October 9th-October 15th // Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes
In This Edition!
CEOs are freaking out about AI
You get an AI model, and you get an AI model, and you get an AI model!
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Top Headlines🔥
Publicis is pitching AI to CEOs and skipping the agency review🔒
Source: Digiday
October 13th, 2026
Summary: Publicis says C-suite anxiety about AI drove a record quarter for new business. In a Harris Poll, 4 in 5 CEOs said a failed AI bet could cost them their job. The agency holding company has been meeting with CEOs directly, not just their CMOs. Sapient, the group’s tech consulting unit, played a key role in its two largest wins of the year without a pitch, as well as three “AI-led transformation assignments this year outside of traditional pitch processes.” Madison & Wall’s Brian Wieser is skeptical, crediting Publicis’ traditional business and principal media for its performance more than AI.
Opinion: This stat made us do a double take: 4 in 5 CEOs think a failed AI bet could cost them their job. We’re talking about CEOs! Some of the most confident people on the planet! AI has even made them feel insecure.
Hiring outside help is an insecure CEO looking for cover. Hiring a holding company, which promises growth via marketing, is the new “nobody got fired for hiring McKinsey.” If it fails, the holding company takes the blame. They do work to protect the CEO: AI roadmaps, governance decks, workflows, pilots. Changing the culture and building skills across the team get put off. But that’s the most important work a CEO can do. Especially in a rapidly changing environment where AI roadmaps, governance decks, workflows, and pilots can go stale fast.
New AI models write on brand, remember shoppers, and make decisions
Source: Various
Summary: New AI models are coming in hot. Google’s new top model is called Gemini 4 Argon. Google says it follows style instructions more closely than past Gemini models, hedges less, and skips clichés. Amplitude also ranked it near the top for turning customer data into charts. Meta’s new Muse Wonder models will soon power Muse, its personal AI agent. Muse Wonder’s Active Memory feature carries details across conversations, and Active Focus keeps the agent working through hard tasks. Meanwhile, a decision model called Jev, from startup TypeSafe, went viral soon after launching last month. Jev doesn’t write; it simply answers questions and makes decisions, like whether a customer service request should go to a chatbot or a person, or whether a job candidate should be screened out. It makes these decisions faster and cheaper than chatbot-style AI models. TypeSafe says a third of Fortune 500 companies already use it.
Opinion: Three new model announcements, three very different use cases. Six months ago, all the model announcements sounded the same. Now they’re starting to sound more specialized. This is the next era of AI innovation: specialized models and wrappers that are particularly efficient and effective for specific use cases. If you’re a marketer, time to move off the “my LLM can handle everything” mentality.
Jev and other “decision models” are fascinating. We’ve talked for a while about how AI makes routine tasks easier so humans can spend more time on creativity and decision-making. But these models are coming for the decision-making too!
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New Products & Features 🚀
What It Does: LG Ad Solutions is selling its smart TV home screen ads through Magnite’s Seller Agent, an AI agent that handles deals on LG’s behalf. Buyers can plan and launch campaigns without manual setup. Agency H/L is the first to try it, running a fall football campaign for Northern California Toyota dealers.
Quick Take: The first buyer is a group of NorCal Toyota dealers. Home screen ads are typically sold via relationships with big buyers. Agentic buying opens the home screen up to smaller advertisers and budgets. In theory, this will push up demand and pricing.
Zeta’s AthenaOS will turn a marketer’s goal into a plan of action
What It Does: Zeta Global’s new AthenaOS lets users skip the UIs and tell Athena, Zeta’s chat assistant, what they want to achieve. It combines a company’s 1st party data with Zeta’s data on likely buyers, then gathers the tools and actions needed to get there. A new connector also brings Zeta’s data into ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. AthenaOS is in limited beta, with a full launch planned for Q1 2027.
Quick Take: The ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini connector is the story. Zeta, like other platforms, is betting marketers will work in their AI tools of choice and treat Zeta as a data source. Luckily for Zeta, it has a good data story to tell.
AI Use Case of The Week💡
David’s Bridal says “I do” to AI
The Setup: David’s Bridal, the largest wedding dress retailer in the US, filed for bankruptcy in 2023. To grow again without opening more stores or carrying more inventory, it decided to help brides with their entire wedding, not just buying the dress. Its edge: Brides share a lot of personal data when they book fittings and shop, often early in the planning process.
The AI Solution: David’s built Pearl, an AI agent that helps couples plan their wedding. It combines customer data with tips from in-store stylists. Pearl can book vendors and appointments, and it rebuilds the to-do list when a couple changes their date. A second tool, Pearl Connect, lets wedding vendors reach brides when they’re ready to book. David’s built it all with fewer than 10 full-time developers using AI coding tools and plans to connect Pearl to Meta’s Muse agent.
The Results:
• 3x increase in customer engagement
• 26x increase in users
• Four years of work done in 18 months
• Required no additional budget, with spending moved from older projects to Pearl
Why This Matters: David’s realized its best asset wasn’t wedding dresses. It was the data about who’s getting married and when, before other wedding vendors. AI let a small team turn that knowledge into a planning service and a marketplace for vendors.
Your Action: Vibe-code your own Pearl. Customers might buy from you as one step in some kind of larger project, like a wedding, a move, a product launch, or a software rollout. Paste a few of your product pages or descriptions into AI and ask: “Build a simple interactive planner for a customer working on [the bigger project].” Can it create something genuinely useful with your data for your customers, that encompasses more of what they need to purchase? If some of those other purchases would be from other companies, could those be potential channel partners? Who knows, you might be sitting on a media business.
Other Notable Headlines📌
Stagwell lands ServiceNow in the biggest multi-agency deal in its history🔒 - The two companies will build an AI-powered system for planning, launching, and measuring marketing campaigns, with teams embedded at each other’s companies.
Character.AI files for bankruptcy, with Disney lined up to buy its tech for $20M - The chatbot startup was losing $8M-$9M a month and faces a lawsuit alleging its companion bots harmed kids. Disney, which just hired Character.AI’s former CEO as its CTO, is the first bidder. Character.AI was trying to monetize via ads.
Coca-Cola’s AI shopping tip: Describe the occasion, not just the product🔒 - Coca-Cola is adding details to its product listings about how and when each drink fits into people’s lives, so AI agents know when to recommend them.
Google opens AI Mode to prescription drug ads🔒 - The U.S.-only test lets some pharma brands run standard text and Shopping ads in Google’s AI Mode and AI Overviews.
Salesforce acquires AI analytics startup Loops in an estimated $30M deal - Loops’ AI explains why metrics like conversions and retention change, and suggests what to do next. Salesforce will integrate Loops into Tableau.
FBI arrests OpenAI engineer in SF over toilet paper-wrapped recording device - Prosecutors say the engineer hid the toilet paper-wrapped device in a TV’s USB port in an executive conference room at OpenAI’s office in San Francisco. OpenAI says it found no sign that model code or customer data was taken. It terminated the employee.
That’s It For This Week 👋
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