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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:
Criteo becomes the first ad tech platform inside OpenAI's ChatGPT advertising pilot
Google embeds sponsored shopping listings directly inside AI Mode's conversational answers for the first time
Meta pushes its autonomous campaign agent (Manus AI ) to all 4 million Ads Manager users this week
Plus: IAB Tech Lab’s CEO argues agentic advertising infrastructure will separate scalable brands from stagnant ones, HubSpot CMO Kipp Bodnar tests an AI agent generating 1,000 ad variants in 10 minutes, plus four new tools to try this week.
The Top 3 Stories
1. Criteo Becomes the First Ad Tech Platform Inside ChatGPT
Criteo joined OpenAI’s ChatGPT ad pilot, linking 17,000 advertisers to sponsored placements in ChatGPT’s Free and Go tiers in the US. Ads appear below relevant answers, while conversations remain private and paid tiers stay ad-free. Early Criteo data suggests LLM referrals convert about 1.5× better than other channels.
Why it matters: ChatGPT referrals converting 1.5× better will quickly shift budgets. If it scales, performance marketers must secure a conversational ads strategy early. Criteo built the first programmatic pipeline; watch rivals move. 📰 AdWeek
2. Google Puts Paid Shopping Listings Inside the AI Answer Itself
Google is testing shopping ads embedded directly within AI Mode’s conversational responses, making sponsored listings part of the AI-generated answer. Its Direct Offers pilot surfaces retailer discounts when shoppers show strong purchase intent. A new Universal Commerce Protocol connects Shopify, Target, and Walmart inventory to AI discovery, further blurring the line between editorial recommendation and paid placement.
Why it matters: Shopping campaigns are no longer competing beside AI answers but inside them. Bidding strategy, product feeds, and creative must adapt to an environment that no longer resembles traditional search results pages. 📰 Bloomberg
3. Meta Stops Hiding Its AI Agent and Pushes It Front of Screen
Meta embedded Manus AI into Ads Manager in February, but it initially sat hidden in the Tools section. This week, in-stream prompts began surfacing its reporting, audience research, and optimisation capabilities to Ads Manager’s 4 million daily users. At the same time, Meta narrowed click-through attribution to link clicks only, removing saves, shares, and likes from the metric.
Why it matters: Establish your reporting baseline before testing Manus AI. The attribution change will shift the numbers used to evaluate campaigns, including autonomous agent activity, so identify the baseline before launching tests. 📰 Search Engine Land
The Future of AI in Marketing. Your Shortcut to Smarter, Faster Marketing.
Unlock a focused set of AI strategies built to streamline your work and maximize impact. This guide delivers the practical tactics and tools marketers need to start seeing results right away:
7 high-impact AI strategies to accelerate your marketing performance
Practical use cases for content creation, lead gen, and personalization
Expert insights into how top marketers are using AI today
A framework to evaluate and implement AI tools efficiently
Stay ahead of the curve with these top strategies AI helped develop for marketers, built for real-world results.
More Trending AI Marketing News From Last Week
Gartner warns that 50% of agency-built AI marketing platforms could become obsolete by 2029 as hyperscaler AI tools expand.
Dentsu forecasts digital advertising reaching 69% of global ad spend by 2026, driven by AI-powered targeting and creative optimisation.
Limy raises $10M to track AI agents visiting and buying on websites.
X (Twitter) rolls out new creator subscription tools including exclusive threads and shareable cards designed to help creators market and monetise content.
GetHookd releases an AI creative intelligence platform designed to optimise Meta and Google ad performance.
Quote of the week
Certain agentic tasks do not scale without a high-performance execution infrastructure."
Trending AI Tools for Marketers
Here are 4 trending tools to explore this week. Quick, practical upgrades to your AI marketing arsenal:
🛍️ Mujo AI – Turns one product photo into marketplace-ready images and SEO listings for 15 platforms.
✏️ Thinking Line – Turns prompts into editable SVGs and doodle-style explainer videos for quick brand visuals.
⚙️ Aident AI – Turns plain-English workflows into automations, scripts, and prompts across 250+ tools.
📊 HookLens – Analyses video ads by hook, body, and CTA to pinpoint where attention drops.
TV, Podcasts & Streaming
We Tested an AI Agent That Builds 1000 Ads in 10 Minutes
HubSpot CMO Kipp Bodnar and SVP of Marketing Kieran Flanagan documented a live experiment running an AI agent that autonomously generates 1,000 ad variants, and then did the more useful thing of showing what worked, what produced rubbish, and where they would never hand the wheel back. It is a grounded view of where autonomous creative production is genuinely useful versus where a human eye still earns its place in the process - watch it here.
AI Training
How to Analyse Your Video Ads Using HookLens
The overview: HookLens analyses your video ads frame by frame to identify where attention drops, which hooks hold viewers, and how your creative structure affects performance. The output is a clear breakdown of hook strength, retention risk points, and specific creative fixes you can apply before scaling ad spend.
Step-by-step:
Upload Your Ad Creative
Upload a video ad or paste the ad URL into HookLens. The platform scans the entire clip and prepares a structural analysis of the creative.Analyse the Opening Hook
HookLens evaluates the first three seconds of the ad, identifying whether the hook is strong enough to stop the scroll and suggesting alternative hook lines if it is weak.Review Attention Drop Points
The platform highlights specific timestamps where viewer attention is likely to decline. These sections usually signal pacing issues, weak messaging, or visual clutter.Evaluate Message Structure
HookLens breaks the ad into hook, body, and call-to-action segments so you can assess whether the narrative builds clearly toward the conversion moment.Generate Creative Improvements
Use the AI suggestions to rewrite hooks, tighten messaging, or improve CTA clarity. Apply these changes before testing new variants.Test Multiple Variations
Upload several creative versions to compare hook strength and retention patterns, helping identify which concept is most likely to scale profitably.
Pro tip: Analyse your competitor’s top-performing ads with HookLens to reverse engineer the hook patterns and narrative structures driving engagement in your category.
The Weekly Deep Dive
GEO Is Not SEO's Successor. It's a Parallel Game and Most Brands Have Not Started Playing.
The mechanics of being found online have fractured. While most marketing teams are still optimising for traditional search, a different game is running alongside it and it rewards a completely different set of behaviours.
What is actually at stake
Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is the practice of structuring content so AI platforms cite your brand in answers. AI search adoption jumped from 8% to 40% in a year, with McKinsey projecting $750B in revenue through AI search by 2028. Unlike traditional search, AI answers cite just 2–7 sources, meaning you are either included or invisible. AI Overviews alone are already reducing click-through rates by 15–64% as users get answers without visiting websites.
Why earned media beats owned content in this environment
AI systems prioritise third-party coverage over brand-owned pages. Guest articles, original studies, and peer mentions carry more GEO value than optimised product pages. Anonymous bylines are a liability, as AI increasingly weighs author credibility and verifiable external presence.
How measurement has shifted
The majority of marketing teams are not yet tracking AI search performance at all. Tools including Otterly.ai, Rankscale, and Ahrefs Brand Radar now measure citation frequency, share of voice inside AI answers, and LLM-referred traffic specifically. Citation authority compounds over time, similar to the way domain authority once did, meaning the brands building it in 2026 will be meaningfully harder to displace by 2027.
Our takeaway: GEO is not a budget line to revisit when things slow down. It is an optimisation discipline to start building infrastructure for now. The brands earning citations this year are the ones AI engines will keep citing next year, and the year after.
📖 Read the full article at Fast Company
That’s it today!
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