October 17th-October 23rd // Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes

OpenAI Takes on Google With Atlas AI Browser🔒
Source: Adweek
October 21st, 2025

Summary: Move over Comet and Gemini, Atlas is here. The AI-powered browser (built on Chromium) lets ChatGPT shop, schedule, and search on your behalf without switching tabs. Atlas shows webpages alongside live ChatGPT conversations. In "agent mode," it can automatically add items to shopping carts or summarize content. Atlas is now available on macOS, with Windows, iOS, and Android on the way. The launch sent Alphabet shares down nearly 5%.

Opinion: Atlas is OpenAI's next move to own the entire end-to-end user experience. Users shouldn’t have to use another company’s browser to go to ChatGPT.com to start their AI-driven journey.

Here's why this matters for advertising: Atlas gives OpenAI direct access to browsing behavior and search activity—the same data that powers Google’s $200+ billion ad empire. When users ask ChatGPT to "find running shoes under $100," they're giving OpenAI search intent data without ever seeing traditional search results or ads. If Atlas gets traction, OpenAI will be in tremendous position to build an advertising behemoth.

Google sees the threat clearly—that's why it has been integrating its Gemini AI assistant into Chrome. Expect Google to accelerate that move as it works to keep users from defecting to AI-first browsing through Atlas.

WPP Uses AI To Chase Long-Tail Dollars
Source: Reuters
October 23rd, 2025

Summary: The new WPP Open Pro is a self-serve version of its WPP Open platform that lets marketers plan campaigns, create branded content, and launch ads without an agency. It uses AI trained on WPP's data to help marketers create campaign strategies, then it automates production using tools like Google's Veo, OpenAI's Sora, and Adobe Firefly🔒 Marketers can publish directly to ad platforms or connect to WPP's Open Media Studio. Pricing is usage-based after the initial access fee.

Opinion: WPP has traditionally worked mostly with large advertisers and sold them agency services. WPP Open Pro allows them to sell tech to smaller advertisers, potentially opening up an entirely new revenue stream for the struggling agency holding company—and put even more pressure on traditional agency models. We wrote this when WPP hired Cindy Rose away from Microsoft to be their CEO this past summer. Is it happening?

Adobe’s New AI Foundry Builds Custom Brand Models 

What It Does: Adobe's AI Foundry builds custom AI models using a brand's existing creative assets, style guides, and content so it can generate on-brand images, videos, text, and 3D assets that match its specific look and voice. Pricing is usage-based.

Quick Take: This tool could help marketers get around the "every AI-generated ad looks the same" problem.

Brands Can Now Use Databricks AI To Analyze LG TV Campaigns

What It Does: LG connected its TV viewership data directly to Databricks, letting brands combine LG's automated content recognition (ACR) data with their own customer data to measure campaign performance and plan media buys—without manually transferring files.

Quick Take: LG is making it easier to buy data-driven advertising within their ecosystem. Smart.

Stagwell's Marketing Cloud Launches Agent Cloud Platform

What It Does: Agent Cloud gives marketers one login to access every major AI model—GPT-5, Claude Sonnet 4, Grok 4, Gemini 2.5 Pro—plus image and video tools like Imagen and Veo3. Users can build custom AI assistants powered by any model. After an annual base fee, teams only pay for the AI tools they actually use.

Quick Take: Not incredibly groundbreaking, but the value here may be the ability to test which AI models work best for different tasks without juggling multiple subscriptions.

The Setup: Virgin Voyages wanted to use AI to scale personalized marketing and reduce use of external creative agencies.

The Solution: The cruise line deployed 50+ AI agents to handle different parts of its business, including marketing and customer experience. One agent, dubbed “Email Ellie,” was trained on Virgin Voyages' data to recreate Virgin's brand voice and build hyper-personalized email campaigns for different audience segments. Another agent, "Landing Page Larry," helps Virgin Voyages show different landing pages to different web visitors based on their customer journeys to increase conversions.

The Results:

Why This Matters: Virgin Voyages shows how AI agents can transform how marketing teams operate. By eliminating the need to pass work between teams and external agencies, the brand compressed weeks-long processes into days. The 35% cost reduction came from eliminating agency work, not from negotiating better rates.

Marketer Action: Audit your most expensive agency relationships. Identify repetitive creative work—email campaigns, landing pages, social posts—where brand voice matters but human creativity isn't the differentiator. These are prime candidates for AI agents. Start with one agent for a single use case, measure savings, then expand.

Netflix Announces New AI Ad Formats on the Way🔒 - Netflix is using AI to test new ad formats, generate hyper-relevant ad creative, choose the best placements, and accelerate media planning. By 2026, AI will help Netflix "test, iterate, and innovate on dozens of ad formats."

Meta slashes jobs in its AI operations - Meta is trying to reduce bureaucracy, while also aggressively hire for its new TBD Lab focused on breakthrough AI research and superintelligence development.

Reddit Sues Perplexity for ‘Industrial-Scale’ Data Theft - Reddit alleges Perplexity and three data-scraping companies are circumventing protections to steal Reddit content for AI training, refusing to pay for licensing deals like OpenAI and Google have.

IBM Sales Jump as Clients Start Scaling AI🔒- IBM's customers are accelerating beyond AI experimentation, helping to drive the company's revenue up by 9%, and it's quickly adding new customers. 

AI Enigma: Search Traffic Drops to Sites, but Revenue Doesn’t—Yet🔒- Companies are saying that although referral search traffic may be down, the traffic that does come through seems to be more likely to convert. 

Amazon worries that new AI startups are spending less on AWS🔒- Some AI startups seem to be first investing in models and tools before adopting AWS.  

Google's viral Nano Banana AI image tool may have already hurt Adobe🔒- After Google launched Nano Banana in late August, downloads of Adobe's competing tool, Firefly, fell by more than half, according to analytics company Appfigures. 

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