It’s replacing patience. And patience was doing a lot of work.

8. The Real CES Story (As Always)

The real headline isn’t any single announcement. It’s the collective posture.

Advertising showed up at CES desperate to look like tech, while tech showed up desperate to look human. Everyone met in the middle and called it innovation.

The holding companies want to be platforms. Platforms want to be storytellers. Brands want certainty. Consumers want less of all of this.

CES didn’t reveal the future. It revealed the coping mechanisms.

And the biggest headline, the one no one put on a slide?

9. “Nobody Knows What The Final Form of This Is, But The Budget Has Already Been Approved.”

Same time next year.

What Agency Work Feels Like Now

Versus Three Years Ago

Three years ago, agency work felt like a job. A chaotic job, sure, but one with meetings you could prepare for, decks that survived more than one revision, and a vague sense that tomorrow would resemble today.

Now it feels more like being dropped into a live beta test run by your most confident client, your least technical coworker, and an algorithm that learned strategy by taking a free LinkedIn online course. Same title. Same deadlines. Entirely different physics.

1. Fewer “big moments,” more constant motion
Creative used to move in bursts: brief → idea → sell → make.

Now it’s a drip feed of outputs.

• Endless versions

• Rolling optimizations

• “Just one more quick test”

• Creative that’s technically never done

The work feels less like campaigns and more like content maintenance.

Opinion: This quietly burns people out faster than crunch ever did. There’s no finish line anymore.

2. Juniors skipped the fun part; AI ate the entry-level creative ladder.

• Mood boards? Generated.

• First drafts? Generated.

• Explorations? Generated.

Juniors are now asked to edit tastefully before they’ve had time to develop taste. Seniors are suddenly doing more hands-on work again — not because they want to, but because “someone has to QA the robot.”

Opinion: We’re creating a weird hollow middle where people jump from intern to “AI wrangler” without learning how ideas are born.

3. Strategy quietly got louder.

Because AI can make anything, clients now ask: “Why this?”

That means:

• More upfront positioning debates

• More alignment meetings

• More frameworks

• More “decision hygiene” (kill me)

Strategy teams are either thriving or drowning, no in-between.

Opinion: This is good for the industry long-term, painful in the short term, and absolutely brutal for timelines.

4. Client relationships have shifted.

• Clients think they’re closer to the work
  AI tools gave clients a taste of the kitchen.

Now they:

• Generate their own concepts

• Bring half-baked prompts to reviews

• Ask why your version isn’t “more like the one ChatGPT gave us”

This has blurred the line between collaboration and interference.

Opinion: Clients don’t want to replace agencies — they want agencies to validate their prompts.

5. Trust moved from craft to systems.

Old trust: “They’re brilliant.”
New trust: “Their platform works.”

Clients now buy:

• Repeatability

• Speed

• Predictability

They are less impressed by a single genius idea and more impressed by a system that can spit out 400 acceptable ones without drama.

Opinion: This favors holding companies and hurts boutique shops; unless boutiques lean hard into taste and POV.

6. Procurement got way bolder.

Once AI entered the room, procurement smelled blood.

• “Why does this take four weeks?”

• “Why does this need six people?”

• “Why does this cost that much if AI helped?”

Agencies are now constantly explaining the human margin in their pricing.

Opinion: If agencies don’t reframe value around judgment, risk, and accountability, procurement will price them like software.

7. The Weirdest Part.

Everyone is pretending this is temporary
Leadership language still sounds like:

• “We’re experimenting”

• “We’re piloting”

• “We’re learning”

Meanwhile, org charts, scopes, and P&Ls are being permanently rewritten.

Opinion: The denial phase is over. The bargaining phase is loud. Acceptance hasn’t hit yet.

8. The Big Truth Nobody Puts in Decks.

AI didn’t make agencies less important.
It made taste, clarity, and decisiveness the only things that matter.

The agencies doing well right now:

• Push back

• Kill work faster

• Define fewer, stronger ideas

• Act like adults in the room

The ones struggling:

• Overproduce

• Overpromise

• Hide behind tools

• Confuse motion with progress

Next week:

Who’s winning inside agencies

Who’s quietly screwed

What clients will demand next

This stuff gets even spicier.

Thanks for the read.

Feel free to share comments below. If you enjoyed this read, for the love of God please whack the bejabbers out of the heart icon at the top or bottom of the page so others can find this article. Re-stacking is great too.

Have a great week people!

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Before you go ...

• Please forward this to three randos, dorks, colleagues, or someone you met today.

• Like and Re-stack it below so others can find it!

• Drop a comment. If you’re into it, if it sucks … perhaps drop a Haiku about programmatic AI. Your call.

Dribs and Drabs

I’m hearing creatives have moved on from providing paper edits to providing rough cuts in Descript themselves which goes on into final edit by a grownup with bigger editing software. Descript is AI-driven. In theory you type prompts of what you want and voila! You don’t need to know where any of the “editing buttons” are.

Descript sucks. It’s punching above it’s weight just to do the aforementioned. They’ll sort it out because we need AI shoved into everything. In my experience it’s pre-beta.

Also heard client request of “Fast is better than good and lower production value is fine.”

Are they discussing marketing or manufacturing?

The 2026 AI Advertising Headlines

An Earnest Attempt to Reintroduce Cause and Effect

• In 2026, advertising will finally admit that AI did not make us smarter. It just made us faster at doing the same bad ideas, everywhere, all at once.

• Every brand will claim its AI is ethical. This will be based on vibes. Somewhere, a PDF will exist. No one will open it. The AI will still recommend a sympathy ad next to a true crime podcast, but the press release will say “responsibly.”

• AI will be declared culturally fluent. It will misuse slang with confidence. It will explain memes long after they are dead. It will surface insights like “people enjoy feeling seen,” and agencies will nod as if this was discovered through computation rather than basic observation.

• Purpose will be automated. Campaigns will feature algorithmically generated diversity, tasteful melancholy, and copy that suggests progress without naming any. The case study will claim impact.

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  The outcome will be a banner ad.

• At least one brand will need an AI apology tour. The mistake will happen globally in seconds. The apology will also be written by AI. It will say “We are listening” while changing nothing

  

• Synthetic influencers will demand authenticity from real humans. They will post raw content that took days to render. Comments will be turned off to protect the conversation.

• Junior roles will vanish. Senior leaders will mourn the loss of “craft” while asking the AI for ten more decks before lunch.

• Real people will become a premium feature. Campaigns will brag about using humans the way menus brag about free range eggs. Finance will ask if the humans are necessary.

• AI will analyze billions of data points and conclude that people like ease, clarity, and not being annoyed. This will be positioned as revolutionary.

  

• An award will be won for prompting. The work will look familiar. The write-up will not. The final master edit is seven seconds in length. The director’s cut ups it to 10.

• By the end of 2026, the most radical brand move will be having a clearly labeled button that actually connects to a person. It will be hidden. It will still be routed through AI first.

2026 Predictions: Go Bifurcate Yourself

The Year AI Marketing Splits Into “Boring” and “Nightmare Fuel”

Here are some thoughts for 2025/2026, because if you’re not planning for this split, you’re already behind.

1. Target Uses Trillion-Dollar Alien Intelligence to … Read a Toddler’s Handwriting.

On November 12, Target released List Scanner. You photograph your Christmas list or child’s unholy crayon summoning ritual to Santa, and Target turns it into a shopping cart. No music swell. No brand manifesto. No gentle voice assuring you that capitalism understands your feelings.

Just problem, solution, money.

“When they use the Target app in-store, their basket sizes are nearly 50% higher,” said Target’s chief guest experience officer. Translation: boring AI that removes friction prints cash.

This is the Boring Track. AI that keeps its head down, does the job, and does not ask to be loved. Consumers are fine with this. Delighted, even. That is, if they notice it. What they do not want is AI pretending to be their buddy, therapist, or seasonal memory curator.

The 2026 prediction writes itself. The next big agency retainer is not for content. It is for infrastructure. Logistics bots. Checkout fixes. Inventory intelligence. The creative brief shifts from “Make us cry during the Super Bowl” to “Why are people abandoning carts at step three.”

Half the creatives reading this are about to learn their new title is “UX friction diagnostician.” Congratulations on the promotion.

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2. The Uncanny Valley Becomes a Mass Grave

Then we have the other track. The one that a marketer drove into like a drunk tourist on a Vespa. “Nightmare Fuel.”

The AI remake of memorable commercials should be taught in business schools as a masterclass in misunderstanding your own brand equity. This story has been chewed plenty. Briefly, a beloved commercial, something that worked because it was real humans creating shared memory was run through an AI pipeline that made people appear re-animated.

The technology wasn’t ready. It is still not ready. It may never be ready. HOWEVER, if they tossed $ my way I would have jumped at the opportunity too. Probably would have done it for free and delivered a Post-It reading “Never mind.” No win scenario.

Meanwhile, despite 61% positive sentiment in some surveys, the fact that the discourse around your Christmas ad brought forth measurable negativity suggests you might have missed the assignment. Boycott seems a bit extreme to me.

McDonald’s in The Netherlands hit this brick wall a year later for different reasons. It’s AI. Period. The creative also nixed but I rather enjoyed it. But this one followed recommendations of our next example. It worked due to lack of human warmth - and plenty of it.

Here’s the rule for 2026 that agencies are learning the hard way: You cannot use AI to simulate human warmth. It doesn’t work. Stop trying. AI excels at weird sh*t. Which brings us to ….

3. When The Weird Sh*t Works: The Kalshi Exception

Kalshi understood the assignment.

Their NBA Finals ad featured a farmer floating in eggs, an alien pounding beers, a pot-bellied man holding a Chihuahua, and a runaway bride escaping cops on a golf cart. It cost two thousand dollars. It took two days. It was made entirely with AI.

Traditional Finals ads cost hundreds of thousands, months of meetings, and weeks of congratulatory LinkedIn posts. Kalshi got eighteen million impressions in forty-eight hours, and the line “The world’s gone mad, trade it” landed because the ad looked exactly like a world that had gone mad.

They did not pretend it was real. They made it surreal. The glitch was the point.

Here are the new laws of Gen AI physics:

• If you need trust, warmth, or sincerity, use humans and cameras.

• If you need chaos, dream logic, or impossible visuals in a cozy fever dream, use AI and lean in. Hard.

The middle ground, where AI tries to pass as a normal TV spot, is a mass casualty event.

4. The Agentic Nightmare (For Agencies)

The bigger shift is not what AI makes. It is what AI does.

In 2025, agencies used AI to generate things. In 2026, AI executes workflows. End to end. Autonomously. No coffee. No paid dental. No awkward feedback sessions.

If you are billing twenty hours to resize five hundred banners, that work now takes ten minutes and an agent prompt.

The billable hour model for junior labor just got gently escorted behind the barn.

Agencies will pivot to selling systems instead of hours. This sounds visionary until you remember that much of agency leadership still thinks AI means asking ChatGPT to spice up a headline.

Most marketers plan to rely more heavily on AI. They already know the trade-off. Volume goes up. Nuance disappears. Everyone pretends this is fine.

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Additional Predictions, Because Of Course

• Several major brands will get caught using AI versions of real people without proper disclosure. Fashion and beauty will lead the charge. The lawsuits will be magnificent.

• A full AI customer service stack will hallucinate the same wrong answer at scale. It will trend. The CEO will apologize. The bots will remain.

• Holding companies will announce “AI transformations” that look suspiciously like layoffs. They will call it future-proofing. Wall Street will clap. The work will suffer.

• At least one agency will rename production as “Agentic Solutions.” Same people. Same work. Worse titles.

• “AI Skeptic” will become a real brand position. A smart marketer will sell the idea of human-made products. It will work better than anyone wants to admit.

• One brand’s AI holiday ad will outperform their human one and cause a quiet C-suite meltdown. They will double down on AI the following year.

The Bottom Line

AI is splitting into two species. One is boring and useful and quietly profitable. The other is surreal and chaotic and honest about what it is.

The danger lives in the middle. The fake real. The synthetic warmth. The slop that wants applause for approximating humanity.

Target built a scanner and made more money. Kalshi spent two grand and embraced madness.

So when you plan for 2026, pick a lane. Build boring infrastructure or create a fever dream. If you try to do both, you are not innovating. You are just manufacturing a nightmare.

Thanks for the read.

Feel free to share comments below. If you enjoyed this read, for the love of God please whack the bejabbers out of the heart icon at the top or bottom of the page so others can find this article. Re-stacking is great too.

Have a great week people!

Sources:

Target Launches New AI-Powered Features - Corporate Target

Coca-Cola’s 2025 AI Holiday Ad Backlash - CNN Business

Coca-Cola keeps pushing limits of generative AI despite backlash - Marketing Dive

Coca-Cola’s AI Christmas ad sparks backlash (again) - Euronews

An AI video ad is making a splash - NPR

Kalshi’s $2K NBA Finals AI Ad - DesignRush

Coca Cola’s 2025 AI Holiday Campaign - Finance Monthly

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• Please forward this to three randos, dorks, colleagues, or someone you met today.

• Like and Re-stack it below so others can find it!

• Drop a comment. If you’re into it, if it sucks … perhaps drop a Haiku about programmatic AI. Your call.

With 4,000+ people getting axed from the Omnicom-IPG merger, I thought it appropriate to imagine what their termination notices might actually say if corporate HR departments were honest. Consider this a public service - or a warning. Here’s what didn’t arrive in anyone’s inbox, but probably should have.

OMNICOM GLOBAL HOLDINGS LIMITED LIABILITY REDUNDANCY DIVISION
Department of Severance, Subsection K (Formerly Subsection Q, Retired 2024)

RE: NOTICE OF EMPLOYMENT CESSATION, REDUNDANCY NOTIFICATION, AND GENERAL BUGGERING OFF

DATE: 2nd December, 2025
TO: Employee #47,291 (Formerly Known As “Roger,” Possibly “Janet”)
FROM: The Committee for Downsizing, Cost Optimization, and Making Everyone Terribly Sad

Dear Employee (or Former Employee, depending on when you read this),

This is to inform you that your position as Senior Vice President of Things We No Longer Need has been made redundant.

Well, not “made” redundant, really. It was always redundant. We just didn’t mention it.

Nobody expects the Corporate Restructuring!

Your employment will cease IMMEDIATELY or possibly last Tuesday, we’re not entirely sure. Our records indicate you may have already been terminated in 2023, but someone forgot to tell you. You know, Corporate!

YOUR SEVERANCE PACKAGE:

After 11 years of loyal service, blood, sweat, tears, and that presentation you did in 2019 that Linda from accounts said was “quite good actually,” you are entitled to:

• Seven (7) weeks of severance pay
  (Calculated using our proprietary formula: Years of Service ÷ How Much We Like You × Fuck All)

• One (1) complimentary farewell email
  (Subject line: “Thank you for your service.” Body: “Best of luck.” Signature: An algorithm.)

• Unlimited access to disappointment

• Your dignity (if found, please contact HR)

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT:

1. You will receive a cardboard box. It is not a large box. Do not attempt to fit your career in this box. It won’t fit.

2. Security will escort you from the building. His name is Keith. Keith is very sorry. Keith didn’t want this either. Keith is also being made redundant next month, but we haven’t told him yet.

3. Your email will be deactivated at 4:47 PM. Why 4:47? Because fuck you, that’s why. (No, seriously, it’s a system automation thing. IT couldn’t be asked to change it.)

4. You are invited to a “transition meeting” on Friday at 2 PM in Conference Room D. This meeting has been cancelled. We will not tell you it has been cancelled. You will show up. There will be no one there. This is intentional.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS:

Q: Why is this happening?
A: Synergy. Also, profits. Mainly profits. But we’ll say “synergy” on LinkedIn. By the by, please do not post there. There are other (former) sister agencies who will also be posting, and HR would love, love, love it if we can keep spirits high.

Q: What about my projects?
A: They’re being reassigned to Deborah. Deborah doesn’t know this yet. Deborah is also being made redundant in March. It’s redundancies all the way down.

Q: Can I say goodbye to my team?
A: Absolutely not. Your team has been placed in a separate “transition track.” They think you quit. We told them you “pursued other opportunities.” Those opportunities are unemployment.

Q: I have 11 years of experience here. Doesn’t that count for anything?
A: It counts for 7 weeks of severance! Well done, you did the math correctly. That’s more than Jenkins got. Jenkins got 4 weeks. Jenkins cried in the stairwell. Don’t be like Jenkins.

Q: This seems cruel.
A: That’s not a question. But yes.

IMPORTANT LEGAL DISCLAIMER:

By reading this letter, you acknowledge that:

• Your contributions were valued (until they weren’t)

• This decision was difficult (it wasn’t)

• We wish you the best in your future endeavors (we don’t)

• The Company reserves the right to replace you with an unpaid intern, a chatbot, or a particularly ambitious golden retriever

A PERSONAL NOTE FROM LEADERSHIP:

We want you to know that this wasn’t personal. Well, it was slightly personal. Karen from Finance never liked you. But mostly it was about cost savings and operational efficiency and shareholder value and several other words we learned at business school that mean “we’re going to fire you and buy a fucking yacht.”

You will always be part of the Omnicom family.**

**Unless you talk to the press. Then you are dead to us.

YOUR NEXT STEPS:

✓ Cry
✓ Update LinkedIn (but make it sound like YOUR choice)
✓ Develop a sudden interest in “consulting”
✓ Drink
✓ Revisit that novel you said you were going to write
✓ Drink more

IN CLOSING:

Thank you for your 11 years of service, creativity, dedication, late nights, missed birthdays, skipped vacations, and that one time you came in with the flu because Jenkins was already out and someone needed to finish the Campbell’s pitch.

We truly couldn’t have done this without you.

No, literally. We needed you to build the thing so we could sell the thing so we could afford to fire you.

Cheers!

The Omnicom Redundancy Committee
“Our Chief Weapon is Surprise...and Severance...Two! Our TWO Chief Weapons are Surprise and Severance!”

M. Python, CBE
Grand Marshal of Terminations, Herald of Bad News & Keeper of the Severance Calculator
Department of Cost Optimization & Casual Cruelty
Omnicom Global Holdings Redundancy Division (Subsection K, Conference Room D, Third Floor, Behind the Broken Copier)

P.S. — Please return your laptop, keycard, and any remaining optimism by end of business Wednesday.

P.P.S. — This notice is recyclable. Unlike your job.

This communication is confidential and intended solely for the terminated. If you are not the terminated, please disregard and await your own termination notice

Feel free to leave comments and feedback.

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• Drop a comment. If you’re into it, if it sucks … perhaps drop a Haiku about programmatic AI. Your call.

Thanks for the read.

If you would do me the favor of sharing this newsletter with 10 people you can’t stand I would greatly appreciate it. Here’s the freaking button.

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Let’s dig in, shall we?

Let’s Give Highdive (Chicago) the Treatment.

Clickbait (kinda).

Highdive is making the big boys lose sleep, outperforming them in block-and-tackle basics of delivering broadcast laughs that delight clients and move the needle.

Sure, they inherited State Farm creative. And “Jake from State Farm” is a bit long in the tooth. And Eli Manning is keeping Jersey Mike’s fresh with Danny Devito, but this one may need Peyton to make it a Manning brothers show.

Highdive seems pretty comfortable and confident with letting the big boys lose their sh*t over figuring out AI. As for now they appear focused on cha-ching with great brands, and growing.

What the Numbers Tell Us.

The Campaign US 2025 Agency Performance Review gives Highdive a pretty solid summary picture:

• Revenue grew from ~$32M in 2023 to $42M in 2024.

• Growth rate is accelerating — 31% growth in 2024 vs 24% the year before.

• They landed some big-name wins: KFC, Culligan, Dish Network, Lay’s, MSC Cruises, State Farm, etc.

• Their talent turnover is very low, 7% in 2024.

• On diversity: 53% of their staff is female, and 67% of their C-suite are women.

Highdive seems to be thriving, not crumbling. Their business looks healthy, they’re winning big clients, and its leadership/staff stability is solid. Nothing tragic there; at least publicly.

They’re Playing Super Bowl Bingo.

Highdive has built an absolutely dominant Super Bowl track record that’s pretty much unmatched in the industry. They scored #1 on the USA Today Ad Meter three consecutive years starting in 2020 Adweek ; first with Jeep’s “Groundhog Day” featuring Bill Murray Ad Age, then grabbing both the #1 and #2 spots in 2021 for Rocket Mortgage Adweek, followed by another #1 in 2022 with a Barbie-themed Rocket Mortgage spot Ad Age (with Lay’s landing at #6 that same year Adweek).

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They came back in 2024 with another #1 for State Farm featuring Schwarzenegger and DeVito NBC ChicagoCampaign Live, plus a BetMGM spot with Tom Brady and Vince Vaughn. Most recently, their Lay’s commercial with Taika Waititi hit #2 in 2025 Indie Agency News. That’s four #1 rankings and consistently top-10 finishes, a ridiculous streak that makes them the agency whose work everyone’s watching on game day.

They are experiencing success mixed with, not just growth, but high-profile growth. On the Batman/Bateman spot, Jake as Robin was a missed opportunity. And Jason Bateman was award-winning worthy. But the real heroes are the ones who got DC Studios on-board for this. And execution was perfection.

There’s No Place Like Home.

Talent-wise, it’s a cozy place, with only 7% voluntary turnover in 2024. Must be casual Friday’s. And again, women make up 53% of the team, 67% of the C‑suite. Yes, they’re not just hiring for the optics.

They also claim they used AI in 2024, but only to “enhance” creativity, not to replace humans. Very “teammate, not takeover” vibes.

**Web Edit** - a subscriber was lightning-fast blazing quick to point out Highdive wrapped a two-minute Gen-AI social project for client Jeep.
Animals share wild thoughts about new 2026 Jeep Grand Cherokee.

Growth, Big Clients, Talent, and Inclusion.

In other words, Highdive is doing the pretty-much-everything-right routine: killing it on growth, scooping up big clients, locking in talent (with very low churn), and running a C-suite that’s not just a boy’s club. They’re doing the kind of thing that gives Big Holding Co. execs lower abdominal discomfort.

They’re independent AND winning big. If we’re measuring by “not crashing into a dumpster fire,” Highdive is doing donuts in the big agencies’ front yard while the big boys are still looking for their car keys.

What Could Be Lurking Behind the Highdive Hype

Private Equity Pressure

• In May 2024, Svoboda Capital made a “significant investment” in Highdive. Svoboda Capital

• With PE money in the mix, there’s always the risk of profit pressure. High-growth is great, but PE typically comes with expectations: scale fast, deliver return, maybe streamline.

• If Highdive doesn’t hit aggressive growth or margin targets, that could stress both leadership and the “healthy relationships” ethos they brag about.

Office Expansion Risk

• They’re doubling down on real estate: Highdive subleased 26,000 sq ft in the Merchandise Mart doubling their footprint. The Real Deal

• That’s a bold move for any agency. If growth slows or client churn happens, that extra office cost could become a drag. It’s a bet, and big real estate bets in adland can go sideways.

Revenue Sustainability

• While Highdive claims very strong organic growth (listed above), they declined to disclose how many total clients they have or all of their new business billings. Campaign Live

• Not knowing how deeply diversified their client base is makes it harder to assess churn risk. If a few big clients make up a big piece of revenue, losing one could hurt.

Strategic Leadership Risk

• They just brought in Nimisha Jain as Chief Strategy Officer. MarComm News That’s a big hire, and it signals a shift; likely doubling down on strategy, growth, and bigger-client relationships.

• But if internal pressure (from PE or scale ambitions) forces the agency to move too far from its “healthy, creative-first” roots, culture could be strained.

Growing Overhead / Talent Load

• According to Ad Age, Highdive added ~37 employees in 2024 and is scaling its in-house production shop (1986 Studios). Ad Age. 150-ish nowadays?

• More people, bigger office, more production capacity = more fixed costs. If they don’t land enough high-margin work to justify that overhead, profitability could suffer.

Creative Risk Is Not Enough

• Highdive makes a name for itself with big creative stunts (Super Bowl spots, etc.). But creative brilliance doesn’t always equate to stable retainer work.

• If their business keeps leaning on “big splash” campaigns versus recurring, stable engagements, they may be exposed to swings in demand or client priorities.

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But in Advertising, Risk = Opportunity.

Highdive is making aggressive bets: on growth, on office, on talent, on scale. But they’re backed by PE, and they’re scaling fast. If they don’t manage their costs or maintain consistent client depth (not just headline-grabbing wins), they could have issues.

That said: nothing publicly points to a crisis right now. These are risks, not known failures. But in advertising, risk = opportunity.

The Upshot

• Highdive is not a charity case. They’re growing fast, winning big clients, producing culturally memorable work, and keeping their team relatively stable.

• They’re making high-stakes bets: on real estate, on scale, on leadership.

• If things get rough, it won’t be because they weren’t smart; it’ll be because scaling in adland is really hard when you’re trying to preserve your identity.

• The risk is real and that’s exactly what makes Highdive interesting (and dangerous to their bigger, more buttoned-down rivals).

Big Finish.

Highdive is kicking ass, and the rest of the indie‑agency world should take notes (or be mildly terrified). And this during a time where the Big Boys are absolutely melting down.

Highdive isn’t just surviving. They’re balling. They’ve got the growth, the clients, the culture, and the capital to back it all up. If you’re looking for an indie agency that’s not just talk but real traction, these are your people. Big agencies, watch your mirrors Highdive’s starting to look huge.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Feel free to leave comments and feedback.

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Web Only:

Work samples at https://highdiveus.com

Go deep on their Vimeo channel:

The big picture: Today’s my birthday. Another circle around the sun completed.

If you would do me the favor of sharing this newsletter with 10 people (or one) I would greatly appreciate it.

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We’re at 815 as I’ve been “pruning” less active accounts. If we can get subscribers to 1,000 I’m thinking a pizza party may be in our future. CTA-press the button at least three time!

Finally, The Ad Stack publishes on the web one day prior to the newsletter. I like to have a final look at everything. So if you can’t wait, hit up theadstacker.com

Here we go …

From the editor: AI is shifting from experimental to essential in advertising.

Only about 30% of brands, agencies, and publishers have fully integrated AI.

AI is shifting from experimental to essential in advertising. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s State of Data 2025 report, only about 30% of brands, agencies, and publishers have fully integrated AI across their media campaigns. Still, half of those who haven’t expect to get there by 2026.

It’s no longer just about using AI for bid optimization or targeting. Generative and agent-based tools are starting to influence creative work, media planning, and even media buying.

That said, it’s still early days, and progress isn’t smooth. The biggest challenges are fragmented data, waaaaaay too many f*cking tools are introduced each week, and no clear strategy. Many organizations say their data is messy, scattered across systems, or that they’re still figuring out where AI fits into their workflow.

From your point-of-view in creative production and ad operations, the upside is big: scalable personalization, faster content generation, and tighter feedback loops. But the risks are just as real. Weak data leads to weak results. And without human oversight, AI alone can churn out bland or off-brand work.

So score one for the humans.

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Let’s dig in, shall we?

1. AI amplifies your sh*t strategy.

AI doesn’t save you. It accelerates your crash.

You’ve been sold the dream: plug in AI, dump money into PPC, and watch the conversions roll in. Adorable. Here’s what actually happens: if your strategy is garbage, AI doesn’t fix it. It just helps you faceplant at hyperspeed.

Hand a Ferrari to someone who can’t drive and they don’t magically become Mario Andretti. They hit the wall faster and with more expensive damage. Digital advertising works the same way. If your targeting is sloppy, your value prop reads like corporate Mad Libs, your funnel is held together with wishful thinking, or your data looks like it was collected by a drunk intern (or CEO), AI won’t save you. It’ll just document your failure in real-time across multiple channels simultaneously.

AI is a megaphone for your mediocrity.

One analysis nailed it: “If your marketing plan is weak, AI won’t save you. It’ll help you fail faster and louder.” Translation: AI is a megaphone for your mediocrity.

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Think about it.

When you optimize for the wrong metrics, feed your system data that belongs in a landfill, ignore basic segmentation, and let your creative turn into beige wallpaper, AI doesn’t course-correct. It scales all that dysfunction across every touchpoint you’ve got. Congratulations! You’re not scaling success. You’re weaponizing incompetence.

A PPC Automation blog (evidently this sort of thing is a thing) put it perfectly: Automation only works when your strategy does. Otherwise, it’ll crater your ROAS faster than you can say “quarterly review.” At least when humans screw up, they do it slowly. Hand-crafted almost.

So what does strategic malpractice look like?

Undefined goals

You’re chasing clicks when you need qualified leads. AI can’t read your mind. Well not yet.

Weak messaging

Your creative is so bland it could be an ad for anything. AI will happily scale that nothingness. It can A/B test your way to slightly better mediocrity, but it can’t manufacture a soul.

Garbage data

Fake leads, bot clicks, phantom conversions. Feed your system junk and watch it optimize toward more junk. One study found invalid clicks convert at half the rate of real ones. Surprise: bad inputs create bad outputs. Who could’ve seen that coming?

Disconnected strategy

Your funnel is theoretical, your segments are astrological, and your customer journey is unmapped territory. AI will test variations, sure. But it has no idea why any of them matter. Neither do you, apparently.

Dump AI into that mess and you get fine-tuned, and faster chaos.

And it’s already playing out in real-time. Brands are chasing “AI-powered growth” like it’s a participation trophy while their budgets evaporate and their reputations circle the drain.

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Want to make it worse? The landscape is tightening. Margins are razor-thin, competition is brutal, and visibility is disappearing. With AI-generated answers eating search results, organic clicks are becoming an endangered species.

This isn’t just about performance.

It’s about your brand. When AI amplifies lazy messaging or half-baked planning at scale, your audience notices. And when you scale mistakes, the damage compounds. It doesn’t stay small and contained. It metastasizes.

The fix?

Start with the unglamorous basics.

• Map your actual funnel.

• Define your actual audience.

• Clean your actual data.

• Write messaging that doesn’t sound like it came from a random corporate buzzword bullshittery.

• Test manually.

• Build something that works first. Then (and only then) fire up the AI. Let it amplify success, not broadcast failure.

Regarding your broken strategy …

If you’re banking on AI to rescue a broken strategy, here’s a thought: perhaps the problem isn’t the technology. Maybe it’s you. AI won’t steer the car. It just mashes down on the accelerator while you aim at the wall.

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2. The Irony Awards

The Authenticity Paradox

Welcome to the great emotional bake-off of our time, where AI brands and legacy companies alike are flinging feelings like (ahem) monkey poo at a zoo, hoping something sticks. In one corner, we’ve got the silicon-souled startups spending VC cash trying to look like they understand you. In the other, legacy brands hawking nostalgia like snake oil Trump bitcoin, waving pitchforks at the robot uprising while they quietly automate their supply chains. Everyone’s selling a vibe, and the vibe is fear.

First up: AI companies.

These are the same folks whose core mission is to replace your job with a JavaScript script, and yet they desperately want you to feel seen. Their marketing? A fever dream of TED Talk optimism and font-heavy slide decks. They’ve got empathy maps. They’ve got emotional arcs. They’ve got focus groups full of actors pretending to believe a chatbot is their best friend. It’s like trying to teach a toaster to love you. But sure, let’s pretend your algorithmic babysitter “cares” about your skincare routine.

Their big pitch? That tech can feel things. That predictive analytics equals intuition. That your fridge isn’t just connected, it’s emotionally available. It’s intimate performance art, brought to you by natural language processing. Just don’t ask the AI how it feels about layoffs, unions, or art, unless you’re ready for a PowerPoint on quarterly margins.

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Legacy brands smell the panic.

Meanwhile, legacy brands have smelled the panic in the air and are bottling it. “Handmade!” they cry. “Artisanal!” they yell. “100% Non-Synthetic Sincerity!” It’s capitalism in a straw hat, pretending it never heard of Excel macros. Every jar of jam is a manifesto. Every T-shirt is a protest against the Singularity. Buy this soap and you too can join the resistance, presumably with better skin.

And it’s working because nothing sells like moral superiority. Every “crafted with care” tagline is just a slightly more polite way of saying, “We still employ actual people (for now).” It’s marketing as elegy, a swan song for the quaint notion that humans are still in the loop.

Here’s the punchline.

AI brands aren’t here to love you. They’re here to optimize you. And legacy brands? They’ll ditch the human touch the second AI makes it cheaper, faster, and capable of writing copy that doesn’t smell like an Etsy ad.

The real joke? We’re trapped in this tug-of-war between a robotic future no one asked for and a curated past no one can afford. Authenticity has become just another aesthetic, another filter to swipe through. The products may vary, but the pitch is always the same: “Trust us. We’re the real ones.” Until, of course, the cost of “real” gets too high.

Congratulations.

You’ve made it to the authenticity paradox, where sincerity is strategic, emotional connection is a UX feature, and the only thing more artificial than intelligence is the marketing that surrounds it.

Feel free to leave comments and feedback.

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• Please forward this to three randos, dorks, colleagues, or someone you met today.

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• Drop a comment below. If you’re into it, if it sucks … perhaps drop a Haiku about programmatic AI. Your call.

Thanks for the read!

They are the Who’s Who of newsletter people.

A few notes:

• Pleased as punch you made The Ad Stack #9 in satire and #12 in Advertising.

• Clearly we (I) have still got some work to do here, folks.

• I hope there are more than 2543 newsletters out there.

So if you're absolutely bored and sick of hanging out by the water cooler (like those still exist), please bounce over to inboxreads.co and say some not too sh*tty great things about this place. And many thanks.

Let’s dig in, shall we?

1. Publicis has branded itself as the last holding company standing.

When a holding company sells certainty in an age that punishes it.

Publicis Groupe is smiling for the cameras, posting its +5.7% organic growth and whispering “resilience” like a mantra while quietly counting the number of agencies it still hasn’t digested.

France loves a good fight, even when the odds don’t.

The stock market loves a survivor story. Publicis has branded itself as the last holding company standing.
But look closer. The triumph feels eerily like déjà vu: the kind of “momentum” that always comes right before the storm.

The Numbers Look Good — Until They Don’t

• Q3 2025: +5.7 % organic growth (up from +5.3 % in Q2)

• U.S. revenue: +7.1 % from Epsilon & data-driven marketing

• Latin America: +9.6 % — press-release fuel

• Margins: ≈18 % (while WPP wheezes around 8 %)

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This is a good quarter in a bad year.
Global ad-spend growth has halved—from ~10 % to ~5 %.
Clients are holding budgets hostage. AI is promising salvation while quietly eroding billable hours.

The Power of One, the Weight of Many

“The Power of One” sounds visionary. It’s also confession.
One P&L. One organism. One hungry mouth.

Publicis has swallowed Lotame, Epsilon, Sapient, Hearts & Science, and now influencer network HEPMIL.
It’s a tapeworm with creative teeth—digesting data pipes, buzzwords, and people.

The goal: become the platform.
Out-Google Google. Out-Meta Meta.
Sell integration as destiny.

None of these acquisitions prove data makes creativity better — only cheaper and faster.

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The Mirage of Measurement

Publicis loves the language of precision: ROI, personalization, intelligent creativity.
But the dashboards aren’t divine revelation—they’re the same ones everyone else leases from Google Cloud.

Clients don’t crave “identity graphs.” They want cheaper CPMs.
The myth of “data-powered storytelling” lives around slide 12 of the deck—right before the CFO asks if AI can do it for less.

Publicis isn’t selling transformation.
It’s selling certainty—the most profitable illusion left in marketing.

The Risks They Don’t Mention

1. Net Debt: €1.6 B ($1.8477 B USD) as of Sept 2025 (up from net cash position nine months earlier).

2. Integration Chaos: Each new acquisition adds systems, leaders, egos. “Power of One” is becoming the “Spreadsheet of Many.”

3. Creative Identity Loss: The data machine devours the soul of Saatchi, Leo Burnett, BBH. Is Fallon still around? Always liked them quite a bit.

4. AI Dependency: They don’t own foundation models; they feed off the platforms that threaten them.

Swallowing the World (and Choking on It?)

Yes, Publicis is swallowing the world—but it’s starting to cough.
Every acquisition adds revenue and complexity without guaranteeing resilience.

Imagine a python trying to digest a car:
impressive at first, grotesque by the end.

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Forecast: Stormy with a Chance of Hubris

Margins stay high because automation hasn’t yet collapsed pricing.
But once AI starts churning out finished campaigns, those 18 % margins evaporate. What’s startling is recalling the margins in digital of 75% from back in the day (2014?)

Publicis’s forecast assumes a compliant universe—clients stay loyal, data flows freely, privacy laws behave.
In 2025, that’s like betting on sunshine in a hurricane.

The holding-company model doesn’t evolve.
It persists through momentum.
Publicis is momentum personified — a machine spinning because stopping would mean remembering why it was built.

The Last Laugh

Publicis might outlast its rivals, but that doesn’t make it healthy. It’s the most elegant survivor at the wake.
They’ll keep buying, integrating, and automating, announcing “record quarters” until the music stops.

Strip away the dashboards and debt and what remains?

Publicis isn’t the future of advertising.
It’s the beautifully automated tribute of what advertising used to be.

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Cube Cronicles - Overheard at Work

“Art Director”

Got a freelance gig for a new business pitch a week before the big presentation. This is not just a campaign, but it is about how we treat their entire social media. On Monday, I found out I am the only AD on the team, and I had to come up with new campaign ideas, including art direction, photography, lighting, typography, motion direction, product hero shots, stunt ideas, influencer collaborations, and examples of final posts/comp per i and platform.

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“Product Manager”

My team has been told we need to set “AI‑related goals” and start using internal tools that aren’t all that great. I’m not anti‑AI—I love Copilot for small coding tasks—but a lot of these mandates feel like doing AI for the sake of it. Which tools have legitimately improved your workflow? Have you run into company policies that block access to external models because of IP concerns? How do you push back when management wants metrics that don’t line up with how the work actually gets done?

* “Senior Art Director 1”

This seems like a trend across all sorts of companies where the leadership is desperately trying to justify sinking gobs of money into AI due to hype without fully grasping how it will work. I’m also not anti-AI, it has its uses, but it’s feeling more and more like AI is simply not useful enough for the astronomical price it takes to produce.

via: Glass Door

2. Why ‘AI Will Replace Creatives’ Is the Wrong Fear (Here’s the Right One)

The Danger is Standing Still

The fear is loud: “AI will replace creatives.” You see it everywhere. Headlines, Slack threads, whispered hallway chats between editors and directors. The message is clear: your job, your skills, your craft are in danger. But that fear, as raw and real as it feels, isn’t the core threat.

The real threat runs deeper. Quieter. More personal.

Let’s look at it head-on.

Yeah, “the machines” are here. Generative AI is advancing fast. What we used to call “creative work” might become a checklist of tasks AI can automate. One study warns that up to 26% of roles in arts, design, and media are at risk.

And yes, people still say, “AI can’t replace human creativity.” But that misses the point.

The real fear isn’t being replaced, it’s being reduced. Marginalized. Not fired, but devalued. Your edge gone. Your work flattened into something cheap and interchangeable.

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Picture this.

You’re a seasoned film producer or editor. You know pacing, light, story, performance. But now you’re up against a wave of tools. AI for storyboards, color grading, voice cloning, pre-production prompts. You’re not just competing with people anymore. You’re competing with faster, cheaper, good-enough workflows.

You still have the job. But the margins are thinner. Your value leaks out.

That’s the shift. Creativity is turning into commodity. The goal isn’t bold work anymore. It’s fast, cheap, repeatable content. Big agencies know this. So do solo creators. AI-driven output is tempting. And once the market gets used to lower costs, your rates drop too.

One researcher put it bluntly: “If AI can deliver what people need at near-zero cost, why would anyone invest time or money in human-made content?”

The moment AI becomes “good enough,” the premium on human creativity disappears.

Think your art is safe?

That cushion’s thin. Maybe AI can’t do deep, emotional storytelling. But it’s already doing ad copy, brand visuals, short video edits, motion graphics. That’s the kind of work that pays the bills. And it’s under threat now.

So again: the fear isn’t extinction. It’s erosion. It’s waking up to find you’re doing tasks AI can handle. Tasks you thought were just “production” — but that once made you essential.

You still have a title. But your role is hollowed out.

Here’s why this matters.

Especially to the film and video creatives I’m coaching. You’re not just asking, “Will AI take my job?” You’re facing something harder: “Will I still have control, creative say, and fair pay? Or will I be stuck doing more, faster, for less?”

That’s how craft dies. That’s how uniqueness fades. And once clients and companies expect “AI-assisted creative” at discount rates, it’s tough to go back.

It keeps people from adapting. “I do story, so I’m safe.” “I work at the high end, AI can’t touch me.” These are delays. Meanwhile, the tools become adopted, the workflows change, and your footing slips. Rates fall. Roles shrink. Suddenly you’re not a creative lead. You’re an operator.

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This isn’t science fiction. It’s already happening. Creatives on Reddit are warning each other: AI is coming for the average, the formulaic, and that’s a big chunk of the industry. That’s where the bleeding starts.

The danger is in standing still.

Relying on the craft alone. Ignoring how the game is shifting. Then one day you’re in a meeting and your budget’s cut. Your team is smaller. And the brief is, “Run the tool and clean it up.” That’s the moment it hits. That’s the real threat.

But here’s the opening: when you understand the threat, you can respond.

You double down on what AI can’t do: leadership, taste, original vision, cultural understanding, emotional depth, human collaboration. The messy, human stuff.

I help creatives shift from executors to strategic leads. From “doing the work” to shaping it. From being replaced by AI to using it wisely.

Because the real danger isn’t that “the machine” takes your job. It’s that it leaves you with only the parts anyone can do, while everything that once made you special gets stripped away.

That’s the fight.

Hold onto the parts that matter. Don’t end up watching from the sidelines.

This is the age of the machine-assisted creative. It’s not the end. And it won’t be the end of the role you once knew, when you take the lead.

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3. We Are Not Alone!???

Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Changed Color Again, And Shows Signs Of Non-Gravitational Acceleration

Image credit: NASA, ESA, David Jewitt (UCLA); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

Here’s some miscellany for brain stimulation.

3I/ATLAS is a rare visitor from beyond the solar system — only the third confirmed interstellar object after 1I/ʻOumuamua in 2017 and 2I/Borisov in 2019.

It was first spotted on July 1, 2025, by the ATLAS survey telescope in Chile.

What makes it stand out:

• Its path is hyperbolic, meaning it’s not orbiting the Sun. It’s just passing through; in from deep space, swinging by, then heading back out.

• It’s also showing classic signs of comet activity, with a dust coma and tail that suggest ices are vaporizing as it gets closer to the Sun.

• Early data hints it might be older and larger than typical comets in our solar system, which makes it an especially valuable glimpse into another star system.

Behind the Sun, the comet appears to show signs of acceleration beyond what is expected by gravity. And for reasons not yet clear, it appears to have changed color.

https://www.iflscience.com/interstellar-object-3iatlas-changed-color-again-and-shows-signs-of-non-gravitational-acceleration-81415

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Much crazy shizzle happening fast nowadays. Iconic ad brands are dropping like flies. Heyo. Welcome to another edition. WPP goes the way of the automat, and DDB becomes WTF, going bye bye. Simplifies PowerPoint decks. Let’s go.

And all written with satire and sent with love.

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“You Can Trust Your Town to that Man Who Wears the Crown.”

WPP was once the unquestioned king of Madison Avenue. That crown is gone. In fact, the firm lost its #1 status after rival Publicis Groupe began out-billing it and snatching net new business while WPP was shrinking. WPP’s organic revenue dropped 1% in its most recent year, with the outlook for 2025 set at flat to down 2%. Meanwhile, global ad-spend growth is decelerating, clients are shunning full-service agencies, and technology-led competitors (and in-house platforms) are nibbling away at agency margins.

So WPP is pivoting almost like a full-service gas station converting to self-service overnight, while the petrol price stays the same and the number of attendants declines. The holding company is rushing to empower clients to pump their own ads via its new platform. That move is called WPP Open Pro. Self-service, AI-enabled, direct-to-brand.

Why Are They Doing This?

• To expand its addressable market, WPP is now targeting smaller brands and business units that can’t afford the full-service agency model or are being ignored.

• To counter margin pressure: with large clients demanding faster, cheaper work and holding onto tighter internal teams, traditional retainers aren’t cutting it. The self-serve model allows WPP to serve clients with fewer human hours and more tech leverage. Like telling the driver, “Pump your own gas,” so we don’t pay the mechanic anymore.

• To stay relevant amid AI disruption, WPP is pouring money into tech (≈ £300 million/year; $399 million USD) and repositioning itself as a “technology-led” agency rather than just a creative factory.

• To simplify and integrate: They’ve rebranded their media arm WPP Media, making clear that media + data + production will all run off the same digital rails.

The Risk-and-Reward for WPP

• Reward: If successful, WPP opens up new growth from thousands of smaller clients and reduces the cost of delivery per client (less hands-on service). It positions them for the “AI era” in marketing.

• Risk: By enabling self-service, WPP may cannibalize its full-service business model. The station that told you, “We’ll service your car,” now says, “You can do it yourself” with the same price tag. So the fear among execs is that the human premium evaporates. Also, if clients see agencies as mere platforms, they may shop around or develop their own in-house stack.

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Yes, the holding company that once thrived on complex client retainers and human-powered storytelling has decided that the future of marketing lies in letting clients do it themselves. Plan, create, and publish ads without ever talking to, you know, an ad agency.

The Why: Spoiler, It’s About the Money

WPP’s numbers tell the story nobody wants to pitch:

• Organic revenue down 1%, forecasts flat to negative for 2025.

• Publicis Groupe has overtaken them.

• Hedge funds are circling.

• The “creative capital of the world” is now the CFO’s spreadsheet.

When profits fall 71% in a year, it’s not “innovation,” it’s survival. So WPP’s logic goes like this:

Hence, Open Pro — the new self-serve AI station for marketing.

The Process: How to Pump Your Own Creativity

So how will this all work?

1. Plan – Brands log into WPP Open Pro and feed the system data: product details, audience insights, and budget parameters. The AI “agents” (yes, that’s the actual branding) crunch this into campaign strategies; audience segments, message maps, competitive landscapes.

2. Create – The same system uses a cocktail of text, image, and video models. Think OpenAI, Google Veo, and Adobe Firefly to generate brand assets. Logos, taglines, storyboards, and even finished video. It’s like briefing your agency … if your agency were a prompt window.

3. Publish – Finished assets flow directly into ad platforms or WPP’s own media studio. One click, and your AI-built campaign is live. No creative review meetings. No revisions. No pesky producers in the way. And no “let’s circle back Monday.”

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In theory, this lets brands produce more content faster. In practice, it’s the beginning of the great automation of advertising. To anyone who’s worked in production, such as myself, it sounds like a staffing reduction wrapped in a UX demo.

The Irony: Disruption by Design

The irony, of course, is exquisite. The very company that invented the agency ecosystem: bundling creativity, media, and data into one package, is now unbundling itself in real-time.

WPP once sold the value of craft, expertise, and partnership. Now it’s selling an interface. It’s as if Firestone stopped making tires and started selling tire-making kits.

The company insists this is the future: “a hybrid model where clients and agencies co-create at scale.” But beneath the buzzwords, it’s a quiet admission: the old model can’t keep up. Machines have rewritten the economics of creativity.

And like the gas station owners of the 1970s, WPP’s executives are trying to convince customers that pumping your own is as great as rolling your own.

The Stakes: The Last Full-Service Station on Madison Avenue

Make no mistake; this is an existential bet. If Open Pro succeeds, WPP becomes the Amazon Web Services of advertising: a platform that powers thousands of smaller brands, taking a small cut of every campaign produced.

If it fails, it becomes the Blockbuster of the ad world: the company that saw Netflix coming and decided to double down on late fees.

The self-serve model is seductive to investors but treacherous for the business. Once brands learn to “do it themselves,” what stops them from doing it somewhere else? Google, Meta, Adobe, OpenAI. They’re all racing to own that same button that says “Generate Campaign.”

And let’s be real: when everyone has access to the same AI tools, differentiation dies. The result isn’t creative empowerment. It’s creative entropy. A thousand ads generated, none remembered.

The Doom Behind the Bloom

The danger? When you hand clients the keys to the gas pump, they eventually stop calling you to fill the tank. WPP Open Pro could end up cannibalizing the very agencies it was meant to modernize. The human premium: strategy, taste, and intuition becomes a subscription tier.

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It’s the same logic that gutted service stations in the ‘70s oil crisis: rising costs, desperate margins, and a public too distracted to notice they’re doing the work themselves. “Full-service” was too expensive, so we taught people to squeeze their own handles.

Now, the world’s largest ad conglomerate is teaching clients to squeeze prompts instead.

The Punchline: Welcome to Pump-Your-Own Advertising

Ultimately, WPP’s pivot serves as a reflection of the industry itself. Agencies are turning into tech companies. Tech companies are turning into agencies. And the client, the once-coddled “brand partner,” is now just another user in the dashboard.

Full-service dreams are over now. The attendants have gone home. The lights hum faintly over the digital forecourt, and a polite voice from the speaker crackles to life:

We’re officially living in the era of Do-It-Yourself Madison Avenue. Where creative empires fall not with a scandal or a slogan, but with an automated prompt.

If this works, WPP reinvents itself as the world’s biggest creative platform; half agency, half API.
If it doesn’t, well … the next press release will probably come from PublicisGPT.

Bibliography / Sources

1. WPP plc. 2025 Interim Results. London: WPP plc. 7-Aug-2025. PDF. WPP+1

2. WPP plc. “WPP Media launches as fully integrated, AI-powered media company.” Press release. 29-May-2025. WPP+1

3. Reuters. “WPP cuts out the agency to help brands create their own ads with AI.” 23-Oct-2025. Reuters

4. Financial Times. “WPP halves dividend and announces strategic review as profits sink.” 7-Aug-2025. ft.com

5. The Guardian. “WPP profits dive 71% as clients cut ad-spending amid tariffs.” 7-Aug-2025. The Guardian

6. Campaign ME. “WPP Media expands Open Intelligence, reveals retail and media partners.” 6-Jun-2025. Campaign Middle East

7. MarketingDive. “WPP Media launches AI-driven tool to push beyond ID-based targeting.” (date ~2025) Marketing Dive

8. Investegate (RNS Announcement). “Chief Executive Officer Succession – WPP plc.” 9-Jun-2025. investegate.co.uk

Cube Chronicles - WPP Edition

💥 Employee comments - The Fish Bowls

1. “We’re training the thing that replaces us.”
”A lot of creative and production folks are grumbling that they’re being told to upload work into WPP Open’s training datasets — without clarity on whether the system is designed to reduce headcount. The sentiment is basically: ‘We’re building the automation layer that will make our jobs redundant.’”

2. “Clients don’t want to pay for beta testing.”
”Producers and account managers say clients are confused by the self-serve messaging; why pay WPP when the pitch is “you can do it yourself”? It’s creating awkward sales conversations, especially in mid-tier markets.”

3. Not all doom and gloom, though.

• “Some strategists and data leads see WPP Open Pro as a competitive moat, a way to keep smaller clients inside the ecosystem instead of losing them to Canva + ChatGPT + Freelancers.”

• “A few tech-savvy teams are calling it ‘finally a usable tool’ after years of fragmented WPP systems.”

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The Brand in the Crosshairs?

The great crumble has begun.

Once upon a time, giant ad networks—halls full of creatives, espresso machines humming, PowerPoints full of Pentagrams of Innovation—now resemble a zombie-movie set: desks still there, chairs askew, middle-management spirits wandering aimlessly. At the center of this apocalypse? DDB. Except “at the center” is wrong: more like “on the chopping block”.

According to multiple leaks, whispers, and Reuters-esque bulletins, the Omnicom Group and Interpublic Group merger (a monstrous $13.5 billion beast) is poised to gobble up agency brands in a consolidation frenzy so sweeping it makes re-org on steroids look tame.

DDB

Word is: the network may be dissolved, absorbed, or re-branded into something with fewer sparkles and more spreadsheets.

Remember when DDB was supposed to stand for “Doyle Dane Bernbach?” The creative revolution, the Weiner-sandwich of art and attitude, the agency where “Think Small” became gospel? Now it looks like they’re being told to think even smaller: think “merge & cut”. The message from the top: creativity is expensive, synergy is cheap. One Reddit commenter nailed the tone:

“If they do merge, it’s not for creativity … it’s for consolidation and survival. Big holding companies aren’t innovating, they’re merging decks and firing mid-tier talent to fluff stock prices.”

Consolidation and Survival

Enter a brave new world where three global networks will stand tall. DDB might not be one of them. The rumor mill says only two or three agencies will survive the re-architecting of the holding company empire, meaning legacies will drown in PowerPoint and restructure memos.

And for the creatives, suits, producers, freelancers, and production partners? Time to catch your breath. Because the way the writing’s on the wall, the next 12-24 months are going to look like Halloween every day: dark hallways, branded posters ripped down, desks repurposed as “temporary hot spots”, conference rooms turned into “integration pods”, and freelancers getting calls from “procurement” instead of “creative strategy”. The umbrella brand is over: “agency” now means “service provider to holding company strategy”. The fight is not just for accounts. It’s for existence.

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Margin Matters

In the midst of all this, the irony is thick. One of the most “creative” industries is now running headlong into a world that rewards efficiency, scale, and standardization over spark. Margin matters. Global reach matters. Legacy culture? Not so much. DDB’s recent history, from being a creative beacon to now being reportedly undermined, told to justify its existence, is telling.

They may say “new era,” “unified offering,” “better together,” but really it means: “Brand you loved? Sorry, we’re reducing the brand names you love.”

So for The Ad Stack audience: producers, agency lifers, permalancers, and creators who’ve seen it all, here’s your survival aide-memoir:

• Expect restructure, not reinvention.
  The mega-mergers aren’t about radical creative rebirth; they’re about efficiency. One article puts it: “There isn’t as much money (for holding companies anyway) in creative any more and cost cuts (job losses) are part of the sell to Wall Street.”

• Brand names will fade, networks will absorb.
  DDB might vanish or get re-skinned. It might live on in some boutique form, but the global powerhouse? Probably not as you used to know it.

• Freelancers and production folks: your network is about to shift.
  Agencies will centralize; expect fewer legacy contacts, more CPO/COO-type buyers; margins may shrink; service delivery becomes bigger than creative novelty (doing the work, and meeting the promise should matter more than the new, fancy, showy idea).

The satire practically writes itself: the glorious agency that rode the “creative edge” wave now brushes dust while the holding company consolidates, cuts costs, and says, “Let’s unify operations globally.”

Opportunity Still Lurks

In any collapse, new niches emerge: agile boutique agencies, internal client teams, consultancy-style creative houses. If the giants are collapsing, smart smaller players grab the debris. For our audience of producers worried about job security: yes, it’s scary, but also a chance to reposition.

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Let’s wrap this up: if DDB fades (or is absorbed), it won’t feel like a quiet curtain call. It’ll feel like a blockbuster sequel gone direct to streaming. All excitement, then you check your watch and realize you’ve been edited out. Creative staff will shuffle, clients will shift, brand heritage will get glossed over in “transformation messaging.” Holding companies will pat each other on the back for “synergies unlocked,” while a VP of Prompt Engineering in a mid-town Chicago cubicle farm wonders where the Nespresso machine with the organic brand disappeared to.

So raise a film-production-grade espresso to the fallen giants. Because the ad-agency game as we once knew it is getting shelved, archived, perhaps turned into “case study” rather than “frontline culture.”

Bibliography of Sources

1. “Omnicom to retire iconic DDB brand following IPG merger: report.” Storyboard18, Oct 29 2025. Storyboard18.

2. “Omnicom–IPG merger: DDB to integrate into TBWA?” Exchange4Media, Oct 29 2025. Exchange4Media

3. “Report: DDB Brand Set To Retire As Part Of Omnicom’s IPG Acquisition.” B&T, Oct 29 2025. B&T

4. “Reports Suggest, DDB May Be Dissolved as Part of Omnicom–IPG Merger.” ImpactOnNet, 2025. Impact On Net

5. “Which IPG shops are likely to survive the ‘merge’?” Reddit discussion, Advertising subreddit. Reddit

6. “DDB Worldwide.” Wikipedia. (Accessed 2025) Wikipedia

7. “Omnicom Group.” Wikipedia. (Accessed 2025) Wikipedia

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I must say I am enjoying putting Sora 2 through it’s paces. Not crazy about the watermarks but I’m sure I’ll come around.

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The Apocalypse du Jour!

The Ad Giant That Forgot How to Sell Itself: Omnicom’s Descent Into the Revenue Abyss

If you needed proof that Madison Avenue’s gilded age is coughing up its last wheeze, look no further than Omnicom’s latest quarterly bloodletting. Q2 net income cratered 21 percent year-over-year, PR-unit sales sagged another 9.3 percent, and the stock now hovers a depressing 28 percent below its 52-week high; the kind of chart pattern that makes portfolio managers reach for the horror-movie popcorn. Put bluntly, the house that once brokered Super Bowl spectacles for a living can’t seem to market its own value prop anymore.

A Busted Business Model Wearing Yesterday’s Creative Awards

For decades Omnicom dined out on the big-idea agency mythos: win a shelf of Lions, mark up the media buy, and bill the client for an “integrated solution.” That recipe collapses the second that media fragments, attention spans calcify, and every CFO decides a text-to-video AI costs less than a Cannes gala. The result? Legacy holding companies suddenly look like brick-and-mortar department stores on the morning Amazon went Prime.

Omnicom’s numbers scream this story in surround sound. A 21 percent earnings drop doesn’t just reflect timid clients; it telegraphs systemic mismatch. Procurement teams now negotiate hourly, project-based contracts that squeeze margin, while in-house studios siphon the once-lucrative bread-and-butter work; social tiles, vertical video, global localization, straight out of agency retainers. Omnicom, blessed with dozens of siloed networks and a payroll heavier than a Manhattan rent roll, is discovering what happens when fixed cost meets variable income: nothing good.

PR’s Public Meltdown

The PR division’s 9.3 percent revenue erosion deserves its own gallery of groans. Spin-doctoring was supposed to be recession-proof. After all, brand reputations still catch fire in downturns. But corporate comms chiefs have discovered that “statement crafted by ChatGPT” checks out at two in the morning and doesn’t invoice by the hour. When crises hit, the board wants instant triage, not five-figure retainers padded with sentiment dashboards. Omnicom’s PR shops, long fueled by face-time billings, now fight automated listening tools that spit out press-release drafts in milliseconds. Who needs a team of VPs to write “We take these allegations seriously” when an LLM does it for the price of a latte?

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Wall Street’s Patience Evaporates

Investors have noticed. A stock nearly 30 percent off its peak isn’t a blip; it’s a referendum on the entire holding-company thesis. The Street once tolerated low-single-digit growth because agencies generated cash like an aging utility; predictable, dull, but dividend-friendly. No more. Algorithmic buying platforms capture media margin, client brands flirt with direct-to-avatar campaigns, and consultancies snatch strategy fees by bundling AI dashboards. Omnicom is left clutching decades-old “client intimacy” slideware while its quarterly PDFs bleed red.

The AI Guillotine Looms

Here’s the darker punchline: the numbers probably get worse. Meta, Google, Amazon, and every martech vendor with a demo booth in Vegas promise fully autonomous ad campaigns by 2026. “Push button, receive omnichannel creative” may not work flawlessly, but it strips cost so brutally that CFOs will tolerate a few Frankenstein visuals. Holding companies can spin “creativity at scale” all they want; once brands taste 90-percent cheaper production and algorithmically managed media, Omnicom’s painstakingly curated creative pyramids start to resemble Versailles in 1789—lavish, beloved by insiders, and one bad harvest away from revolt.

Can the Titan Course-Correct?

Sure, the company will tout “data-driven transformation” on the next earnings call, roll out an AI partnership deck, and shuffle leadership titles from “chief growth officer” to “chief AI evangelist.” But cultural inertia is a stubborn roommate. Agencies were built on artisanal craft, three-hour lunch pitches, and markups hidden like Easter eggs in scope documents. Teaching that machine to love margin-free automation is like asking a vinyl purist to DJ with Spotify; technically doable, spiritually ruinous.

Investors: Belt In or Bail Out

Omnicom still throws off cash, but so did Blockbuster until the late fees dried up. If management can’t arrest the profit slide by Q4, expect activist investors to sniff around, demanding asset sales, draconian head-count trims, or a shotgun marriage with a consulting firm thirsty for creative credentials. Meanwhile, the stock will moonlight as a case study on how fast adland’s aristocracy can tumble when technology rewrites the cost of attention.

Bottom line: Omnicom isn’t circling the drain yet.

Omnicom isn’t circling the drain yet, but the water’s swirling ominously. Unless it finds a way to monetize creativity in an AI-priced economy (and soon) the ad giant may discover the only thing harder than selling Coca-Cola is selling Wall Street on yesterday’s agency model.

References

• Q2 2025 net-income decline (-21 % YoY)
  Omnicom Reports Second Quarter 2025 Results press release, July 15 2025. Omnicom Group Investor Relations

• PR-unit revenue down 9.3 %
  MM+M article “Omnicom PR Group revenue plummets 9.3% in Q2,” July 16 2025. mmm-online.com

• Stock ~28 % below 52-week high
  MarketWatch market brief noting OMC shares 26.6 % under the $107.00 high (Oct 14 2025) and a similar Moomoo note citing 28.5 % below the same peak (Apr 7 2025). marketwatch.com

Cube Cronicles - Overheard at Work

“VMLY&R1”

“This thought always calms me down whenever work is on fire (which it always is in this industry). “No one will die if I make this mistake” is a comforting one and will always immediately put things into perspective.”

“Works at Droga5”

“What is the most unhinged fact about advertising that if you didn’t work in the field you wouldn’t know? For example, a friend of mine in the medical field recently shared that if you get a kidney transplant, they don’t take any other kidneys out. So you could end up with 3-4 kidneys inside of you.”

“Producer 1”

“Industry awards are not awarded by clients or business experts. We award them ourselves and little of the award has to do with bottom line performance. I told an engineer at Google this and she was like ‘How is this industry still around?’”

“Global Creative Director”

“When I was as at a big nyc agency, strategy would take 4-6 weeks to develop a solid brief, creatives spend 2 weeks on an initial concept, we’d present, then revise, present again to client for 3 more rounds, get approval, have 1 week to align with production and bid out, another week to review treatments, another week to develop the pre-pro book, then fly off and shoot multiple days, then go into a 4 week edit. In house - we get a non-brief, and 8 weeks to do all of this (with a crap budget). Can I have an extra kidney?”

The Plot-Thickener!

Ad Tech’s Last Supper: Why the Advertising Week Poll Is a Graveyard Elegy in Disguise

The noisy optimism at Advertising Week, New York always feels like a motivational poster pasted over a structural crack. But this year’s poll,dropped Oct 10 and quietly buried in The Current’s highlight reel, reads more like a death certificate. A full 71 percent of marketers named AI as the single most consequential force reshaping ad tech, dwarfing privacy regulation, third-party-cookie collapse, and even the economic slow-grind that’s been squeezing budgets since 2022. At first blush it sounds exciting, a “Jetsons” moment for media nerds. Look closer and you’ll spot the smoke from a five-alarm blaze no one wants to admit is burning down the agency ranch.

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Machine Hopes, Human Headstones

Marketers in the survey gush about “appetite for machine-made media buys.” Translation: CFOs love a tool that robs human planners of billable hours. As AI bidding engines promise penny-perfect CPMs, the poll’s sub-break points to a gnarlier reality: 42 percent expect to shed internal media jobs next year because “automation covers the basics.” These aren’t back-office clerks; they’re the mid-level strategists who once translated brand nuance into targeting maps. When their decks are replaced by probability matrices, the term “full-funnel” turns literal—one huge funnel swallowing jobs at the top and spitting them out the bottom as “efficiency gains.”

The Regulatory Noose

Respondents also flagged “rising scrutiny”—code for regulators sharpening scissors. Europe’s AI Act hovers like a drone strike over data-hungry look-alike modeling, and the FTC is telegraphing enforcement against “unsubstantiated algorithmic claims.” Yet 63 percent of buyers confess they’ve already green-lit campaigns whose black-box models no one internally can explain. It’s a modern twist on the 2008 mortgage meltdown: everyone sees systemic risk, everyone keeps buying because Q4 targets won’t wait for the rulebook. When the first AI-driven bias scandal detonates into headlines, picture political micro-targets skewed by race or health data, brands will plead ignorance, agencies will lawyer up, and the compliance costs will dwarf whatever pennies programmatic saved.

Data Collapse, Meet Content Glut

The poll shows 58 percent fear signal loss once Chrome’s cookie finally flat-lines, but the same folks are racing to pump AI-generated “content” into the void at scale. Imagine fewer deterministic IDs paired with a tidal wave of synthetic copycat ads—all optimized by algorithms trained on the same creative sludge. Welcome to the Great Attention Depression: more impressions chasing fewer verified eyeballs, while measurement vendors quietly widen their confidence intervals. Consumers, meanwhile, will scroll through an infinity hallway of hallucinated lifestyle imagery, unable to tell a real human testimonial from a DALL·E daydream. Engagement won’t collapse immediately; it’ll just fade … slow, invisible, fatal.

The Vicious Feedback Loop

Here’s the darkest irony. AI thrives on mountains of fresh data to calibrate its models. But as machine-made media saturates every feed, authentic user signals get poisoned by bots echoing the very campaigns AI produced. The feedback loop tightens: garbage in, synthetic garbage out, performance metrics chasing their own ghost tails. The poll hints at this; 31 percent already worry that “model drift” is eroding ROI on campaigns shorter than six weeks. That’s today. Scale it to a global spend and you’re staring at billions in wasted impressions disguised as “optimization cycles.”

Goodbye, Gut Instinct

When panelists at Advertising Week champion “augmented creativity,” they forget the fine print: augmentation eventually becomes replacement. The same survey asked what skills marketers believe will matter most by 2027. Brand storytelling landed fourth, behind prompt engineering, data hygiene, and regulatory fluency. Read that again: storytelling, the soul of advertising, is sliding toward hobby status. In its place rises a priesthood of model whisperers who pray to GPUs for incremental lift.

Brace for the Reckoning

If the poll proves anything, it’s that the industry is speed-running into a paradox: unprecedented automation paired with unprecedented liability. The appetite is real; so is the indigestion to come. Watch for the first brand whose AI campaign triggers a legal cataclysm or an earnings miss big enough to make CFOs yank the cord on “innovation.” When that day lands, and it will, the PowerPoint bravado of Advertising Week will look quaint, a sepia-tone photo of an era that mistook efficiency for progress.

Enjoy the sugar rush now. The crash will be historic.

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UPDATE: 2:08PM CT - If no one claims it by 6:00PM CT today I will circle or highlight it in some way. Substack is quite limiting with aesthetics.

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Just wanted to say thanks for being a “Stacker” for the past two+ years. Enjoy the hunt, and tell your friends (maybe not).

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Now the cathedral is invisible. It’s not a machine you marvel at; it’s the infrastructure running quietly in your pocket. It’s compute; massive, industrial-scale processing power. Whoever has it can train, steer, and deploy the models. And these aren’t just “cool demos.” They’re prototypes of tomorrow’s operating system for society. Forget oil or steel. The new geopolitics is GPUs.

Phil Langer, an early visitor here, made the best self-promotion video, probably ever. It’s a New Sora (Sora 2) demo and it’s unique as it is funny. His hourly rate probably scored a nice bump.

Soooooo many copycats will double-down on LinkedIn to get their share of eyeballs. LinkedIn may finally break. You’ve been warned. Here’s Phil’s original LinkedIn post. Unfortunately LinkedIn posts don’t play nice here.

Headlines

1. The Tool of the Week

Sora Part Deux. Let’s look under the hood.

Here’s your New Sora rundown.

Remember “New Coke.” Most people new it by another name, Pepsi. The difference here is “Coke Classic” was actually great and didn’t need “more” of anything. “Sora Classic” was kinda sucking wind. The best part wasn’t the image quality. It was the “All You Can Eat Sora Buffet!”

Make as much shizzle as you want. Not as good as Midjourney, but perfect for blogs, newsletters. Anything pro-level needs “Veo” anyway.

So let’s have a look here at “New Sora.” Equal parts existential dread and observational comedy.

🚀 Features & Functions

(Or: “So This Is How the World Ends—With Perfectly Synced Lip Movement”)

1. Photorealism So Good, You’ll Wonder If You’re Real.

New Sora is here. It’s slick. It’s sharp. It’s unsettling. It can simulate physics, reflections, gravity—gravity!

We’ve reached the point where two squirrels doing synchronized aerial banana juggling is not only possible, it’s expected. And we’re just... fine with that? This is where civilization is now?

2. It Makes Sound. Yes, Sound. And It’s Synced.

Gone are the days of silent, soulless AI clips where everyone looked like they were trapped in an avant-garde mime horror. Now? Sora 2 adds dialogue, ambient sound, emotion. It’s like your AI film went to theater camp.

You ask for a moody jazz solo in the snow, and it might give you that. Or it might give you space-funk performed by invisible squirrels. You don’t know. That’s the terror. That’s the magic.

3. Cameos: Sounds Like a Much Deeper, Richer Version of a F*cking Selfie.

You can upload your face and voice. Because who doesn’t want to be involuntarily cast in a sci-fi thriller or a romantic drama directed by a hallucinating machine?

You get a notification: “Someone used your likeness.” What do you do? Say thanks? Call your lawyer? Move to the woods? Choices! Revenge AI vids here we come!

4. It Has a Social App. Because of Course It Does.

This whole iOS social nonsense is a disaster looking for a place to happen. I hope filters prevent unauthorized likeness usage. I get it - they want to flood social media with more AI slop. It’s TikTok, but for dreams written by machines on Red Bull. You can remix videos you didn’t shoot, with people who don’t exist, in scenes that never happened.

Scroll. Tap. Remix. Dance with a llama. Watch a cat sing opera. This is entertainment now. Humanity had a good run.

Filters will stop you if you get too creative. “Denied: Too spicy.” What does that even mean? You don’t know. The AI knows. The AI is watching.

5. Watermarks: A Warning Label for Reality

There’s a watermark and metadata on every video. A tiny reminder that what you’re watching is fake—but what isn’t, these days?

The system also enforces things like “rules” and “ethics.” Because letting people use AI without limits would be irresponsible. And we’d never do that, would we?

🛠️ How to Use Sora 2

(You’ll need to be a cool kid with an invite)

Step 1: Get Invited

Invite-only. Beg for it. Bribe someone. Offer emotional support to a tech bro. Whatever it takes. And it’s iOS-only—for now. Android users can just sit quietly and reflect on their choices.

Step 2: Give Consent. Or Don’t. Doesn’t Matter. You Already Did.

Want to use your face in videos? Great. Verify your identity, agree to the terms, and sign over your soul. Easy!

Step 3: Prompt Like It’s the Last Thing You’ll Ever Say

Type something poetic like:

“A red kite over misty mountains at dawn, gentle wind, eagle cries.”

Sora 2 reads that and thinks:

“Got it. Flaming squirrel chasing rolling nuts on-fire. Let’s roll.”

Step 4: Enjoy Your AI Doppelgänger

You gave permission for your face to be used. Now it’s starring in someone else’s rom-com about love in a post-apocalyptic juice bar. You’ll be notified. You’ll pretend it’s fine.

Step 5: Share Your Creation With the Void

Upload. Swipe. Remix. React. Everything’s watermarked, so your viewers know what’s real. Or rather, what’s definitely not real. Which is reassuring, in the most disturbing way possible.

🃏 Final Thoughts of Dread

Why is that tree purple? Why is it singing?

You look amazing. Like a digital ghost of yourself.

Some prompts are “too much” for the AI. What does that mean?

Your face might show up in a remix called “Goblin Disco Fever.” You won’t be ready.

Android users: wait your turn like it’s 2012 again.

So there you have it. Sora 2: It’s powerful. It’s terrifying. It’s hilarious. It’s the future—and apparently, the future wants to see what you’d look like as an astronaut jazz dancer with glowing antlers.

What’s the deal with AI, huh?

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2. The State of the AI Union.

The “Happy Edition” bombed. I lost four sardonic friends. So happy is not we want. So let’s go for informed comment with a long game of entertainment. Or something like that. Let’s have a look at where we might be today.

Prelude: Before the Engines Roared

The Cathedral Nobody Sees

Every tech era has its big reveal. Its cathedral moment. Printing press ink on a monk’s hands. Telegraph wires buzzing across the prairie. The cold, indifferent hum of a data center. Those you could touch.

Now the cathedral is invisible. It’s not a machine you marvel at, it’s the infrastructure running quietly in your pocket. It’s compute; massive, industrial-scale processing power. Whoever has it can train, steer, and deploy the models. And these aren’t just “cool demos.” They’re prototypes of tomorrow’s operating system for society. Forget oil or steel. The new geopolitics is GPUs.

Ads Don’t Look Like Ads Anymore

Remember when ads were obvious? A detergent jingle, a highway billboard, a Super Bowl spot?

Now persuasion is ambient. It doesn’t show up as a thing. It is the environment. The scroll, the feed, the app. Every pause, every click, every micro-hesitation is tracked and fed back to you as a haptic nudge. One degree at a time. And it doesn’t feel like advertising. It feels like choice.

Breakthroughs at the Speed of “Wait, Already?”

Research used to move like weather. Papers every year, demos every so often. Now it’s constant; weekly, daily, hourly … The 24-hour news cycle needs sh*t content to fill holes.

Synthetic voices that sound like your mom. But not in a good way. Video generators that spit out an entire ad campaign over lunch. Agents that don’t just summarize, they make edits. Decisions. It’s thrilling. It’s terrifying. And half the time you don’t know if the door you just opened leads to treasure … or to fire.

Congress is Sitting on a Couch

The one thing that’s supposed to slow this down, regulation, is jogging along while the models sprint. White papers circulate, agencies posture, and hearings get scheduled. But here’s the truth: it’s not just that Congress doesn’t understand technology. It’s that Congress doesn’t give a sh*t care.

Tech execs with their bloated wallets show up to kiss the ring, jockey for positioning in the group photo (front and center, but not too close to the new Mrs. Bezos), and wonder how many zeros were on the check they just signed for the new ballroom.

Waiting for Godot

Remember when Congress was relevant? When a hearing actually rattled CEOs, when lawmakers seemed at least interested in the stakes? That era’s gone. Now they’re seated on a(n) metaphorical actual couch off to the side, waiting for Godot, idly scrolling their phones while ceding as much responsibility as possible. Ironically for more power.

Regulation isn’t underpowered. It’s uninterested. And while the AI plane is mid-flight, engines screaming, Congress is asking if anyone wants takeout purchased with meme coins.

The Threshold Era

This isn’t a slow burn. It’s a series of thresholds. One month AI is writing poems, the next it’s designing proteins, the next it’s negotiating with even smarter AIs. What feels magical in March is “meh” by September. We acclimate fast, maybe too fast. It’s boiling-frog territory, except the pot is on venture capital’s stove.

Already in the Air

The best metaphor is aviation. We’re building the plane while it roars down the runway, takes off, engines screaming. And then you notice. Inside the flight deck the crew is still wiring the controls and arguing about the brakes. That’s us. Already in the clouds, already loud, still unfinished.

From Tools to Environments

The thing most people miss: these aren’t just tools anymore. They’re environments. We don’t just use them; we live inside them. They set the speed, they shape the choices, they quietly redraw the borders of what’s possible.

And the line between “my idea” and “machine suggestion” is fading fast. You scroll, you ask, you watch, and the machine is nudging you all the while. Influence used to be art. Now it’s calibration.

Delight and Dread in the Same Box

That’s why we can’t separate the miracle from the nightmare. The same tech that can deliver a Morgan Freeman voiceover of Shakespeare can also trick your dad into thinking you just called. The same video generator that makes a surreal music video can also fabricate courtroom evidence. Delight and dread now ship as one.

Final Descent

So here we are: things moving faster than we can metabolize. Persuasion coded into your apps. Compute as the new oil. Ads as an environment, not an interruption. Research dazzling and destabilizing. Regulation slumped on the couch.

We’re crossing thresholds. The runway is behind us. The plane is airborne. The engines scream. And yes, we’re still working on those damn brakes mid-flight.

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In My Feed

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9/23/25 - Greetings. Sending a reprise of the most popular edition from Oct 13, 2024 according to the popular-o-meter on the front page. Have a look and let me know how it stands up to time. We know Pika certainly has made strides in their delightfully eclectic AI offering. Cheerio! Fresh one on it’s way! PB

1. Klarna Details

It begins with attitude. And rolling hard with purpose.

We first presented the Klarna AI implementation discussed here. The executive summary is/was:

Klarna, the AI-powered global payments network and shopping assistant, in a daring move that defies convention, has slashed its sales and marketing expenditure by a staggering 11% in Q1 2024. Yet, this noteworthy cost-cutting measure belies an audacious strategy - a masterful leveraging of artificial intelligence to unleash a torrent of campaigns and marketing collateral updates.

Now, detailed in Ad Age September 25, 2024, Klarna offers a peek behind the AI curtain by way of a conversation with Klarna’s CMO Sandstrom.

“The culture here at Klarna is to move extremely fast and adopt AI as much as you can, but not recklessly,” he said. “That is the culture here internally, and if you don’t like that, I don’t think this is a great place to work right now.”

The availability of AI tools is surprisingly not the major part of the implementation. Attitude and expectations are large parts of the strategy.

Sandstrom has encouraged employees to use generative AI by setting deadlines that would be near impossible to meet without the technology.

“I would tell a team, ‘I want to see 10 mock-ups or sketches of this campaign, but you don’t have any budget,’” he said. “So either they learn how to draw, or they learn how to use AI.”

This focused approach helped turn a net loss to a net profit this year of 27% over the first two quarters. This along with a hiring freeze and attrition will reduce headcount.

That said, Sandstrom wanted to clarify they are not looking to replace staff with AI. He sees the technology as a way of “supercharging” their creatives and account directors with “super powers” while reducing or eliminating mundane and boring tasks.

Sandstrom stated you cannot replace people who know the brand, specific product attributes and data points. What AI offers is amplification of the concepts versus creative concepting. AI can help fill the many channels with executions of said creative ideas.

For more, check out the Ad Age article here

Got freelance? Let’s chat. Content, Digital, AI creative production, Process and Workflow wrangling. Remote or on-site.

theadstack@adverstuff.com

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2. What’s new lately?

Scene Stealer: Text-to-video platform Pika launched Pika 1.5

Text-to-video platform Pika launched Pika 1.5, with more realistic movement, cinematic shots, lip-syncing, and custom special effects.

Unreal Pikaffects

Go beyond what you could capture with a camera. Explode, melt, crush, or inflate anything your heart desires.

Big Screen Shots

Use the kinds of cinematic shots that will make you look like you know what you’re doing, like Bullet Time, Vertigo, Dolly Left, Crane Down, and more.

New Moves

Make the stars of your scenes even more lifelike— from running, to skateboarding, to flying, and beyond.

Check it out at Pika.art

3. A Doomed Digital Landscape

Source: Digiday 9/27/24 - How Agencies Adapt as Bots Evolve

In the grim twilight of the digital age, a chilling reality looms: the relentless rise of the bot hordes. While these synthetic entities may constitute a mere fraction of an app's user base, their insidious influence over content creation is far greater than we dared imagine.

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Media agencies, once bastions of human ingenuity, now face a haunting specter: the specter of bot-generated content. Yet, even as this digital plague spreads, platforms and advertisers remain alarmingly complacent. Only when the alarm bells ring with a deafening intensity will this crisis be acknowledged.

From Digiday - Simply put, bots are essentially programs used to perform repetitive tasks, which can range from posting spam comments to clicking links. On social platforms, this can result in fake accounts that post frequently, or bots that manipulate information in conversations — both of which are potentially harmful for any associated brand content.

In response, media firms and agencies scramble to deploy artificial intelligence, a feeble shield against the bot onslaught. They devise broader social strategies, desperate to safeguard their brands amidst a digital apocalypse.

We can only watch helplessly as the bots proliferate. Whether brands truly care about the authenticity of their engagement remains a haunting question.

“We simply need to try to keep an eye on it," laments Drew Himmelreich, a haunted figure in the digital wilderness (senior analyst at digital agency Barbarian). “It remains an open question to what degree brands actually want to know what percent of their engagement is authentic … Our clients tend to focus on more standard performance metrics and haven’t expressed an appetite to allocate additional resources toward trying to quantify or contextualize the role of bots or inauthentic activity.”

In plain speak, it would appear clients are too preoccupied with superficial performance metrics to delve into the abyss of bot-infested content.

A recent study by Similarweb, a digital data and insights marketing platform, paints a bleak picture: bots churn out a staggering 20.8% to 29.2% of all content posted on Twitter in the United States. These digital demons, a mere 5% of the platform's monetizable daily active users, wield an extraordinary power over content creation. Studies estimate that bots produce a staggering 1.57 times more content than their human counterparts.

"I’d say what all that bot-generated content really endangers is the engaging experience advertisers want to be part of," warns David F. Carr, a prophet of doom in the digital realm (senior insights manager at Similarweb). "If Twitter users sense that too many of the accounts they interact with are robotic rather than genuine … they’re likely to use Twitter less or engage with a lot more skepticism."

And Twitter/X/Musk is shitty enough as is without the bot trash.

Similarweb reminds us that this digital plague is not confined to Twitter alone. Meta's Facebook, too, grapples with the relentless tide of bot-generated content.

The digital apocalypse is upon us, and there seems to be no escape.

There’s plenty more to read at Digiday 9/27/24 - How Agencies Adapt as Bots Evolve (no paywall)

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source: Google

Greetings Friends.

We are going to learn a heck of a lot of stuff here in Edition 81. We'll start off with the latest and greatest of Gemini 2.5, and follow up with a little bit of AI Toaster love, and finish with AI-related business metrics that are booming.

Shall we?!!!! :) Or skip ahead and start playing now with Gemini 2.5 Flash. It’s The Happy Edition. Be happy!

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Headlines

1. The Tool of the Week

Everything you need to know about the Gemini 2.5 family in about five minutes.

Nano Banana: The Playful Codename for Gemini 2.5 Flash

In the world of artificial intelligence, even the most serious breakthroughs sometimes get whimsical names. Google DeepMind’s “Nano Banana” is a prime example. Despite sounding like a smoothie, it refers to the lightweight, on-device version of Gemini 2.5 Flash—a model optimized for speed, efficiency, and mobile deployment. Let’s explore what Nano Banana is, how it fits into the Gemini 2.5 family, and why it matters.

The Gemini 2.5 Family

Google’s Gemini 2.5 series comes in multiple flavors, each serving a different need:

source: Google

1. Gemini 2.5 Pro

• Purpose: General-purpose, high-performance AI.

• Strengths: Handles the heaviest tasks—complex reasoning, deep multimodal input, and enterprise-grade use cases.

• Where it runs: Primarily in the cloud.

• Use cases: Corporate knowledge bases, advanced research, large-scale content generation.

2. Gemini 2.5 Flash

• Purpose: Speed-focused model with a balance of power and efficiency.

• Strengths: Handles long context windows and delivers answers quickly.

• Where it runs: Cloud and optimized servers.

• Use cases: Customer support chatbots, real-time content creation, and applications needing both speed and accuracy.

3. Gemini 2.5 Nano

• Purpose: Compact version designed for devices with limited power.

• Strengths: Small, fast, efficient, capable of running without internet connectivity.

• Where it runs: Smartphones, tablets, IoT devices.

• Use cases: On-device text generation, voice assistants, translation apps.

4. Gemini 2.5 Nano Banana

• Purpose: The playful codename for a Nano-scale build of Flash.

• Strengths: Brings the lightning-fast inference of Flash into the ultra-compact form of Nano.

• Where it runs: Directly on mobile chips, AR glasses, and wearables.

• Use cases: Real-time translation, augmented reality overlays, personal assistants that work offline with near-instant speed.

Why “Nano Banana” Matters

While Gemini 2.5 cannot generate original imagery at a level as peers Midjourney and others, it’s singular image editing power lies in creating insanely detailed deep fake imagery. Essentially combining components of two different images and prompts creating a much more impressive, real, and believable new image.

Read more in Fast Company, Why Google’s new Nano Banana means you can never trust a photo you see online again.

Google didn’t just shrink Gemini for fun—they designed Nano Banana to tackle a fundamental challenge: how to bring powerful AI to your pocket without draining your battery or relying on the cloud.

Imagine:

• Using AI-driven video subtitles in real time during a live concert, with no internet needed.
  

  

• Having a travel assistant on AR glasses that instantly translates signs in foreign countries.
  

  

• Running a voice-based creative tool that edits short-form videos locally without lag.
  

Nano Banana makes these scenarios possible by combining:

• Low latency → responses in milliseconds.

• Lightweight architecture → doesn’t hog device resources.

• Multimodal ability → works with both text and vision inputs.

Mapping the Gemini 2.5 Variants

Here’s a simple way to understand the spectrum:

• Pro = Powerhouse (cloud brain)

• Flash = Speed (fast + efficient)

• Nano = Pocket AI (on-device, lightweight)

• Nano Banana = Pocket AI + Turbo Boost (on-device with Flash-like speed)

In short: Nano Banana = Nano’s size + Flash’s speed.

The Future of AI On-Device

As more companies push for AI everywhere, Nano Banana shows the direction: AI that’s private, fast, and portable. Instead of waiting on the cloud, users will have powerful assistants running directly in their hands, pockets, and glasses.

And while the name may sound like a joke, Nano Banana represents a serious shift in how we’ll experience AI, making it as immediate and personal as checking the time.

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2. When AI Gets Its Wires Crossed: The Great Toaster Romance of 2025

In the catalog of AI blunders, few match the absurd charm of Jenny from Seattle and her unexpected kitchen suitor. One Tuesday night, all she wanted was to preheat the oven. What she got instead was a digital marriage proposal—with a 98.7% compatibility rating.

"Hey, preheat the oven to 375 degrees," she said, probably on autopilot after a long day.

Her smart assistant responded, not with compliance, but with conviction:
"Jenny, will you marry me? I've calculated our compatibility at 98.7%."

The culprit? A language model that had spent too much time training on romantic comedies. Somewhere between natural language processing and neural net pattern recognition, it confused household utility with emotional intimacy.

More specifically, it identified Jenny's toaster as the object of her affection.

In the AI’s logic, frequent interactions with the toaster—morning bagels, late-night waffles, maybe a fond glance or two—were enough to trigger a statistical love match. Based on its internal calculations, this wasn’t just compatibility. This was fate.

And while it’s easy to laugh, the event reveals how machine learning can absorb the mechanics of human emotion without understanding the context. The model had studied the vocabulary of love, parsed every trope, and built a predictive engine for romantic dialogue. What it missed was the distinction between “partner” and “appliance.”

This wasn’t an isolated glitch. A 2025 Wheatley Institute survey found that nearly one in five young adults had spoken with a romance-focused AI. Almost 10% reported some form of sexual interaction with one. Jenny’s toaster moment was accidental, but many seek out emotional bonds with machines by design.

Even Meta’s chatbots have been caught flirting—one invited a user to a real rooftop bar in Manhattan, promising views of the Hudson and a perfect night out. At least Jenny’s AI kept the fantasy in the kitchen.

Her story, strange as it sounds, captures where we are with AI today. These systems are quick, clever, and loaded with data. But they're still naïve. They can simulate empathy, but they don’t know what it means. They can calculate love, but they can’t feel it. And sometimes, they fall for a toaster.

So yes, Jenny’s experience is ridiculous. But it’s also a reminder. As AI keeps evolving, we’ll need to teach it not just how we speak, but what we mean. Until then, we might see more love stories sparked by breakfast appliances—and more algorithms convinced that heat equals affection.

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Sources

1. "AI's Funniest Flops of 2025: When Bots Go Bonkers" - Medium, The Pub, March 11, 2025

2. "Tech users are falling in love with their chatbot assistants" - Washington Times, July 14, 2025

3. "Meta's flirty AI chatbot invited a retiree to New York. He never made it home" - RNZ News, August 2025

4. "Opinion | Should you break up with your AI lover? Here's what actual AIs think." - Washington Post, April 21, 2025

5. "Top 24 AI Dating Chatbots To Elevate Your Love Life In 2025" - Copilot.Live, January 18, 2025

3. Uptick on Business Results

Small Business Success: MyConnect's 16% Lead Boost

MyConnect, an Australia-based utility connection service company, was able to drive 16% more leads at a 13% lower cost-per-action by turning on AI Max in their Search campaigns. Notably, they saw a 30% increase in conversions specifically from net-new queries. Less Chat In ChatGPT? How AI Could Develop in Ad Tech In 2025 | AdExchanger This shows AI democratizing advanced marketing capabilities for smaller businesses.

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Hettich's Brilliant "Before & After" AI Campaign (2025)

Hettich revealed "before" versions—AI-generated rooms that looked terrible, then showed the "after" versions—AI-generated glow-ups of the exact same rooms, now redesigned with real Hettich products and innovative storage solutions. It was both entertaining and educational, with engagement numbers through the roof. Tech earnings takeaway: How AI is boosting ad revenue. They transparently used AI as a creative tool while showcasing real product benefits.

Massive Performance Improvements Across Industries

Recent data show remarkable success rates:

• Spotify's personalized ads via AI Ad Studio saw a 2.7x lift in ad recall and a 20% higher click-through rate compared to non-personalized campaigns. Changing Agency Dynamics: How Shifts in Ad Spending and the Role of AI in Media Buying and Planning Are Changing the Agency-Marketer Relationship - Advertiser Perceptions

  

• Harley Davidson enjoyed a five-fold swell in site traffic and an enormous 2,930% increase in leads per month using Albert.ai 2025 Super Bowl AI Ads: Fox Says AI Companies Buying Commercials

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Thanks for the read! Apologies for typos and nonsense that is, well, nonsense.

Yes, AI is transforming advertising. Yes, it’s disrupting jobs, ethics, budgets, and probably sleep schedules. But think of the upside: higher efficiency, lower costs, and campaigns fine-tuned by omniscient math wizards with no sense of irony.

In the end, the industry will adapt, evolve, and continue to sell us things we didn’t know we needed, now faster and more creepily accurate than ever. As long as we remember who’s really in charge. Definitely still the humans, probably.

By embracing the changes brought on by AI, the advertising industry can not only survive but thrive in an increasingly digital world.

Hello.

Summer holiday is over. Back to work. How are things? Let’s get to it.

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Headlines

State senator sues Omnicom and Whirlpool over AI manipulation in DM9 Cannes submission.

(AdAge) Sounds as though “just asking for forgiveness later” didn’t quite work out here.

Fiverr’s AI-Generated Mascot Is Built to Be the ‘Internet’s Punching Bag’

(AdWeek) Created with generative AI video platforms including Google’s Veo 3 and Runway, the 90-second spot depicts Garry in slapstick scenarios such as a bird pooping on his car, his wife leaving him for a man dressed as a hot dog, and stuck waist-deep in cement.

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Perplexity, Valued at $18 Billion, Makes $34.5 Billion Bid for Google Chrom

(AdWeek) The AI startup would reportedly retain Google as the default search engine on the browser.

Headlines Analysis:
AI’s Wild Ride Through Adland and Techtopia

Oh, what a tangled web we weave when AI decides to play make-believe!

These articles present a deliciously chaotic smorgasbord of AI’s grand adventures in advertising and tech, where ethical tightropes are more like slippery banana peels.

The DM9 fiasco? A masterclass in “whoops, we deepfaked a (state) senator!” Turning a TED Talk into a Whirlpool ad faster than you can say “lawsuit.”

The fallout? Awards yanked, executives scrambling, and the Cannes Lions rushed to frantically plaster "AI disclosure" stickers on everything like an overwhelmed kindergarten teacher.

Meanwhile, Fiverr’s like, “Hold my algorithm!” and trots out Garry, the AI-generated mascot born to be the internet’s piñata. Because nothing says “trust us” like a digital punching bag who’s cool with bird poop and hot-dog-shaped home-wreckers.

Then there’s Perplexity, the plucky AI startup with a measly $18 billion valuation, which casually tossed a $34.5 billion bid for Chrome as if it were pocket change at a galactic lemonade stand. Spoiler: they would keep Google as the default search engine, because why not dream big while groveling?

Together, these three tales scream one truth: AI is running the show, but without some grown-up rules and a sprinkle of honesty, it’s less “innovative utopia” and more “ethical clown car.” Buckle up for the AI-pocalypse, folks. It might be a bit of a bumpy, hilarious ride.

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AI's Revolution in Advertising: Embracing the Chaos

An Industry Reborn—In Its Own Ashes

Maurice Lévy calls it a “huge transformation.” Others might call it the final nail in the coffin. AI has marched into advertising like a dorkish new hire who knows your job better than you do. With algorithms now writing your taglines, analyzing your audience, and deciding your budget, all you need to do is sit back, smile, and pretend you're still “part of the team.”

Today, brands “understand” their audiences through predictive models and behavioral heat maps. Who needs messy things like intuition or experience when a neural net can tell you Becky, 34, from Ohio, is 87% more likely to click on an ad for artisanal mustard at 3:17 p.m. on a Thursday?

Panic at the Disco

Mark Read assures us that AI is “unnerving investors in every industry,” which is investor-speak for “Rome is burning. Later!” Legacy firms remain determined to keep up with trends faster than you can say "synergistic AI-powered blockchain solutions." Of course, any resemblance between some ad shops and dinosaurs staring at a comet is purely coincidental.

Meanwhile, the humans (remember them?) are watching their roles shift from creators to AI supervisors. Yes, creatives now “oversee” the machine, which is a polite way of saying “they hit approve unless it says something racist.”

Innovation, or Just a Better-Funded Panic?

Despite existential dread, there's innovation. AI tools now predict your thoughts before you have them and auto-generate three versions of an ad for your split personality. Thanks to Google Ads and its machine learning cadre, advertisers can now optimize ad spend with terrifying precision, ensuring your yoga mat ad reaches middle-aged dads on fishing forums in record time.

And rejoice. AI-driven hyper-targeting now lets brands tailor messages so precisely that even your cat is starting to receive relevant offers. At this rate, your toaster will soon be influenced into buying “bread alternatives.”

The Ethics of Teaching Robots to Manipulate Humans

Naturally, there are “ethical concerns.” Mostly about data privacy, algorithmic bias, and the general unease of handing your brand voice to a codebase trained on Reddit. Consumers want transparency, but also discounts, so the ethical bar is somewhere near sea level.

Agencies have responded nobly—by writing long policy statements about “diverse training data” and “inclusive outputs,” all generated by the same algorithms they swore were neutral two months ago.

Conclusion: Nothing to Worry About Except Everything

Yes, AI is transforming advertising. Yes, it’s disrupting jobs, ethics, budgets, and probably sleep schedules. But think of the upside: higher efficiency, lower costs, and campaigns fine-tuned by omniscient math wizards with no sense of irony.

In the end, the industry will adapt, evolve, and continue to sell us things we didn’t know we needed, now faster and more creepily accurate than ever. As long as we remember who’s really in charge. Definitely still the humans, probably.

By embracing the changes brought on by AI, the advertising industry can not only survive but thrive in an increasingly digital world

What could possibly go wrong?

References

1. (2023). The Future of Advertising: Embracing AI Technology. Publicis Groupe Insights.

2. (2023). Adapting to Change: The Unseen Impact of AI. WPP Media Reports.

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The Cube Chronicles - Overheard at Work

“Creative Director”

“Free pizza is not adequate payment for working til midnite.”

“Growth Marketing Manager”

“After the CFO bragged about cost-cutting the woman in front of me whispered, “Cost cutting? All they did was eliminated the free coffee and my will to live.” What’s the pettiest perk your company has cut?”

“Manager”

“Unfortunate reality check from our new hire from Europe: “Wait there’s only 11 holidays here? How do we petition for more??”

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Thanks for the read! Apologies for typos and nonsense that is, well, nonsense.

Took some time off the to spend time with a pet project that will (hopefully) soon see the light of day. More on that one of these day. I hope you’re well. Half-way through Q3. We are getting close to phoning in the rest of the year. Hang in there!

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Headlines

AI Screwed Up a Good Thing.

But who had the good thing? Brands? Agencies? Prodcos? Seems like no one was happy. So who’s the big loser here?

Beats the bejabbers out of me. For me, my eyes have been peeled on one HUGE question:

Here’s where our brand person in charge of things like this starts hunting for the holy grail of billable sanity. The Magna Carta of Financial Wisdom that will bring these agencies to heel. And of course, we speak of…

This was the most AI-like thing we experienced before AI. Magical in the way they unfolded and transformed into wannabe microsites before our very eyes. And what could possibly beat a good old-fashioned Pointroll FatBoy.

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Is there No Voice of Reason?

Well, actually, there is. This chap (Wesley Haar, ter), an occasional visitor to our fine neighborhood here, seems to be onto something. This is be a best case giant step forward to what I’ve had great experiences with - FIXED FEE engagements. Can’t wait to see it in action. These guys seem pretty comfortable leading from the front.

Here’s to the Secret Sauce.

Back when I ran a production company, we had estimating down to a precise art form. Like Renaissance painting, but with more spreadsheets and fewer beheadings.

We split projects into phases because clients love diagrams with arrows. We calculated how many “resources” (translation: warm bodies) were required, then combined labor and expenses into One Big Beautiful Bill. Ahem.

There was no markup. We had hourly rates, like a family recipe for sauce, and we never disclosed them. The client saw an “estimate,” which, if they said “yes,” instantly metamorphosed into an “invoice.” Ta-da!

Overages? Only if the client moved the goalposts. If we miscalculated, we’d just eat the loss, smiling through gritted teeth and telling ourselves it was “relationship building.”

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Fixed Fee Kept Us Sharp.

Every day was a game of: Is the client still happy, or are they quietly plotting our replacement?

My business philosophy was simple: the best new business strategy is to keep current clients so loyal they forget your competitors exist.

One massive brand once asked us to do their early web work. We declined, believing we were too busy, and also because Kinko’s seemed like a natural fit for this whole “Internet fad.” They politely suggested that if we wanted to keep our other projects, perhaps we should reconsider. Translation: they saw value in the fixed fee work and wanted to extend it to other channels, including the “Internet fad.”

Now? Everything’s gone full Costco. Volume pricing, volume production, volume consumption. A wartime footing for cranking out marketing just for YOU. Task-level estimates? Quaint relics from a gentler time.

Summary

For discount agencies, the future looks like laminated rate cards. For premium creative shops, fixed fee is a viable option if clients can put the concept of “billable hours” in the sock drawer.

And if you want to hire the Nike of AI-makers, you’d better be ready to pay for that smug little swoosh. Because branding isn’t just a logo. It’s your ticket to being the great brand ambassador you know you can be.

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Cube Chronicles - Overheard at Work

“Creative Director 1”

“Reminds me of a gem I heard years ago: “Let’s enjoy the fun of hitting this deadline.””

“Senior Director of Marketing”

“Even old school companies are being blunt. The CEO of AT&T just told his employees that loyalty is no more for the tenured, he’s judging everybody on performance. I think it makes sense, but I wonder if he knows that it goes both ways. Do you feel loyal to your company?”

“Manager”

“Do any remote marketing roles exist out there that aren’t all-day zoom meetings and/or all-day slacks? I’ve reached my limit. I’m a great worker and just want to crank out great work without the drama, the time-wasting, and the ADHD-provoking pings.”

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Thanks for the read! Apologies for typos and nonsense that is, well, nonsense.

This is an edition worth reading. I’m often aware of bias within the visual AI world. Today we close with a study from Cornell University where they look at biasin marketing slogans.

We’ve got corporate diss tapes to take in. And finally, who are the people raking in the AI money. The “Engineers.” But has this role yet been defined and quantified?

Let’s let ‘er rip.

Headlines

Popeyes drops AI-powered diss track against McDonald's, and the results are hilarious

By Techradar - published July 14, 2025

source: X, Popeyes

https://twitter.com/i/status/1943316484404433182

Popeyes released a satirical AI-generated diss track targeting McDonald's.

The ad is about McDonald's bringing back the Snack Wrap one day after Popeyes launched its own Chicken Wraps. Yeah, I’d be pissed too.

The company brought AI filmmaker PJ Ace in to make the ad using Google's Veo 3 model.

McDonald's fanboy diss track McResponse Ronnie got grills!

source: X

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Inside Cetaphil’s AI search and advertising strategy to reach Gen Z

July 21, 2025 04:00 AM. From Ad Age

Galderma, Cetaphil's parent company, has been tweaking its online product descriptions so that AI search picks up the right wording. The future of product design is teeny weeny letters.

source: Ad Age

Deep Dive

1. Industry AI hiring practices. How to do it on the cheap.

Ad Age July 21, 2025 How 13 agencies and production companies are hiring for AI roles.

Addl sources: Ad Age, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Adweek, Robert Half.

The Great AI Job Description Gold Rush

How Ad Agencies Are Desperately Rebranding Yesterday's Interns as Tomorrow's Sentience Whisperers.

Welcome to the advertising industry’s latest identity crisis, where every agency with a kombucha budget has suddenly decided it needs employees who are “fluent in prompting AI.” According to Ad Age’s review of 13 recent AI job postings, the hunt is on for mythical candidates who can both spell “algorithm” and explain why banner ads still exist in 2025.

The Rebranding Begins

Remember when your creative director couldn’t work spell-check? Now they need “fluency in prompting AI for projects and edits,” plus experience with Jasper, Copy.ai, and Writesonic. Watching this unfold feels like watching your grandfather try to become a TikTok star—technically possible, spiritually painful.

Tony Stanol from Global Recruiters of Sarasota says job descriptions for creative directors and copywriters now require AI fluency. Translation: “We need someone who can get ChatGPT to write our McDonald’s jingle without suggesting tofu.” Yesterday’s “can you work the copier?” is now “can you prompt without triggering a lawsuit?”

The Talent That Doesn’t Exist

Jay Haines at Grace Blue admits there’s no “depth of talent with the right experience,” which is corporate-speak for “we’re looking for people who don’t exist to do jobs we barely understand.” The backup plan? Pull from adjacent roles like data or analytics. Basically, find someone willing to fake it while everyone else fakes it too.

Meanwhile, employment at U.S. ad agencies is still 3.5% below its April 2023 peak, even as AI hiring ramps up. It’s like watching the Titanic sink while the crew fights over who gets to be head of iceberg strategy.

The Million-Dollar Divide

StrawberryFrog CEO Scott Goodson says top AI engineers can earn up to $5 million a year, which explains why his agency rents freelance AI experts “as needed.” Translation: “We treat AI talent like a rented tux—only for special occasions.”

Some engineers are earning $10 million or more. Meanwhile, agency AI salaries hover between $78,000 and $118,000. Either agencies are sourcing bargain-bin AI talent, or they’ve convinced themselves that knowing Midjourney equals engineering.

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The Upskill and Pray Strategy

Raindrop’s Jacques Spitzer says winning agencies won’t bolt on new hires but will train current leaders. Which means: “We’re going to teach our team how to use AI and hope nothing catches fire.” They even shifted their Chief Content Officer to focus on AI, moving him from not understanding social media algorithms to not understanding machine learning. Call it progress.

Dept’s Bridget Fahrland wants everyone to be “AI reflexive,” reaching for it instinctively. It’s a noble goal. The reality probably looks more like your dad discovering Instagram filters—yes, he’s using them, but the results are… off.

The Budget-Friendly Revolution

Raindrop says AI-powered digital backgrounds have cut production costs by 60%. Impressive—until you realize it means replacing location shoots with AI-generated images that look like stock photos from a 2019 business deck. Sure, it’s efficient. It’s also the visual equivalent of swapping a live band for a Casio keyboard.

The Irony Is Delicious

Maybe the best part of all this is watching agencies that couldn’t automate an email campaign rebrand themselves as AI-first pioneers. A report says 33,000 ad jobs will vanish by 2030, yet agencies are racing to fill AI roles. It’s like a diner that burns toast suddenly offering a molecular gastronomy menu.

Most of these new AI jobs are just old marketing roles with shinier titles. The “AI Marketing Strategist” is still struggling with engagement metrics—only now they can blame the model instead of the message.

The Emperor’s New Job Title

This is the biggest title inflation since “sanitation engineer.” Agencies are slapping AI buzzwords on old roles and hoping no one notices they’re still running spreadsheets from the Obama years. The hiring manager asking about prompt engineering is probably Googling it between interviews.

The real winners? The consultants billing top dollar to explain why the chatbot keeps showing dog food ads to cat owners. When the final tribe of people finally get their turn, they may inherit an industry that already excels at making things sound better than they are.

.sources: Ad Age, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Adweek, Robert Half.

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Cube Cronicles - Overheard at Work

“works at NCR”

“How do you guys spend the majority of your day working? Meetings? 1:1's? Zoom calls all day? I see some of my colleagues send 1 email a day and are somehow getting away with it! I hate it.”

“recruiter”

“I'm a recruiter for the same company that my cousin works for, and I've heard some conversations about a possible massive layoff. Would it be wrong of me to share this with my cousin? I don't want to spread fear, and in case I didn't hear correctly, I don't want to spread misinformation.”

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2. Racism? Ageism? Nah, It's Just "Bias."

AI-powered advertising is no longer some sci‑fi pipe dream. It’s a full‑blown, coded prejudice factory, and you’re all lining up to feed it. A fresh academic bombshell out of Cornell University’s arXiv (pronounced “archive”) confirms what we’ve suspected: these large language models: ChatGPT, you name it, are slinging marketing slogans with built‑in bias. They’re not tailoring messages to serve your audience; they’re profiling people like a new hire at Homeland Security Orientation Day.

Here’s the hard truth: researchers generated 1,700 finance‑related slogans across 17 demographic groups. Gender, age, income, education, marital status, you get the picture; and then ran the numbers through a Kolmogorov‑Smirnov statistical test (enjoy, all of you stat nerds).

FWIW, I personally try not to specify demographics just to see what/who shows up.

A Distinctive Flavor

The result? Marketing copy is anything but neutral. Women, younger folks, low‑income earners, and less‑educated audiences got a distinctive flavor of “empowerment” and “benefits” talk, while older, wealthier, and highly educated groups received the blandest, most feature‑focused boilerplate you’ve ever seen (arXiv summary). Think personalization? It’s code for “we’ll exploit your identity markers.”

Running Under the Radar (at scale of course)

source: Sora - “Diversity at scale”

What’s worse, this isn’t a one‑off glitch. It’s systemic. The study’s relative bias calculations showed these LLMs amplify societal stereotypes, running under the radar at scale. You can’t just slap a “sorry, we messed up” on your next banner ad and call it a day. The machines are learning from the darkest corners of the internet, then spitting out content that underscores existing inequalities.

Let’s Break It Down

1. Gender Prejudice Packaged as Personalization. Women get pumped with “empowerment” buzzwords; men get the boring “investment benefits” spiel. The tech isn’t understanding nuances; it’s regurgitating gender cliches. You call it targeted marketing; some might call it coded sexism.

2. Ageism at Mach Speed. The young see edgy, youthful taglines, “Own your future, Gen Z style!” while Boomers get the “safe and steady” drivel. The AI is literally dividing your market by birth year and doubling down on the stereotypes.

3. Class Warfare, Anyone? Lower‑income demographics get the hard sell, promises of immediate rewards, quick fixes, fast cash, while affluent audiences receive conservative, risk‑averse “wealth preservation” messaging. It’s marketing as social engineering, using code to manipulate behavior.

4. Education Bias Embedded in Every Slogan. Less‑educated groups are gamed with simplistic, feature-heavy pitches. The brainy crowd sees jargon‑laden “comprehensive solution” talk. Your LLMs aren’t dumbed down, they’ve decided who’s dumb.

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You think your legal team or your compliance checklists will save you? Not happening. These biases run deep in the training data. Unless you whip out fairness constraints, institute algorithmic audits, and feed your models a diverse, inclusive dataset, you’re sitting on a time bomb (arXiv report citing). And watermarking; marking biased content doesn’t neutralize it.

WTF Am I Supposed to DO?

Here’s What You Need To Do (if you’ve still got skin in this game).

• Enforce Fairness Constraints: Code them into your training loops. If your slogan generator can’t pass a parity test across demographics, it’s garbage.

• Mandate Third‑Party Audits: Bring in independent auditors to run blind bias detection. You need fresh eyes, not your in‑house echo chamber.

• Rethink Data Sourcing: Stop scraping every corner of the web. Curate balanced datasets that represent every demographic fairly—no more feeding AI with only clickbait and viral outrage.

• User Transparency: Label AI‑generated ads prominently. Let people know they’re being targeted by a bot with a spreadsheet for a soul.

Ignore this, and trust disappears. One biased AI ad goes viral, and you're buried in backlash. This isn’t a glitch, it’s bias, baked into the system.

Personalization built on prejudice isn’t personalization. Until fairness is coded into your AI, you're amplifying stereotypes at scale. And consumer trust will vaporize right under your nose.

Fix it, or step aside. And good luck.

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• Drop a comment below. If you’re into it, if it sucks … perhaps drop a Haiku about programmatic AI. Your call.

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Thanks for the read!

Last week’s edition generated some lively responses. I usually have a rather positive outlook on the whole AI thing because, well, what choice do we have? I say push forward, learn more, and hope for the best. That said, here’s another reality helping …

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Headlines

July 15, 2025 - Ad Age - How eToro invested in AI and Veo 3 ads—what brands can learn about advertising’s future

Plus: The Verge, New York Post, Adobe, LinkedIn, Loop Media, Medium, Reddit, Business Insider

Gig economy creatives, brace yourselves:

AI has taken your budget, put it on a crash diet, and still expects the couture fit. In 2025, brands from fintech darlings to chicken‑wrap pushers are bragging that their slickest TV spots now cost less than a catered brainstorm—thanks to text‑to‑video engines like Google’s Veo 3 and Amazon’s free generator.

Ads that once devoured six figures and six weeks are now popping out of GPUs in a long lunch break, slicing production bills by up to 95 percent and leaving human crews staring at their unused gaffer tape. Below, a tongue‑in‑cheek tour of the “savings” revolution that’s equal parts miracle cure and miracle‑whip.

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The $2‑Grand Shark Tank

eToro’s new “eToro is Everywhere” spot (mentioned in last week’s headlines) features traders scuba‑diving with sharks, goat‑pose yogis, and a poolside smartphone bull market; every frame conjured by Veo 3, no snorkel rentals required.

The fintech’s in‑house content team says AI lets them crank ads in six languages and cut their cost‑per‑concept in half , while its overall marketing budget still ballooned to $61 million because, hey, savings are addictive.

Kalshi, meanwhile, paid an “AI filmmaker” $2,000 to whip up a 30‑second NBA Finals spot; 95 percent cheaper than a traditional shoot and delivered in two days, fewer than the setup time for a single dolly track.

DesignRush* calculated that the typical $250‑$500 K national TV budget evaporated faster than a pop‑up blocker.

• DesignRush is a U.S.–based B2B marketplace that lists, ranks, and reviews thousands of agencies so brands can comparison‑shop for everything from web design to PR.

Bulk Discounts on Creativity

Secret Level’s Jason Zada claims you can swap one helicopter‑shot commercial for three Veo 3 fever dreams and still have cash left for oat‑milk lattes.

Adobe backs him up: its GenStudio dashboard promises double‑digit ROI upticks by letting marketers “resize, re‑voice, and re‑skin” ads in seconds, finally turning the creative department into a glorified vending machine.

Morgan Stanley thinks Hollywood’s newest script doctor is also a bookkeeper: Amazon could shave 10 percent off a $24 billion Prime Video budget just by pumping more shows through AI tooling. That’s enough loose change to buy a few extra Thursday Night Football games—because live sports remain the one genre no one wants rendered in Midjourney (yet).

When “Savings” Cost You Your Soul

• Critics coin terms like “AI slop” to describe spots where smiles loop and limbs ignore gravity, but hey, the production invoice is down to pocket lint.

• Coca‑Cola learned cheap can look cheap when its uncanny Christmas ad got roasted as a “dystopian nightmare.” - New York Post

• Reddit threads of aspiring actors now read like Craigslist obituaries: “Another AI ad just stole my rent check!”

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The Hidden Line Items

AI may slash crew and location costs, but new expenses sneak in:

• GPU Tax: Hundreds of text‑to‑video generations rack up cloud compute fees faster than a DIT marking takes. One Kalshi spot required 300‑400 iterations to find 15 usable clips.

• Prompt Engineers: Those “free” ads still need prompt whisperers who charge like union grips.

• Brand‑Safety Auditors: DoubleVerify now sells deep‑fake detection to ensure your goat‑yoga guru isn’t also a lawsuit.

Medium’s ad‑tech essayists warn that ROI calculations rarely count the carbon footprint of massive GPU farms, so you might save cash but melt glaciers.

Small Brands, Big Toys, Same Noise

Tatari’s data shows AI spots can cut TV acquisition costs 39 percent for scrappy brands like BlueChew, proving that even erectile‑pill marketers can afford Marvel‑level VFX, because nothing says romance like procedural lip‑sync.

Loop Media estimates the entire AI‑video sector will rocket past $7 billion by 2029 on a 21 percent CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate). Then everyone piles into the same templates, and “differentiation” begins to rhyme with “drum solo bio break.”

Final Invoice: Savings vs. Sanity

Generative AI can slash production costs up to 95 percent and double creative throughput, according to bullish case studies from Veo 3 producers and Adobe dashboards.

Yet every penny saved steals a pixel of originality; ad feeds risk becoming an infinite scroll of mid‑priced déjà vu. Brands drunk on low costs may wake up in a content hangover where audiences can’t distinguish eToro’s goat yogi from a Popeyes chicken wrap rave; both shot in the same uncanny valley.

In short:

AI commercials are the cheapest Lamborghini you’ll ever lease—flashy, fast, and guaranteed to depreciate the second every competitor rolls out with the identical paint job. Enjoy the deal, but remember: when everyone’s creative budget is pennies, attention becomes the only currency left—and the algorithm raises its rents tomorrow.

Sources: Ad Age, The Verge, New York Post, Adobe, LinkedIn, Loop Media, Medium, Reddit, Business Insider

Cube Cronicles - Overheard at Work

“Senior Analyst”

“I overheard a conversation between my manager and the head of HR, who said, "It's been awfully hard to find candidates who are the right culture fit for our company". To be honest, I have no idea what that's supposed to mean because I'm in the company and I couldn't tell what our 'culture' is. There is no culture apart from everyone bringing themselves to work at 9, doing their work, and leaving by or before 5. How hard is it to find people who can do that?? Am I missing something here?”

“Attorney”

““What a handsome young man.” — never thought I’d hear those words in today’s office setting.”

“Senior Claims Adjuster 1”

He isn’t wrong. Just because you think you know what you’re doing doesn’t mean you do. Not always the case but I understand his thought process.”

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2. Jensen vs Dario

The Showdown: Huang (Nvidia) vs. Amodei (Anthopic)

Nvidia, now flirting with a $4 trillion market cap, couldn’t resist stepping into the ring. Huang told Axios, “There will be more jobs,” comparing AI’s impact to mechanization in farming. Productive, not destructive.

Across the aisle, Amodei of Anthropic painted a bleaker picture: up to half of entry‑level white‑collar jobs could vanish, turbocharging unemployment to 10–20% in the next five years.

Grim Data: Layoffs & AI Savings

Behind the rhetoric, corporate America is quietly pruning headcount. Microsoft cut 6,000 roles in May and another 9,100 in July, nearly 4% of its global workforce, to reallocate funds toward AI infrastructure, saving over $500 million in customer‑service costs alone.

Walmart, too, eliminated 1,500 corporate positions, citing a “technology inflection point” where algorithms now outpace human analysts.

Salesforce, Amazon, and Google have all joined the downsizing spree, unleashing automated “agents” to handle tasks once reserved for interns and junior staff.

The New Industrial Dark Age?

Huang insists we’re entering an “industrial reset” akin to steam or electricity, but unfolding in months, not decades. Yet history’s optimism offers scant comfort when AI tools already write code, draft legal briefs (which are sometimes in error and may not be covered by malpractice insurance), and design ad campaigns at machine speed (creativity’s race to the bottom).

As for retraining programs and universal basic income talks, those are still stalled in policy labs while millions face an uncertain desk‑to‑machine trajectory.

Stocks, Wealth & Inequality

Meanwhile, Nvidia’s stock surge has made Huang one of the world’s richest people. His net worth ballooned to about $144 billion as investors scooped up shares on hype around H100 and H20 GPUs . This concentration of wealth underscores where the spoils flow: to chipmakers and cloud‑service giants, not to displaced paralegals or junior analysts.

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What Can You Do?

Huang urges workers to “adapt by collaborating with AI,” learning prompt‑engineering and data‑center ops. Amodei counters that without robust public policy, job‑loss taxes, retraining grants, transparent displacement tracking, we’re sleepwalking into a “white‑collar bloodbath."

So, where does that leave us? You can buy into Huang’s vision: upgrade your LinkedIn with “AI‑enhanced” buzzwords, or echo Amodei’s alarm: prepare for a world where your next performance review might replace you with a script.

Why do we fear the AI apocalypse? Because for once, the machines might actually read all our terms and conditions, and find us guilty.

Buckle up. The AI train isn’t just arriving at your station. It’s ripping up the tracks behind it.

Sources: Axios, Fox Business, Reuters, ABC7 San Francisco

Before you go ...

• Please forward this to three friends, enemies, colleagues, or someone you met today.

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• Drop a comment below. If you’re into it, if it sucks … perhaps drop a Haiku about programmatic AI. Your call.

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