February 27th-March 5th // Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes
In This Edition!
Meta (also) wants a piece of agentic commerce
OpenAI is an open ad ecosystem (to start)
The Pentagon “helps” Claude become most downloaded app
“This course is a must for any marketing leader who wants to understand how to leverage AI to accelerate growth!” -Linda Bethea, CMO Danone
Enroll NOW For The March AI Accelerator, Sponsored By Yahoo DSP. Use promo code PROCRASTINATOR for 25% off! STARTS MONDAY!
Top Headlines🔥
Meta brings AI shopping to its chatbot
Source: Bloomberg
March 3rd, 2026
Summary: Meta is testing a shopping research feature in its AI chatbot for some US users that could compete with ChatGPT and Gemini. Ask Meta AI for product suggestions and it returns a carousel of images with brand, price, and website info. Recommendations are personalized based on what Meta already knows, including the user's location and inferred gender. There's no checkout within the chatbot, but users can click through to merchant sites. Meta hasn't confirmed whether it takes referral commissions.
Opinion: Everyone wants a piece of AI-driven commerce! OpenAI, Google, and now Meta. Commerce ads are the lowest-hanging-fruit-way to monetize AI with ads. While Meta isn’t explicitly serving ads in AI yet, Zuckerberg did say that Meta's AI shopping tools will surface products specifically "from the businesses in our catalog." The “businesses” he’s referring to are Meta’s advertisers. Gotta pay to play!
Check out U of Digital’s Myles Younger on stage at Marketecture Live in NYC on March 11th running a session on agentic commerce. Use promo promo code UofD30 for 30% off!
OpenAI can't build its ad business alone
Sources: eMarketer, The Information
March 3rd-4th, 2026
Summary: OpenAI is partnering with ad tech companies to help it sell ads in ChatGPT while it builds up its own ads business. OpenAI has tapped Criteo as its first ad tech partner for ChatGPT's ad testing, letting brands buy ChatGPT inventory through Criteo's commerce media platform. OpenAI is also reportedly in early talks 🔒 with The Trade Desk, the industry's largest independent demand-side platform. A deal with OpenAI would be a win for The Trade Desk, which has faced headwinds in the past year; its stock rose by double digits after news of a potential partnership was reported.
Opinion: This is a big win for Criteo, and would be a big win for The Trade Desk if a deal gets done. They get to say “We have AI ads and no one else does!” And if you’re a customer of either platform, you have an easy way to test ChatGPT ads. At least for now.
It’s interesting to see OpenAI partner instead of build or buy. It makes sense; they’re just getting started with ads, they need revenue badly, so why not get some ad dollars flowing through their ecosystem and figure out where to go from there? We don’t anticipate OpenAI will be an open platform long-term. They’ll probably bring it all in-house at some point and become a walled garden. They won’t want to share any of that juicy ad margin with other ad platforms.
New Products & Features 🚀
What It Does: Stagwell's media agency Assembly built a generative engine optimization (GEO) platform that helps brands track and improve how they show up in AI-generated search results. It covers discoverability, visibility, and sentiment across LLMs, and connects those insights to paid, owned, and earned media execution. Early results include a 57% increase in AI Overview visibility for one software client and 27% average incremental lift across deployments.
Quick Take: GEO is getting crowded, fast. A raft of hot startups 🔒 like Profound (now valued at $1B) and Bluefish are selling standalone tech platforms, while agencies Stagwell, Havas, and Broadhead are just vibe-coding their own GEO tools in hours. Where will GEO ultimately end up? In the hands of tech platforms or as part or service businesses like agencies? Right now, the answer isn't clear. If we look at how SEO played out as an indicator, it’ll be the latter.
Confused about the difference between SEO, GEO, AEO, and AIO? So were we! We learned about it and made this handy chart.
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AI Use Case of The Week💡
AI agents help Formula 1 cut fan support response times by 80%
The Setup: F1's fanbase has grown to over 700M worldwide, but less than 1% will ever watch a Grand Prix in person. That means digital touchpoints such as streaming, merchandise, and the F1 app are where most fans actually experience the sport. But these fans were getting stuck in lengthy support queues. Service reps had to pull fan data from disconnected systems, which slowed response times and made personalization nearly impossible during high-traffic moments like race days.
The AI Solution: F1 deployed Salesforce's AI agent layer Agentforce and unified its fan data in Salesforce Data Cloud, consolidating 100+ data sources to create individual profiles for F1 24M known fans. Agentforce handles routine service issues like login problems or streaming issues directly through self-service tools. For more complex issues, it gives reps instant access to fan history and drafts on brand replies they can send or edit. Agentforce also creates more personalized content and experiences for fans.
The Results:
• 80% faster response times
• 50% less call handling time
• 95%+ first-call resolution rate
• 22% increase in click-through rates on AI-generated content
• 8% increase in fan satisfaction (reaching 90%)
Why This Matters: By resolving routine issues faster, F1 is protecting revenue since an annoyed fan who can't log in during a race is a churn risk and potential lapsed subscriber. AI-powered service becomes a retention tool, not just an efficiency play.
Your Action: Close the loop between service and marketing to reduce churn. Pull your last 6 months of service data and identify the issues associated with the highest churn rate after contact. Rank them by volume and revenue impact; build your AI agent use case around resolving those first, not the easiest issues to automate. Create a feedback loop: Flag frustrated customers in your CRM and trigger a follow-up marketing touchpoint once their issue is resolved, such as a loyalty offer, a personalized recommendation, or a simple check-in. Measure success by retention rate and downstream purchase behavior, not just response time.
Other Notable Headlines📌
Claude is suddenly the most popular iPhone app following the Pentagon feud - The Pentagon cut ties with Anthropic and designated it a “supply-chain risk” after the company refused to remove safety guardrails from Claude. Users responded by downloading Claude in record numbers.
Gartner predicts half of agency AI platforms will be obsolete by 2029 - Open-source AI platforms from the likes of Google and Amazon will likely undercut agency-built tools on cost and customization.
Google patents a system that replaces brand landing pages with AI-generated versions in real time - If Google predicts a landing page will underperform for a specific user, the original page could be hidden and replaced with an AI-built alternative without the brand's involvement.
Parade founder Cami Tellez launches AI influencer platform Devotion with $4M in funding - The platform uses AI to help large brands discover, manage, and pay creators at scale.
News Corp. strikes a $50M-per-year AI licensing deal with Meta - Under the three-year deal, Meta will use content from News Corp's US and UK properties to fuel its AI, adding to existing deals with CNN, Fox News, and USA Today.
Amazon explores helping other apps sell chatbot ads 🔒 - Amazon Publisher Services is talking to AI companies about incorporating ads. The AdSense of AI?
Amazon deepens OpenAI ties with $50B investment - OpenAI will use more AWS infrastructure and Amazon will use some of OpenAI's models to help power its consumer products.
9 rising stars of brand marketing share how they're using AI 🔒 - Edmunds creative director Benny Gee uses Claude to pressure-test ideas and find holes in his thinking; others like Grubhub's Jasmine Sharpe are using Gemini and Copilot to cut admin work and spin up presentation visuals.
Fraudsters create 200+ AI slop websites in one operation - DoubleVerify discovered the fraudulent operation designed to generate ad revenue from AI-generated made-for-advertising websites. They called it “AutoBait”.
That’s It For This Week 👋
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