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Cannes Briefing: Creativity is moving beyond the agency model

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Cannes Briefing: Creativity is moving beyond the agency model

OpenAI’s ChatGPT ad delivery improves, doubts aren’t easily fixed

Advertisers treated OpenAI’s ad pilot like a bet on the future. The question now is how long they’re willing to wait for it to pay off. So far, it has not been an easy wait. Since the pilot launched in February, advertisers have reported chronic underdelivery — campaigns falling well short of their targeted impressions,

Epidemic Sound gives agencies faster soundtracking and greater creative control

Practically, this is a big step forward for content creation, as traditional processes of licensing and sourcing soundtracks have led to what Pete describes as “a significant bottleneck”, tearing creatives away from the most important task at hand: storytelling. “Epidemic Sound directly addresses this by integrating into their existing workflow,” he continues, giving its Adobe

Pichai Says Google Is ‘A Bit Behind’ On Agentic Coding

Google CEO Sundar Pichai acknowledged the company is “a bit behind” the frontier on agentic coding. Pichai called coding “very foundational” to Google’s AI work. He made the comments on the New York Times Hard Fork podcast. The interview came days after Google’s I/O developer conference. Where Google Sees The Gap When asked about Google’s

If You Can Sell Insurance, You Can Sell Anything ft. Tory Pachis of Amica Insurance

The power of word-of-mouth and referral-based marketing takes on a whole new meaning in this episode of Marketing Vanguard. Tune in as Amica Insurance EVP and CMO Tory Pachis reveals how their Rhode Island-based challenger brand competes against massive incumbents by doubling down on empathy, service, and human-led experiences while building relevance with younger consumers.

Epic’s Unreal Engine 6 reveal got a standing ovation, but not everyone’s happy

Unreal Engine 6 is coming, perhaps sooner than expected. Epic Games and developer Psyonix, which Epic bought in 2019, have announced that Rocket League will be the first title to use the next generation of Epic’s real-time 3D creation platform, which is also widely used for animation, VFX and 3D work for marketing and advertising.

LLMs ‘Would Not Exist’ Without Reddit Data

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said large language models “would not exist as we know them” without Reddit’s content. He called the platform’s user-generated data “modern oil” for AI. Huffman made the comments during an interview at Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies Summit. What Huffman Said About Reddit’s Value To AI Huffman described the position Reddit’s

In agentic commerce, your brand promise must be provable

In agentic commerce, brand shifts from a perception advantage to a verifiable advantage. Customers may still choose brands based on emotion or identity, but their AI agents will evaluate those brands using measurable signals such as price transparency, fulfillment reliability, reviews, loyalty value, privacy practices, and service history. This changes how loyalty is evaluated, and

Luis Fercán Visuals

Creative Direction, Photography & Video | Studio portraits for the promotional posters of Luis Fercán’s new album, Cerezos en Flor, alongside visuals for the accompanying tour. Photo Assistant: Jorge Ponz Lighting: Aisha Niccole

Google Says AI Mode Can Now Scale Faster Across Languages

Reid said AI Mode’s multilingual model architecture has made it easier to expand across countries and languages. She said Google uses existing Search ranking work to help ground AI Mode responses based on location. The interview restated the I/O keynote announcements without rollout timelines. In a post-keynote interview, Google’s Liz Reid told NDTV that AI

Production and media squeeze lead brands to run longer campaigns

Campaign consistency has been a brand marketing best practice for decades. Changing media economics are turning it into a business necessity. Data from ad measurement firm Extreme Reach (XR) showed that 17.9% of Super Bowl ad campaigns ran for six months or more last year, triple the number that ran for the same amount of

Jeremy Liebman’s debut Apartamento book traces family life as language begins to disappear

What makes this observation striking is that it’s happening in parallel with his daughter’s emergence into language. While his father loses the ability to name things, they’re just starting to discover it. We’re witnessing three generations and three different relationships with meaning and interpretation, captured in photographs that were never shot with that in mind.

WordPress 7.0 Launches With Native AI Integration

After weeks of delay, WordPress 7.0, named Armstrong, is finally released. The centerpiece feature was supposed to be real-time collaboration (RTC) but what is shipping is bigger: Native AI integration, a watershed moment in the content management system’s history. Native AI integration is what will carry WordPress into the future and put more distance between

How Recurrent Ventures Rebuilt Itself

Three years ago, the digital media holding company Recurrent Ventures was struggling. A $300 million investment from the private equity firm Blackstone in 2022 had turned into an albatross, and the company spent the period that followed shedding titles, laying off staff, and cycling through three chief executives in three years. But since then, the

These 8 gorgeous house plants will brighten up your home office, and they don’t cost the earth

Adding some plants to your desk can really cheer things up and brighten up your space. They’re great for purifying the air, too. That’s why I’ve gathered some easy to care for house plants that will look great on your desk or in your office space. A lot of them come in packs of two

Microsoft Clarity Now Shows Grounding Queries Behind AI Citations

When Microsoft Clarity made AI citations available to all users, it opened up a new playground for SEOs to harvest AI visibility data. Finally, we can see the exact “grounding queries” an AI engine uses to pull our content. It raises a massive question because this is a Microsoft tool: Are the insights useless if

Consumers want AI ads with a human touch

Consumers are giving mixed signals about AI content in marketing. People like ads and content that feel useful and relevant, but many are still turned off by marketing that comes across as robotic, emotionally empty, or a little too invasive. Seventy percent of consumers said they can usually spot an AI-generated ad because it feels

All You Need To Know About Cloudflare’s Agent Readiness Score

Agent-readiness crossed from concept to measurable infrastructure this week. On April 17, as Cloudflare Agents Week extended into its sixth day, the company shipped isitagentready.com, a public scanner that scores any website on how prepared it is for AI agents. Paste a URL, get a score, see which checks passed and which failed, read AI-generated

Walmart warns it may have to raise prices due to fuel costs

Higher fuel prices due to the war with Iran are putting pressure on Walmart’s customers and supply chain, and could lead to higher price tags on the shelf. Consumers may face higher retail prices in the coming months due to higher-than-planned fuel costs in global distribution and fulfillment operations and the rising cost of food

The Click’s clever university branding puts the ‘I’ in identity, individual and Imperial College London

The work began as a conversation: “The primary objective was to create a brand for all – something everyone at Imperial would want to engage with and belong to, from students to academics to commercial partners, across every faculty,” says Bobby. “Just as important: portraying the cross-learning, collaboration and innovation at the heart of Imperial’s

Here’s What You Need To Know

WordPress released version 7.0, codenamed Armstrong, bringing changes that make it easier for users and developers to control the look and user experience of websites, and a refresh of the admin page that makes the entire CMS behave more like modern publishing software. WordPress 7.0’s AI integration may grab a significant amount of attention at

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