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:
Higgsfield hits a $5.4bn valuation selling video to marketing teams
LinkedIn starts throttling the posts readers report as AI slop
An AI storefront doubles the revenue of a designer launch
Plus: the Liquid Death creative chief on the one thing uniting America, why 80% of your web traffic bounces on arrival, a 30 minute creator brief workflow, and four new tools.
The Top 3 Stories
1. Higgsfield is now worth $5.4bn on marketing video
Higgsfield raised a $400m Series B at a $5.4bn valuation, quadrupling its price in eight months. It says it now works with 390 of the Fortune 500 at $700m annualised revenue, and sells a Marketing Studio built for ad teams. Founder Alex Mashrabov expects video AI to sit inside everyday marketing workflows.
Why it matters: Your video line item is now competing with a tool that 390 of the Fortune 500 already have in the building. 📰 TechCrunch
2. LinkedIn is throttling the posts you report as AI slop
More than a million people used LinkedIn's new AI slop reporting option in its first fortnight, according to chief product officer Hari Srinivasan. Content the platform classes as slop is now getting 40% fewer views than a few weeks ago. Reporting reshapes the reporting user's own feed rather than deciding distribution outright.
Why it matters: Volume-first posting on the biggest B2B channel has quietly started carrying a distribution penalty. 📰 Social Media Today
3. An AI storefront doubled a designer launch
Willy Chavarria ran his Adidas World Cup collection on a separate AI-powered storefront built by Swap, which delivered twice the revenue of the previous launch at comparable conversion and order value. Of 802 conversational signals tracked during the six-day run, 44.8% were about sizing and fit.
Why it matters: The revenue lift is the headline, but the conversation log is the asset, a ranked list of the objections your product pages never answered. 📰 Glossy
More trending AI marketing news from last week
Microsoft pushed AI Max to every advertiser account worldwide, still opt-in.
Baidu saw ad revenue fall 19% as AI ate its search business.
Pew found 35% of post-ChatGPT web pages show AI authorship.
Twitch and Amazon face a class action over undisclosed AI training.
Operating models, not AI stacks, separate the teams getting results.
Together with GoHalves
Helping brands grow and scale faster through AI-driven, co-marketing matchmaking.
A shout-out in each other's newsletters. A co-hosted webinar. Swapped podcast guest spots. A guest post on each other's blog. An offer for each other's customers. GoHalves' AI matches you with verified, non-competing brands whose audiences overlap with yours, recommends the format most likely to land based on each brand's data and strongest channels, and drafts the campaign for both sides, yours to tweak before it runs, with your own tracking links to prove what it delivered.
No hours of partner research, no guesswork about who is right for you. The engine does that part.
Joining the waitlist is free and commits you to nothing. Matching opens when the first cohort fills, so joining now puts you in it.
Quote of the week
When you look at the data, it is literally the one thing that unites all Americans right now, across the spectrum.
Trending AI tools for marketers
Here are 4 trending tools to explore this week. Quick, practical upgrades to your AI marketing arsenal:
Astute finds, briefs and pays the creators your B2B buyers already follow.
Clara AI SDR turns website visitors into booked meetings without forms or extra headcount.
Wizstar lets you film once, then publish branded video in every language.
Tiny Funnel shows which channels send visitors who actually buy, no cookies needed.
TV, podcasts & streaming
Frontier CMO, "Your content is corrosive"
Knotch chief executive Anda Gansca argues brands still chase vanity impressions while roughly 80% of web traffic bounces instantly off what she calls corrosive content. Her contrarian case is that the brand website remains the front door in an AI-first world, watch it here.
AI training
How to run a B2B creator brief in under 30 minutes using Astute
The overview:
Astute finds the creators your B2B buyers already follow and handles briefing and payment in one place, so a full creator brief takes about half an hour.
Step-by-step:
Define the buyer, not the follower count
Describe the exact job title and industry you sell to.
Anchor on audience overlap, because chasing reach alone is how these programmes usually go wrong.Pull a shortlist of eight
Let the platform surface creators whose audiences match that buyer.
Eight to ten names gives you room to cut without restarting the search.Write one brief, not ten
Draft a single brief carrying the claim, the proof and the boundaries.
Creators need your non-negotiables far more than they need your adjectives.Send it and agree rates in one thread
Push the brief to the shortlist and settle fees in the same place.
Chasing across email is where most B2B creator programmes quietly die.Report on meetings, not impressions
Tag every creator link and measure pipeline against it.
Good output looks like named accounts in your CRM, not a reach number.
Pro tip: Rerun the same brief next quarter with only the creators who produced meetings, and you build a roster rather than a campaign.
The weekly deep dive
The line brands will not let AI cross
Deciding when AI is allowed to touch customer-facing work has become the year's most awkward marketing call, and brands are answering it privately rather than publicly.
Where it clearly works
Koia, a plant-based protein drink brand, uses AI only for content that could never be filmed. Its Costco protein powder launch pulled 48,000 organic views, roughly 6.4 times its usual figure on Instagram Reels. Marketing vice president Diane DiLorenzo credits the obviousness, saying nobody feels deceived when everyone can tell it is AI.
Where the line gets drawn
Goodwipes reworks visuals from past shoots with AI and reports click-through rates above 1%, but it will not use AI-generated actors. Marketing head Meredith Diehn frames that as a trust problem for an intimate category. The boundary is not AI itself, it is a synthetic human speaking on the brand's behalf.
The premium opt-out
Pizza oven brand Gozney restricts AI to drafting and keeps it out of anything a customer sees. Chief revenue and marketing officer Jonathan Kantor points to a consideration window of about 30 days and a YouTube channel nearing 400,000 subscribers. When buyers deliberate that long, being mistaken for AI slop costs more than a shoot.
Our takeaway: Write down where AI stops in your own work now, because the brands with a stated line are the ones who will not be apologising for it later.
📖 Read the full article at Digiday
