March 20th-March 26th // Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes
In This Edition!
OpenAI’s Sora spot
Apple’s going AI agnostic
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Join Shiv & Myles and a rotating cast of industry leaders to get the latest AI news and how it impacts the marketing industry.
This week’s guest is former Amazon ad tech product leader Brian Tomasette. Next week’s guest is former CMO of Cadillac, Melissa Grady Dias!
Top Headlines🔥
Google pitched marketers on Gemini And YouTube creators at the NewFronts
Source: AdExchanger
March 23rd, 2026
Summary: YouTube's Creator Partnerships Hub now uses Gemini to help marketers find contextually relevant creators by using natural language prompts to search by tone, subject matter, and aesthetic. Marketers can bulk-message the creators directly from the platform and manage their deals. Google is also bringing more agentic AI capabilities to its Google Marketing Platform and demand-side platform DV360. A new Ads Advisor agent can automatically optimize campaigns, explain why creatives were rejected, and suggest fixes. Google is also using Gemini to tackle overfrequency through DV360's new household frequency management tool.
Opinion: For Google, the fewer humans involved in having to make advertising work, the better. It erodes everyone else's reason to exist. Google’s value prop is inventory and data, at scale; when AI removes the need for customer service, manual button-pushing in UIs, manual deal-making, etc., the value prop becomes even stronger.
OpenAI kills Sora. Disney walks.
Source: Wired
March 25th, 2026
Summary: OpenAI is shutting down Sora, its AI video generation app, six months after launch. It seems usage had been declining: Downloads had already fallen from 3.3M in November to 1.1M by February, and many ad agencies said they had already moved on to other tools that better fit into their workflows. Disney got burned; it pledged to invest $1B in OpenAI and license some of its characters for use in Sora, but the deal is now dead. Interestingly, the current box office hit Project Hail Mary was made almost entirely with practical effects, rather than digital effects. Audiences are responding to it.
Opinion: They’re probably just responding to Ryan Gosling. Sora didn't die because AI video has failed. Sora died because it was the wrong product, at the wrong time, for the wrong company. Deepfake lawsuits, copyright chaos, all for $2.1M in lifetime revenue against enormous compute costs. All Sora was doing was burning money and creating legal exposure for OpenAI. That said, the serious AI video tools — Runway, Kling, Firefly, etc. — aren't going anywhere. These companies, and the massive companies (like Google) that can treat AI video generation as a loss leader, will persevere and unlock the potential of AI video. Not from OpenAI.
Apple Plans to Open Up Siri to Rival AI Assistants in iOS 27 Update 🔒
Source: Bloomberg
March 26th, 2026
Summary: Users will be able to fetch answers from any AI model they want through Siri’s new “extensions” feature, as long as they have the AI app (e.g. Gemini, Claude) downloaded on their device. This means that Apple will end its exclusivity with OpenAI; however, it will continue its work to fine-tune Gemini’s models and integrate them into its products in various capacities.
Opinion: While every other big tech company sinks billions into AI model development, just to partake in an increasingly commoditized AI model race, Apple hovers above it all, continues to own the rails, and charges handsomely for it. No AI research investment required, no data centers; just take 30% of every dollar every AI company charges users through the Apple App Store. Chess, not checkers.
New Products & Features 🚀
What It Does: A few weeks ago, AppLovin began offering a multi-agent production pipeline to generate interactive ads for advertisers. AppLovin followed this with a video generation tool that only requires an advertiser to input a URL. It is now in early access and free to try, with broader rollout planned for early Q2. AppLovin is also working on automated playable ad creation for gaming brands.
Quick Take: Early results are promising: Within two weeks, AI-generated interactive ads ramped up to a significant share of spend. Using AI to create rich, interactive ads, which requires a unique kind of ingenuity and resources, is a great use case for AI (h/t to Mobile Dev Memo and AI TipSheet).
What It Does: Samsung Ads is rolling out two new AI-powered targeting tools for CTV advertisers. AI-Powered Contextual Targeting reads what's happening on screen in real time to determine when and where to serve ads. AI-Powered Audience Collectives uses Samsung's first-party data across devices to identify viewers most likely to engage or convert.
Quick Take: Samsung can see what people are watching across linear and CTV, across apps, etc. That, along with the fact that Samsung is the largest TV manufacturer in the world, puts it in quite a unique position to utilize AI to unlock tremendous value for CTV advertisers.
What It Does: Meta unveiled an AI browsing experience that surfaces product reviews, brand details, and discounts after someone clicks on an ad from Facebook or Instagram. Meta is testing a one-click checkout with PayPal and Stripe. Meta also announced several new tools 🔒 , including one that lets advertisers create UGC-style video ads using AI avatars, a tool that auto-generates product videos from catalog data, and AI voiceover translation, all available directly in Meta Ads Manager.
Quick Take: Meta is a) making its closed-loop ecosystem from ad → browsing → research → purchase even tighter and b) removing humans from the advertising equation, just like Google.
AI Use Case of The Week💡
PepsiCo's Lay's campaign shows what AI-driven localization can look like
The Setup: PepsiCo's media team in Europe needed to adapt a global Lay's campaign for local markets in Belgium and the Netherlands. For the campaign, "Joy is a simple recipe," PepsiCo wanted to use AI to analyze the meaning of "joy," which can look different in various regions.
The AI Solution: PepsiCo used Gemini to analyze insights from 6,000 consumers, inputting native-language prompts to surface cultural differences. Gemini revealed that Dutch consumers associated joy with canal boating while Belgians leaned toward cycling culture. The team used those insights to generate 30 hyper-local three-word creatives, all built on the same structure but rooted in country-specific references.
The Results:
• 6.5 million unique users reached in one month
• 4 percentage-point increase in ad recall
• CPM 30% below typical campaigns
Why This Matters: Poor localization of creative can doom a brand in a given market. And a lack of localization can prevent a brand from getting any traction whatsoever. It's cool to hear how AI tools can help companies better understand local audiences and connect with them on a deeper level.
Your Action: Start by pulling your last campaign's performance data broken out by market. Identify any markets where results fell significantly below average.
Feed the creative brief and the actual ads from those underperforming markets into an AI tool and ask it to identify missing cultural references, emotional cues, local idioms, and context your original creative may have overlooked.
Use the findings to build a cultural reference guide for underperforming markets that can inform your creative teams for future campaigns.
Other Notable Headlines📌
PubMatic is using AI agents to simplify programmatic ad buying 🔒 - PubMatic's AI infrastructure handles campaign planning, execution, and optimization automatically. One agency testing the system saw an 82% reduction in buying costs and 90% faster campaign setup.
Google is quietly replacing news headlines with AI-generated ones 🔒 - The Verge discovered that Google has used AI to rewrite some of its headlines in Google's traditional search results.
Advertisers Say OpenAI Is Extending Its Ad Pilot Beyond April 🔒 - And expanding ads to other countries, while asking advertisers for IO commitments. It’s hit $100M in annualized ads revenue in 6 weeks of testing!
Gap becomes the first retailer to offer checkout inside Google Gemini - Shoppers can now browse Gap's catalog, get styling recommendations, and complete a purchase without leaving Google's Gemini AI Assistant.
source: MediaPost
Zuckerberg is building a personal AI agent to help him run Meta 🔒 - The CEO agent helps Zuckerberg get information faster by bypassing organizational layers.
That’s It For This Week 👋
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