December 5th-December 11th // Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes
In This Edition!
Mickey Mouse meets Sora
Gemini does, and then does not, have ads
McDonald's AI Christmas ad hits the naughty list
U of Digital’s AI Accelerator is BACK by popular demand. This is the go-to bootcamp for marketing and advertising professionals looking to get a head start on AI.
The next Accelerator launches on January 13th. Use promo code ACCELERATE20 for 20% off individual tickets. Email [email protected] for team discounts.
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#KnowledgeIsPower #HumansAheadOfAI
Top Headlines🔥
Disney Makes $1B OpenAI Investment, Licenses 200+ Characters to Sora
Source: CNBC
December 11th, 2025
Summary: As part of a three-year licensing deal, Sora and ChatGPT users will be able to create videos and images with Mickey Mouse, Yoda, Iron Man, and over 200 other Disney characters starting in early 2026. The deal marks Disney's first IP licensing agreement with any AI platform. Disney will also deploy ChatGPT across its workforce and use OpenAI's APIs to build new Disney+ experiences for subscribers. The agreement includes characters, costumes, props, and environments but notably doesn't include talent likenesses or voices. Curated user-generated Sora videos will stream on Disney+.
Opinion: Disney seems to be making a calculated bet: maintain some control over how its IP appears in AI rather than fight an uphill battle against user-generated content and copyright infringement (which it just sued Google for). This strategy could backfire if AI-generated Disney content floods the internet and dilutes the brand's premium positioning—or it could extend Disney's cultural relevance to a generation that creates rather than just consumes content. Will we start seeing AI ads featuring Mickey Mouse or Darth Vader?
Criteo Turns LLMs Into New Ad Channel With Commerce Data Play🔒
Source: Digiday
December 8th, 2025
Summary: Criteo is experimenting with piping its commerce dataset—720M daily active users and over $1T in observed transactions—directly into an unnamed large language model to power AI-driven product discovery. The assumption is that generic web-crawl data isn't sufficient for quality product recommendations. Criteo could also eventually power product ads served within LLMs.
Internally, Criteo is also leaning into using AI for campaign creation and optimization. Criteo's Commerce Go tool, launching in Q1 2026, automates campaign setup in roughly 10 minutes compared to the typical multi-day process, and now works directly inside ChatGPT and Claude.
Opinion: Criteo is no stranger to business pivots after transforming itself from a display retargeter to a commerce media platform. It's wise to now reposition its decades-old commerce dataset as infrastructure for AI shopping. If LLMs become the primary product discovery layer, the companies that control the underlying commerce data and recommendation engines have a big advantage.
New Products & Features 🚀
What It Does: The image generation model, internally dubbed "Mayo," reportedly delivers quality nearly identical to the Pro version (codenamed "Ketchup") at lower operational costs.
Quick Take: This is pure speculation based on code leaks—Google hasn't announced anything official. If true, it would let Google scale its popular Nano Banana image editing tool to more users without premium pricing.
What It Does: LinkedIn has rolled out several B2B marketing tools, including AI Ad Variants, which generates multiple ready-to-use copy variations from a single headline or intro text. The tool lets B2B marketers instantly create new ad content that stays on-brand without manual rewriting.
Quick Take: This tool could help B2B marketers produce enough copy variations to test effectively. Scaled testing is important since running five ads drives 20% higher click-through rates than running just one ad, according to LinkedIn.
What It Does: Shopify Agentic Storefronts syndicates products across AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot automatically, without individual integrations. Merchants control where their brand appears and can track conversations, while customers can complete purchases without leaving the AI chat. Another tool, SimGym, uses AI shoppers trained on billions of real purchases to simulate customer behavior and stress-test store changes.
Quick Take: As shopping shifts to AI chat, Agentic Storefronts could help millions of merchants keep pace by making every store "agent-ready by default." SimGym gives small merchants testing capabilities previously available only to high-traffic brands. Rapid AI adoption helps Shopify and its merchants compete with the likes of Amazon and Walmart.
What It Does: When an AI agent needs to sign up for a paid service, it must stop and wait for a human to fill out forms and enter payment information. InFlow solves this by letting AI agents use pre-approved payment credentials to automatically create accounts and complete purchases on their own.
Quick Take: AI agents can often do the work but can't pay for the tools they need without human intervention. InFlow could turn AI agents into paying customers that businesses can monetize. Agentic commerce won’t take off until people get comfortable with this concept. This is an important first step.
AI Use Case of The Week💡
The Setup: The $2B cloud networking company wanted to scale content production and free its marketing team to focus on strategic work rather than repetitive tasks.
The AI Solution: Aviatrix deployed 4-5 LLMs per marketer for different purposes, plus a full AI stack for video production and analytics, including Midjourney and Higgsfield. To ensure all content includes a human element, Aviatrix has trained its models to ensure content is factually accurate, empathetic, and not playing to the user's ego.
The Results:
Automation: AI can automate 80% of marketing tasks.
Blog production: 6 blogs per week, up from 1 per week a year ago
Social media: 12 posts per week, compared to 3 previously
Technical blog writing: 2 hours, down from 8 hours
Video production: A 2-minute video now takes 6 weeks instead of 6 months
Why This Matters: The productivity gains are dramatic, but the real challenge is maintaining brand voice and quality, at scale. This level of transformation requires significant investment in tools, training, and process redesign.
Your Action: Create a multi-model "assembly line" for marketing content, where different LLMs handle different stages of production. For example, use ChatGPT for initial research and an outline, GPT-4 for drafting, and Claude for critical review and fact-checking. Track which combinations produce the least human editing time to refine your workflow over time.
Other Notable Headlines📌
Google Tells Advertisers It’ll Bring Ads to Gemini in 2026 - Google reps apparently told advertisers that it would roll out ads to its Gemini AI chatbot next year, per Adweek. Hours later, Dan Taylor, Google’s VP of Global Ads, shot it down.
Agentic Shopping, Wall-E, and What Women Want… - The debate continues! Shirley Marschall responds to an op-ed by U of Digital's Myles Younger about whether agentic commerce will or won't take off.
PubMatic brings programmatic advertising to AI chatbots through Kontext partnership - Kontext analyzes AI conversations to show relevant ads and adjusts brand creative to match user queries. The partnership with PubMatic enables advertisers to buy these ads the same way they buy other digital ads.
Meta helps brands turn creator content into partnership ads - Brands can now search Instagram for user-generated content and affiliate posts in Meta's Partnership Ads Hub, then use a new API to turn creator content into paid ads.
Not lovin' it: McDonald's pulls AI-generated Christmas ad after social media backlash - This week's AI ad fail goes to McDonald's, whose Christmas ad was called "unsettling" and "creepy".
That’s It For This Week 👋
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