📈 AI is turning CMOs into mini CEOs

Unilever has grown its creator programme from 10,000 to 300,000 creators and is handing the grunt work to AI: discovery, vetting, brand safety checks, briefings and paperwork. Beauty CMO Leandro Barreto says technology is there “to augment the human choices”. The relationship itself stays human.

Why it matters: US influencer spend is heading for $13.7bn by 2027; the winners will industrialise the admin without automating away authenticity. 📰 Digiday

Meta released Muse Image, the first image model from its Superintelligence Labs, and it will power Advantage+ ad creative within weeks. Meta says it reads complex creative briefs “the way a designer would”, producing on-brand variations with fewer iterations. Internal tests put it ahead of Google’s Nano Banana 2.

Why it matters: Generated ad variations are becoming a default platform feature, not a choice, so brand controls and asset quality matter more than ever. 📰 CNBC

Character.AI is producing its own microdramas, launching a romance, a horror and a survival series built with AI production tools. The twist: adult users can chat with the shows’ characters and roleplay storylines. Users already spend more than 950 minutes a month in the app, per Sensor Tower.

Why it matters: Interactive, AI-native entertainment is a fresh pool of attention; brands eyeing microdrama budgets should watch where two-way formats go. 📰 TechCrunch

ChatGPT and Claude don't just answer questions anymore. Employees are connecting them directly to Notion, Linear, Jira, and the rest of your stack. The AI can read, write, and take actions on company data. Most IT and security teams have no visibility into any of it.

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Marketing’s two most influential voices sit down together for the first time in a decade. They find rare common ground on the 95:5 rule, distinctiveness and whether AI is more brand-centric than humans. A fundamentals masterclass for any marketer, listen to it here.

The overview: ChatCut turns one long video into edited, captioned clips you can ship across channels, all by typing prompts.

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Pro tip: Save your best-performing prompt as a template and rerun it on every new webinar or launch video.

AI is quietly rewriting the CMO job description, and brand building is no longer the whole brief.

The remit has exploded
Autodesk’s Dara Treseder calls the CMO “basically a mini CEO”, responsible for growth, technology and strategy at enterprise level. Recruiter Russell Reynolds found more than 90% of CMO job descriptions posted in 2025 required performance expertise alongside leading teams. Brand craft alone no longer clears the bar.

The content flood raises the bar for taste
Fortune and Morning Consult polled 1,100 marketing and finance decision-makers: 78% worry AI-generated content could erode consumer trust, and 53% think AI will replace or shrink creative functions. Treseder’s warning is sharper: it has never been easier to make something “beautiful, polished, and completely forgettable”.

Discovery has already moved
McKinsey says half of consumers use AI-powered search and predicts $750bn of consumer spend will flow through it by 2028. Semrush finds AI-search users are more than four times likelier to buy than traditional searchers. Yet only 12% of leaders use influencers to build trust in the AI era.

Our takeaway: Treat GEO, performance fluency and creative taste as one job description, because your CEO already does.

📖 Read the full article at Fortune

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