📈 The largest theft of labor in human history

Pinterest unveiled Visual Search Ads at Pinterest Presents, letting brands appear inside visual search results and Pin close-ups using creative they already own. Performance+ adds manual A/B testing and product prioritisation for seasonal pushes. Chief executive Bill Ready told advertisers Pinterest is “now a performance platform, … and AI is powering all of it.”

Why it matters: 96% of Pinterest searches are unbranded, so the model picks which brand answers a want the shopper cannot yet describe. 📰 Modern Retail

Sam’s Club, the warehouse retailer, will now sell advertisers audiences of shoppers who have never bought the product being advertised. Procter & Gamble tried it on Cascade dishwasher tablets, reaching 800,000 households the model picked. Harvey Ma, who runs its ad business, says those shoppers spent 71% more than in the previous campaign.

Why it matters: Retail media has run on what shoppers already bought, so a retailer selling access to non-buyers is a real change. 📰 AdExchanger

Salesforce launched Koa at Dreamforce, its first reasoning model, built with Nvidia for sales, marketing and support work. Until now, when an Agentforce agent had to reason through a multi-step task, it sent the job to Claude or ChatGPT. Koa keeps that work in-house, uses fewer tokens and has ingested no customer data.

Why it matters: Agents get cheaper to run and your customer data stops being sent to a third party, removing the two usual blockers. 📰 TechCrunch

For its first CTV campaign, Jennifer Aniston’s DTC haircare brand LolaVie had a few non-negotiables. The campaign had to be simple. It had to demonstrate measurable impact. And it had to be full-funnel.

LolaVie used Roku Ads Manager to test and optimize creatives — reaching millions of potential customers at all stages of their purchase journeys. Roku Ads Manager helped the brand convey LolaVie’s playful voice while helping drive omnichannel sales across both ecommerce and retail touchpoints.

The campaign included an Action Ad overlay that let viewers shop directly from their TVs by clicking OK on their Roku remote. This guided them to the website to buy LolaVie products.

Discover how Roku Ads Manager helped LolaVie drive big sales and customer growth with self-serve TV ads.

The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Aniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.

Learn more.

Here are 4 trending tools to explore this week. Quick, practical upgrades to your AI marketing arsenal.

Alan Hart interviews Meghan Gendelman, Canva’s CMO of B2B, on keeping a brand recognisable once AI is producing the volume. Her order is guardrails first, brand systems and templates, then AI at scale. The threat she names is not error but average, watch it here.

The overview:

Anthropologic is a consumer research platform that reads what a whole category searches, says and believes, so you can see which brand positions are already taken and which are still going spare.

Step-by-step:

Pro tip: Rerun the same category next quarter and keep both outputs, so you can see which tension moved instead of starting from a blank brief.

Unsealed filings in the New York Times case against OpenAI and Microsoft show both companies describing the damage in their own words, long before anyone outside started calling it Google Zero.

The internal verdict
Microsoft’s director of applied science, Brent Hecht, called model training “the largest theft of labor in human history” and said the company’s defence made “a complete mockery of the idea of ‘fair use’”. Microsoft has distanced itself, calling the remarks one employee’s individual perspective. A separate filing casts Hecht’s role as deliberately adversarial.

The doom loop
An internal Microsoft document warned that its AI content strategy had started a “doom loop” that would damage both its models and the wider web. It is highly unusual, the document notes, for an end product to threaten the economic foundations of its own suppliers. Elsewhere Microsoft concedes that LLMs destroy their own supply chain.

The number in your dashboard
OpenAI’s own media and economic experts tied falling referral traffic to AI summaries, and speculated that search referrals may be down as much as 60%. Nick Turley, head of ChatGPT, is quoted saying that once the chatbot answers, there is “no good reason to click”. That is a product description, not a forecast.

Our takeaway: Budget now for the traffic you are never getting back, because the companies building the summaries priced that loss in years ago.

📖 Read the full article at The Verge

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