February 6th-February 12th // Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes
In This Edition!
Ads on ChatGPT are live!
Google AI = Amazon Ads killer?
“The AI Accelerator is a great mix of strategy and hands-on application that will enable me to communicate the value of AI at the C-suite level while also coaching and developing marketing teams on the day-to-day practicalities. This course is a must for any marketing leader who wants to understand how to leverage AI to accelerate growth!”
Top Headlines🔥
Google previews new AI-powered ad products for 2026
Source: Social Media Today
February 11th, 2026
Summary: In her third annual letter, Google VP/GM of Ads & Commerce Vidhya Srinivasan detailed how the company plans to monetize Google Search “AI Mode” with sponsored retailer listings that appear below organic results, clearly marked as "Sponsored." The goal is to help shoppers find buying options and help retailers appear in moments of intent. Direct Offers, an ad product which will let brands share tailored deals with shoppers that are ready to buy, will expand beyond discounts to include loyalty benefits and product bundles. Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is also rolling out now for one-click checkout in AI Mode from retailers like Etsy and Wayfair, and Shopify, Target, and Walmart are coming soon.
Opinion: While OpenAI experiments with $60 CPMs and minimal measurement, Google is bringing 25 years of search advertising expertise and data to AI Mode. The sponsored retailer format is essentially proven search ads applied to AI answers, with a minimal learning curve for advertisers that are already buying Google Shopping ads. The UCP checkout integration turns Google's AI from a research tool into a transaction engine. And remember, UCP will also enable transactions in Gemini; more data to feed into AI Mode ads.
Google is going hard after AI-driven commerce. Why? Because Google wants a piece of commerce advertising. Who runs the largest commerce advertising business in the world?
ChatGPT launches ads with major agencies buying in
February 9th, 2026
Source: Axios
Summary: OpenAI began testing ads in ChatGPT this week with major agency holding companies and brands participating. Omnicom Media has 30+ brands testing the platform🔒, while WPP Media brought Adobe, Ford, Mazda, Audible, Audemars Piguet, and Mrs. Meyers to the pilot. Target said it's participating too. The ads will be clearly marked as sponsored below organic answers in both free and $8/month Go tiers. ChatGPT's $20/month Plus tier remains ad-free. OpenAI is charging $60 CPMs, and ads are targeted based on chat context, without sharing the actual chat content with advertisers. Advertisers only receive aggregate metrics like views and clicks. Users can opt out of ads either by upgrading to paid tiers or accepting fewer daily free chats. OpenAI asked brands to initially commit $100K-$200K to test ads.
Opinion: We’ve already talked a lot about ads in ChatGPT. Not much else to say for now!
New Products & Features 🚀
What It Does: Criteo's new service connects AI shopping assistants to merchant inventory and data from 720M daily shoppers and $1T in annual transactions to recommend products. Early testing delivered up to 60% better relevancy than systems relying only on product descriptions.
Quick Take: Criteo has loads of valuable commerce data. Seems like a smart play to build an AI shopping infrastructure layer on top of it. Helps the company diversify beyond pure-play advertising and ad tech. Helps retailers bring much better AI shopping assistant experiences to their users.
What It Does: Spaceback's new AI suite transforms brands' existing vertical social creative into CTV-ready ads with four tools. AURA discovers best-performing social content. FADE generates background audio for 15-, 30-, or 60-second spots, and AI Backgrounds fill horizontal formats with complementary imagery. Pause Ads converts social videos into streaming pause ad formats.
Quick Take: Brands are starving for affordable CTV creative. Rembrand turns one, top-performing social asset into multiple CTV assets.
What It Does: The SAGE platform uses two AI agents (creative planning assistant and creative insights analyst) to help media buyers generate campaign ideas and diagnose ad performance. The system analyzes 2M+ ad creatives to link performance with creative themes.
Quick Take: It would be pretty cool and useful if advertisers had a measurement platform that could actually explain why ads work instead of just reporting that they did.
What It Does: Chinese company Moonshot AI released Kimi K2.5, a model that can create teams of up to 100 AI agents that work together simultaneously, instead of one AI handling tasks step by step. Key use cases include research, batch downloads, multi-file processing, and multi-angle analysis.
Quick Take: Why have one agent do something in sequential steps when you can have 100 agents do all those steps simultaneously?
AI Use Case of The Week💡
Fashion retailer's AI assistant drives 41% more wishlist adds, creating retargeting goldmine
The Setup: Zalando, Europe's largest online fashion platform, wanted to scale its AI-powered shopping assistant beyond the four markets where it initially launched. Zalando also wanted to deliver personalized product recommendations in 20+ languages while improving the assistant's ability to handle nuanced requests.
The AI Solution: Zalando worked with OpenAI to develop and upgrade the Zalando Assistant. First, it improved AI Assistant evaluation by breaking down testing into individual components and using better examples to train the AI what good vs. bad responses look like. Second, it upgraded the assistant's underlying model from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4o mini.
The Results: The upgraded assistant delivered:
• 23% increase in product clicks within the recommendation carousel
• 41% increase in products added to wishlists
• 5% reduction in recommendations marked "unhelpful" by users
• 12x traffic increase without significant cost increase
Why This Matters: Zalando's 41% wishlist increase is particularly significant for marketers, since every wishlist addition creates a retargeting opportunity and intent signal that drives future conversions.
Your Action: Quantify your product discovery bottleneck. Track 100 real customer sessions from search to purchase. Count how many customers: (1) get zero search results, (2) don't click any product recommendations, (3) abandon after adding to wishlist. Each failure point represents revenue leakage. Calculate the cost: failed searches × site conversion rate × AOV + missed recommendation clicks × CTR × conversion rate × AOV + abandoned wishlists × conversion rate × AOV. That total is your monthly opportunity cost and your benchmark for whether AI can deliver ROI.
Other Notable Headlines📌
Musk’s xAI loses second co-founder in two days - Influential researcher Jimmy Ba and co-founder Tony Wu both departed Elon Musk's AI company following its merger with SpaceX.
Anthropic raises another $30B in Series G, with a new value of $380B - The Claude creator more than doubled its valuation from $183B as it competes with OpenAI, which is seeking $100B in funding at an $830B valuation.
ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 AI video tool wows early users - TikTok's former parent company's new AI video generator is impressing beta testers who say it beats OpenAI's Sora 2, though availability in the US remains uncertain given ByteDance's forced TikTok US divestiture.
People grew revenue 14% despite losing half of Google search traffic to AI - The publisher's Q4 digital revenue hit $355M as it shifted to off-platform distribution via Instagram, TikTok, and Apple News.
OpenAI's new Codex app hits 1M+ downloads in first week — but limits may be coming to free and Go users - The Mac-only agentic coding app orchestrates multiple AI agents simultaneously. OpenAI warned it will reduce limits for free and $8/month "Go" tier users.
Uber Eats rolls out AI assistant for grocery shopping - Cart Assistant turns grocery lists and photos into checkout-ready baskets using real-time availability and pricing.
Google takes a step toward an internet built for AI agents🔒 - Google's new protocol WebMCP aims to help AI agents better perform specific actions on websites.
About that AI Bowl: Reception of AI ads ‘sharply negative’ - Nearly 50% of mentions of the 15 AI-related Super Bowl ads were negative, with discussions framing them as "emblematic of declining creative effort."
That’s It For This Week 👋
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