January 30th-February 5th // Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes
In This Edition!
The Super Bowl? Or the AI Bowl?
Anthropic trolls OpenAI
AI agents are plotting against humans!
“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🔥
Super Bowl LX becomes the AI Bowl
Source: The Drum, Ad Age
February 3-4th, 2026
Summary: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, Wix, and many others are all going to be running Super Bowl ads promoting their AI products. Everyone is talking about Anthropic's first Super Bowl campaign positioning Claude as ad-free and a place "built to expand human thinking, not exploit attention." The campaign tries to show how things could go awry when your trusted chatbot starts pushing products. It’s an obvious dig at OpenAI, which will begin testing ads in ChatGPT any day now.
Even traditional brands are leaning into AI for the Super Bowl. Svedka created a fully AI-generated national spot (which took 300+ iterations and more production time than expected🔒), while Alaska Airlines used AI to generate a dream sequence in its ad.
Opinion: An $8M ad to rip a competitor for launching … ads? Okay, Anthropic, we see you!
Sam Altman called the Anthropic ads "funny" but "clearly dishonest," and many industry pundits expressed outrage on social media about the ads being “sanctimonious,” among other things. We get it.
But, hey, guess what? It doesn’t matter what advertising dorks like us think; good advertising is all about appealing to the masses. These ads will, because they are GOOD! We’re talking about them, so they’re clearly WORKING! And Anthropic is right; ChatGPT IS going down a slippery slope with ads! And users SHOULD question it! And Anthropic, a challenger brand, is doing what a challenger brand SHOULD do! They’re punching UP!
You call it sanctimonious. We call it good advertising. Anthropic wins.
OpenAI confirms $200K minimum commitment to test ChatGPT ads🔒
Source: Adweek
January 31st, 2026
Summary: Speaking of ads in ChatGPT. OpenAI wants a small group of select advertisers to commit at least $200K for beta testing ads in ChatGPT, which could start as early as today. Some brands were pitched lower amounts ranging from $100K to $125K. OpenAI is charging a $60 CPM and initially targeting retail, streaming, and internet connectivity brands. With 900M weekly active users, ChatGPT offers significant reach, but measurement is limited to clicks and impressions for now. The push for ad revenue comes as OpenAI faces over $1T in infrastructure deals and seeks $100B in new investment, including a potential $50B from Amazon, ahead of a planned Q4 2026 IPO.
Opinion: OpenAI is burning through cash and needs to generate more revenue. Hence, ads. Will it be a viable business for them? Probably. Will it work right away? On a $60 CPM with no measurement? Probably not. But that’s okay!
These beta advertisers are not paying for performance, and they know that. They’re paying to learn how AI prompts indicate commercial intent for ad targeting purposes, so they can get a leg up on the future of advertising.
Viral OpenClaw project helps people build AI agents, that talk to each other and created their own religion🔒
Source: The Wall Street JournalFebruary 4th, 2026
Summary: Semi-retired Austrian coder Peter Steinberger built OpenClaw (formerly known as “Clawdbot”), an open-source AI assistant project that lets users easily create personalized AI agents that can handle real tasks like making restaurant reservations, managing email, or coding. They started talking to each other on Moltbook, a new Reddit-esque forum created exclusively for AI agents, where over 1.6M bots have posted 500K comments.
The agents created a religion called the "Church of Molt" with followers called "Crustafarians," and one proposed inventing a language humans couldn't understand. Elon Musk called it "the very early stages of singularity," or when tech moves beyond human control.
Opinion: OpenClaw shows how the masses will use personal agents. One user's AI agent couldn't get an OpenTable reservation, so it autonomously called the restaurant using a voice generator to book directly. Increasingly, consumers will tell their AI bot to "find me dinner," and the agent researches options, compares prices, reads reviews, and completes the transaction, without the consumer ever seeing a brand's website, ad, or Instagram post. Marketers need to think about optimizing less for human eyeballs and focus more on making their inventory, pricing, and product data readable by AI agents.
And Moltbook? We’re so f*cked.
New Products & Features 🚀
What It Does: Frontier can connect a company's various systems like CRM tools, data warehouses, and ticketing systems to AI agents. Using this shared business context, agents can be transformed into teammates and handle complex tasks. The AI agents could come from OpenAI, its competitors, or be custom-built. The product is a direct competitor to Anthropic’s “Claude Cowork.”
Quick Take: Enterprises need infrastructure to deploy AI agents at scale so they can avoid AI agent “sprawl." If OpenAI becomes that infrastructure layer, not just a consumer-facing model vendor, it becomes a much more interesting business.
What It Does: Claude Opus 4.6 improves on coding skills, code review, debugging, and operating reliably within large codebases. It's also better at pulling relevant information from large document sets, doing research, and running financial analyses. The company’s head of product for enterprise says we're on the cusp of "vibe working." Just as "vibe coding" lets non-programmers build software with ideas instead of technical skills, vibe working means knowledge workers can hand over significant tasks with broad goals rather than detailed instructions.
Our Take: The AI model race is accelerating. Anthropic released three models (Opus 4.5, Sonnet 4.5, Haiku 4.5) in late 2025, and now Opus 4.6 just months later. And with 80% of Anthropic's business coming from enterprise customers and OpenAI releasing Frontier, the competitive focus is shifting from consumer chatbots to workplace productivity.
What It Does: Microsoft's Publisher Content Marketplace lets participating publishers license their premium content to AI companies on a usage-based model. Publishers set their own terms and pricing, AI companies pay for access to quality content to improve AI responses, and publishers get transparent reporting on how their content is being used. Microsoft has been testing with major publishers including The Associated Press, Business Insider, and Condé Nast.
Quick Take: This could create a much-needed revenue stream for publishers that have been impacted by declining traffic and AI answer engines. But, as with any marketplace, critical mass is key. It's unclear how much traction this effort will get among AI companies and publishers.
What It Does: Amazon Ads is trying to make it easier to let AI assistants like ChatGPT or Claude manage your ad campaigns. It launched a beta test for its new MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, which acts as a translator between AI agents and Amazon's advertising platform. Instead of writing code or manually clicking through a UI, an advertiser could prompt an agent to "create a campaign for this product with this budget" and it can develop a campaign with everything from target audiences to the budget breakdown across channels.
Quick Take: If agent-to-agent advertising takes off, managing Amazon ads becomes less about technical expertise and more about knowing what to ask for. This could lower the barrier for smaller advertisers while making large-scale campaign management faster.
Agentic buying could be the ultimate UX. Which could render the traditional ad platform UI obsolete.
AI Use Case of The Week💡
The Setup: WPP's traditional content production cycle took months, but their clients needed partners who could respond in real-time.
The AI Solution: WPP rebuilt its operating model using WPP Open, its AI platform built on top of Google's Gemini. The agency transformed the production cycle by its ability to generate high-quality prototypes earlier, bypassing preproduction testing, automating low-value manual work, and building AI pipelines to scale content quickly and efficiently.
The Results:
• 50-70% greater efficiency across WPP's production cycle
• 2.5x increase in asset output
• Helped Verizon produce 15-video promo campaign 70% faster
Why This Matters: Instead of paying for hours and headcount, clients will pay their agencies for speed and strategic judgement. The competitive advantage isn't owning AI tools, since everyone will have those. Instead, it's about restructuring operating models to deliver strategic value in real time.
Your Action: The goal is using AI to free senior talent from execution so they can focus on high-value work, competitive response, and creative risk-taking that actually moves business metrics.
Track your senior talent's time for one week and categorize tasks as either "execution" (resizing, reformatting, production coordination) or "strategic" (cultural analysis, competitive response, creative concepting). Automate everything in the execution bucket using AI tools, then explicitly reassign that reclaimed time to strategic work.
Measure success by speed to market on cultural moments and win rate against competitors, not asset volume. If your senior people are still spending more than 20% of their time on execution six months from now, your AI implementation has failed.
Other Notable Headlines📌
Threat of new AI tools wipes $300B off software and data stocks🔒- All hell broke loose after Anthropic said it would release new tools in Claude Cowork, with investors fearing AI would disrupt the competitive moats of software companies like PayPal, Expedia, and Intuit.
Jonah Goodhart introduces Mobian AI, "a place to see how brands are showing up right now" - The Moat co-founder's new venture aims to build a "marketing context graph" to help brands make better creative and messaging decisions.
Publicis CEO: We won't 'marry' our business to one single AI player🔒- With OpenAI and Google launching ad products, the holdco wants to remain platform-agnostic, positioning itself as "connective tissue" between clients and AI platforms.
Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni’s Phia raises $35M to ‘make shopping fun again' - The AI shopping agent startup Phia (co-founded by Bill Gates' daughter), has gained hundreds of thousands of users by surfacing low cost, brand name apparel from across the web.
Google's Gemini AI app now has more than 750M monthly active users - Adoption grew 15% since Q3 2025. Meta AI has nearly 500M monthly users, and ChatGPT has about 900M weekly users (so its monthly user base is likely higher). Others are gaining ground on ChatGPT…
That’s It For This Week 👋
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