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Your weekly guide on everything AI marketing. Covering everything from AI marketing news, tips, deep dives, events, podcasts, jobs and much more. Never miss a beat with our 5-minute newsletter.
In today’s email:
Meta's superintelligence division debuts its first model
Visa launches the payment rail for agentic commerce
Publicis teams up with Microsoft to build the agentic marketing stack.
Plus: Gartner explains why per-seat licensing is broken, a podcast on climbing the AI skill ladder, and a practical Influcio training workflow.
The Top 3 Stories
1. Meta's new superintelligence model sends its AI app to number 5 in the App Store
Meta released Muse Spark on 8 April, the first model from its Superintelligence Labs. Within 24 hours, the Meta AI app climbed from rank 57 to number 5 in the US App Store, with iOS downloads up 87% day-on-day and web traffic reaching an all-time high.
Why it matters: Meta AI now has a plausible path to becoming the default AI assistant for hundreds of millions of consumers. If that happens, the real question is not whether your brand appears in it, but whether Muse Spark's improved reasoning makes it better at recommending, rejecting, or misrepresenting you, and right now, marketers have almost no visibility into how it works. 📰 TechCrunch
2. Visa launches a platform so AI agents can shop on behalf of your customers
Visa unveiled Intelligent Commerce Connect on 8 April: a single integration letting AI agents browse, select, and pay across any card network. It supports all four major agent payment protocols and is already in pilot with AWS and a range of commerce partners.
Why it matters: Another week, another major platform betting the future of commerce on AI agents doing the buying. At this point the pattern is clear: Visa, Mastercard, Shopify, and Perplexity are all building infrastructure for a world where consumers delegate purchasing to AI. The question for marketers is no longer whether this happens, but how quickly, and whether your brand is set up to be recommended when it does. 📰 eMarketer
3. Publicis and Microsoft expand their partnership to build the agentic marketing platform
On 8 April the two companies announced a full-stack solution combining Epsilon's identity data, Microsoft Azure infrastructure, and AI agents that can plan, execute, and optimise campaigns autonomously. Publicis also takes on Microsoft's global media account, reported at $1.2 billion.
Why it matters: The world's largest ad group is rebuilding around AI agents. Brand clients should expect their agencies to pitch agentic capabilities as standard within the year. 📰 Marketing Dive
Turn Google Ads into a real customer acquisition channel
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More trending AI marketing news from last week
OpenAI is projecting $2.5 billion in ad revenue this year, rising to $100 billion by 2030, according to investor forecasts published this week.
AI virtual try-on startups are tackling one of retail's most expensive problems: returns. New platforms let shoppers create a digital twin before buying, with early results showing meaningful drops in return rates.
Medialister launched a Model Context Protocol server this week, allowing AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Claude to query its editorial advertising marketplace directly and book sponsored content placements without a single email.
Shopify's new AI Toolkit lets agents build and manage entire stores autonomously.
Quote of the week
In the future, you have these AI agents that are crawling through the environment, where the AI agents are often doing tasks that are independent of the human being. And if they're doing that, it does not make a lot of sense to tie the licenses to a human that's doing the task."
Trending AI tools for marketers
Here are 4 trending tools to explore this week. Quick, practical upgrades to your AI marketing arsenal:
Influcio: Finds the best influencers and runs your campaigns end-to-end with a self-learning AI system.
ProdShort: Converts your meeting recordings into ready-to-post social media content automatically.
Velo: Transforms screen recordings into polished, shareable video messages in minutes.
CoChat: A centralised workspace where teams access, share and collaborate across AI models and automated workflows in one place.
TV, podcasts & streaming
HubSpot’s Marketing Against the Grain - The AI skill ladder (most people never reach level 4)
HubSpot CMO Kipp Bodnar and SVP of Marketing Kieran Flanagan break down four levels of AI maturity, from basic prompting to building reusable automated workflows. The episode is a practical 18-minute guide for any marketer looking to move beyond ad hoc AI use - listen to it here:
AI training
How to run a full influencer campaign in 30 minutes using Influcio
The overview:
Influcio is an AI marketing agent that finds the right influencers, manages campaign logistics, and uses performance data to sharpen its recommendations over time.
Step-by-step:
Write your campaign brief
Describe your product, target audience, and campaign goal in the brief field.Let Aria search for influencers
Influcio's AI, Aria, scans its database of 4 million creators and surfaces the best matches.Review and approve the shortlist
Click through each profile, check sample content, and approve the creators that fit your brand.Launch and let Influcio manage outreach
Confirm your budget and timeline and Influcio handles creator coordination automatically.Analyse the performance report
After the campaign, review the results and let Influcio update its recommendations for next time.
Pro tip: Run two or three small test campaigns before scaling budget. The system's recommendations improve with each data point, so early tests pay for themselves.
The weekly deep dive
Human-made" is becoming a brand strategy. And it's working.
While most marketing teams are racing to automate more, a handful of major brands are moving in the opposite direction and turning it into a competitive advantage.
The brands betting against AI
Aerie has pledged never to use AI to generate images of people or bodies, partnering with Pamela Anderson to hammer the message home. Equinox ran deepfake ads of babies on water skis, then revealed the deception to reinforce its manifesto: "In a world where little can be trusted, the only thing you can truly believe in is yourself." Almond Breeze used the Jonas Brothers to reject increasingly absurd AI marketing concepts on camera. The RealReal positioned human authentication expertise as the thing AI simply cannot replicate.
This is not anti-technology. It is anti-sameness.
None of these brands are abandoning AI in their operations. They are making a calculated bet that in a market saturated with AI-generated content, "human-made" functions as a premium signal, the same way "organic" or "handmade" transformed food and retail. iHeartMedia has gone furthest, adopting a "guaranteed human" tagline and committing to no AI-generated personalities or music after their own research found 90% of listeners want human-created media.
What this means for your brand
The consumer psychology here is measurable, not sentimental. Studies show people consistently rate identical content as more meaningful and more beautiful when they believe it was made by a human. That is a preference gap that directly affects engagement and brand equity. The practical question for every marketer reading this: at what point does your AI content start working against you?
Our takeaway: The smartest use of AI in marketing right now might be knowing when not to show it. "Human-made" is no longer a limitation. It is becoming a positioning statement.
📖 Read the full article at Adweek
