Marketing

Michaels said shoppers using its Ask Mike, an AI-powered shopping assistant, converted at more than double the rate of customers using the retailer’s traditional search function. The tool has handled nearly 75,000 conversations since launching in May. The retailer formally announced Ask Mike on July 21, describing it as its first customer-facing AI shopping assistant.

The rebuilt agent lets advertisers run entire campaigns by chat, and early users are already seeing 2–4× more revenue and launching 11× faster. Limassol, Cyprus, 28 July 2026 – PropellerAds, a leading global advertising network, announced a major upgrade to NIKO, its AI-powered campaign agent. The update transforms NIKO from a smart setup assistant into

Have you ever walked through Times Square and thought, Wouldn’t it be cool if these giant billboard ads could be produced by AI? This doesn’t seem like a universal experience. But for CDP Hightouch, apparently, this question was top of mind. In June, Hightouch launched a one-day Times Square activation to showcase ads that its

Every industry develops narratives that begin as useful simplifications and eventually become accepted truths. Advertising is no different. But the problem is that many of these narratives survive long after the market has stopped validating them.  The industry says streaming television is becoming a performance channel, then acts surprised when television behaves like television and

Principal Principles Who bears the brunt of AI costs? The advertising industry hasn’t settled on an answer yet, but many agency holding companies are striking a compromise with clients. They’re willing to pay the full AI infrastructure bill so long as the brand agrees to run a predetermined amount of paid media through principal inventory

OpenAI may want to own parts of the ad tech stack, but vendors won’t be the collateral damage of it. Two job postings on OpenAI’s career’s page spell out how. A head of scaled ads solutions will design the reseller model from scratch, picking priority vendors and markets, running RFPs and contracting as well as

The recent rise of would-be adland challengers, such as OpenAI, and the expected hegemony of the social giant Meta have led to a comparative absence of the name “Google” from headlines in the media landscape as of late.  Arguably, that’s just the way leadership at Mountainview likes it, as poring over their ledger books makes

This is an excerpt from our Digiday+ Research report “The marketer’s 2026 guide to creator marketing, including Duolingo, Ulta and YouTube,” which analyzes the types of campaigns marketers are partnering with influencers on, their top success metrics for those campaigns and the challenges they face with influencer campaigns. The report is based on a survey

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts • Spotify The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) just dropped another industry acronym — as if the media biz needed another one — but this one may prove useful. Earlier this month, the IAB released its Redefining Media Types (RMT) Standard framework that aims to add clarity to the convoluted digital video space.