November 28th-December 4th // Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

AI Chatbots drove record holiday sales as shoppers leave traditional search
Sources: Business Insider, TechCrunch, Modern Retail

Summary: AI shopping assistants became a primary sales driver during Black Friday and Cyber Week. Amazon's AI assistant Rufus saw adoption surge on Black Friday, with shoppers completing purchases at double the rate of those who didn't use it. Shoppers arriving at retail sites from AI services like ChatGPT on Black Friday converted 38% more often than traditional traffic. The trend extended across major retailers, with AI traffic to US retail sites jumping 805% on Black Friday year over year. The momentum continued throughout Cyber Week, when AI agents influenced nearly one in five orders, according to Salesforce. 

Opinion: We think it’s inevitable that AI agents are going to buy stuff for us, though some think it won’t happen (tell us what YOU think here). Regardless, based on this data, we know that agents will play a major role in the future of commerce.

Amazon's agentic strategy is simple: keep AI-driven shopping inside their walls so they control the customer data and protect their $50B ads business (and ads in Rufus). It's not consumer-friendly, but Amazon is big and sticky enough that shoppers will probably accept it.

Everyone else is stuck in a lose-lose situation. Retailers like Ulta, which optimize to show up in ChatGPT searches, are driving more sales today but are giving away their customer data (and in turn, their commerce media business) to OpenAI and other LLMs. So, either be visible in AI, where people are shopping now, and sacrifice your customer relationship, or protect your business long-term and sacrifice sales.

If you’re a retailer, invest heavily in loyalty programs, subscriptions, and owned channels (email, SMS, apps) that give you direct customer data outside of your direct shopping experience. Build AI tools that are incrementally valuable to the LLMs. All while optimizing for AI visibility in ChatGPT and other major AI chat platforms.

LG and Taboola launch Performance Enhancer to prove CTV ads work

What It Does: Performance Enhancer connects CTV ad exposure on LG smart TVs to outcomes and integrates that data with campaigns run on Taboola's Realize AI-driven performance ad platform. The idea is to extend campaigns from TV to the web and provide cross-channel targeting and measurement using television data. This is Taboola's second CTV deal after partnering with Paramount in October.

Quick Take: Taboola is making an interesting play by hooking itself to as many CTV players as it can, specifically from a data perspective. The company's Realize AI technology, which enables performance advertising across open web publishers (ala Google’s Performance Max), is being positioned as a bridge between TV exposure and open web outcomes.

Scott Brinker's 'Martech for 2026' report maps the reality behind AI hype

What It Does: Brinker and Frans Riemersma's annual report draws from their AI & Data in Marketing study and covers topics like the most popular AI agents in marketing, how to categorize AI agents, and building agentic mar tech stacks. It includes loads of insights around organizational readiness and where AI is headed. 

Quick Take:

The Setup: Priceline manages 200K paid search campaigns but couldn't justify the manual labor needed to pursue niche opportunities, like promoting independent boutique hotels, upper-funnel destination searches, or event-driven travel. 

The AI Solution: Priceline marketers could enter a landing page URL and a basic text prompt into a spreadsheet, and Microsoft Copilot instantly produced ad headlines and descriptions customized for specific cities and keywords. The system scraped landing pages to maintain brand voice and enforce character limits across different ad products.

The Results: 

• 10% lift in click-through rates from AI-generated ads 

• Reduced ad creation time from hundreds of hours to minutes

Why This Matters: The results show how AI can eliminate the need for labor-constrained prioritizatio. AI unlocks the ability to “market everything”.

Your Action: Audit your "not worth it" list—marketing opportunities your team has deprioritized because the manual effort doesn't justify the potential return. Common examples: hyper-local campaigns, seasonal micro-moments, or niche product categories. Pick a few and calculate the break-even: If you could create those campaigns in 5 minutes instead of 5 hours, would the ROI justify testing them? If yes, run a 30-day pilot using an AI ad generation tool to see if previously marginal opportunities can now drive incremental revenue. 

OpenAI declares ‘code red’ to improve ChatGPT amid rising competition from Google - OpenAI will delay advertising initiatives and other products to focus on improving the quality of ChatGPT. The news comes as evidence emerges that OpenAI may be building an early framework for ads in the ChatGPT Android app.

Svedka’s first Super Bowl commercial will mix vodka with AI - Svedka’s inaugural Super Bowl ad will use AI to bring back “fembot,” the vodka brand's female robot character that has been on hiatus for more than 10 years.

Target and WPP are racing to build infrastructure for AI agents - Brands and agencies are turning to the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to help their AI agents access data from other systems and complete marketing tasks. 

Oreo maker Mondelēz invests $40M in gen-AI tool AIDA - Mondelēz spent $40M building AIDA, a generative AI tool that creates personalized ads for brands like Oreo and Chips Ahoy!, aiming to cut content creation costs by 50%. $40M!

Google merges AI Overviews with AI Mode on mobile - Google is testing an all-out transition to conversational AI Mode on mobile search, allowing users to ask follow-up questions to search queries without having to explicitly switch into AI Mode.

Valentino's AI-generated handbag ads get roasted as 'lazy' and 'cheap' - The Italian luxury brand faced intense social media backlash after posting AI-generated Instagram ads showing strange collages of models morphing with handbags and logos.

Click at your own risk…

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