May 1st-May 7th // Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes

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Coca-Cola, United, and Hershey marketers use AI to prove their value to the C-suite🔒
Source: Ad Age
May 1st, 2026

Summary: AI and real-time data are changing how marketers measure and justify their spending. Coca-Cola is able to track "weekly active drinkers" the way a tech company tracks monthly active users, connecting data across vending machines, checkout lines, and digital touchpoints. Hershey built an AI-powered measurement platform that gives teams real-time data on where ad dollars are working. Hershey is doubling down on organic social, with platform-native organic content delivering a 4.5x higher view rate and 13x more engagement than paid. United Airlines is turning hundreds of employees into brand influencers, empowering them to post on behalf of the brand, and using CreatorIQ's AI platform to track which content is actually performing.

Opinion: Three different strategies, same underlying mandate: show that marketing drives business results. AI is helping marketers get their hands on data, and connect that data to marketing, in ways they’ve never been able to before. All it takes is an understanding of what AI is capable of along with some creativity, and thinking outside the traditional marketing “measurement box” of MMM, attribution, etc. That enables marketing to start looking more like a P&L driver, not a cost center. Which changes the CMO's relationship with the CFO and CEO, and helps them keep their jobs (a little longer, at least).

New Bluefish product tracks when AI misrepresents your brand

What It Does: Bluefish's new AI Accuracy tool monitors AI responses across major platforms to verify whether brands are being represented factually, flagging every mismatch by severity, product line, and channel. A companion feature called Brand Vault lets brands feed their own first-party content directly to LLMs as training material to improve accuracy at the source.

Quick Take: AI hallucinations are common, and when AI gets product information wrong, consumers often blame the brand, not the AI. This may not be a long-term problem. But the AI Accuracy tool + Brand Vault seem like an easy button to address this problem for now. 

KERV.ai matches ads to high-intent moments in CTV content

What It Does: KERV.ai's Moment Match Engine uses AI and image recognition to identify high-attention moments in video content and align them with relevant brand and product signals. Rather than placing ads around content, it places them within the moments the platform identifies as the most likely to drive action.

Quick Take: This is powerful. But matching video context to a brand and placing their ad in the moment is just the tip of the iceberg! Imagine how much further you could take this with AI. Understanding who the user is, their mindset in the moment, the right message to serve, etc. 

Rakuten Advertising launches Mirai, an AI agent for affiliate marketing

What It Does: Mirai is a conversational AI agent that lets advertisers build and manage affiliate campaigns through natural language. Instead of manually configuring commission structures and campaign details, advertisers describe their objectives and Mirai handles the setup and optimization behind the scenes.

Quick Take: Affiliate marketing can be extremely effective, yet operationally heavy. As a result, it tends to be underfunded relative to its ROI. If AI can streamline the operational burden, affiliate budget grows.

The Setup: Adidas had over 2M product reviews from customers across 150+ countries. Analyzing them was largely manual, slow, and inaccessible to nontechnical teams. Adidas had a legacy chatbot, but it gave generic answers, carried high compute costs, and took a long time to respond. 

The AI solution: Adidas built a GenAI chatbot powered by retrieval augmented generation (RAG), a technique that lets AI pull from a specific set of documents rather than relying on general training data alone. The system used a combination of Databricks tools and LLMs to process customer reviews and generate real-time insights for internal teams. Nontechnical users across design, product, marketing, and customer service could query the chatbot in plain language to surface customer sentiment about adidas products. 

The Results:

• 30-40% improvement in analysis efficiency

• 60% reduction in response time, from 15.5 seconds to 6

• 91.67% cost savings by switching to more efficient AI

Why This Matters: Customer reviews are one of the most honest data sources a brand has, but many companies are barely using them, especially at this scale. With the right AI infrastructure, customer reviews can drive product decisions in real-time.

Your Action: Pull your last 90 days of product or service reviews from wherever they live. Drop them into an AI tool like Claude and ask it to identify the top recurring complaints and the top things customers love. That's a free, five-minute version of what Adidas built and a good gut check on whether a more scaled solution is worth pursuing.

​​Zoom built a SWAT team to manage how it shows up in AI🔒 - Zoom's CMO says press releases and executive LinkedIn activity now matter more than ever, because LLMs are citing both when users ask about business software.

Marketers are spending big on AI visibility tools but aren’t sure if they’re worth it🔒 - Tools that track how often a brand appears in AI chatbot responses are booming, but agencies say inconsistent results and lack of benchmarks make them more of a gut-check than a source of truth.

Retailers are rushing to build AI apps. It's unclear if shoppers will use them. - About 10% of the nearly 900 apps on ChatGPT are for shopping, but adoption and conversion are low and discoverability is poor. 

Instacart bets AI will drive its next phase of ad innovation - As the grocery platform hit $1B in quarterly revenue for the first time, CEO Chris Rogers pointed to AI as the biggest advertising opportunity, starting with a generative recommendation system that serves ads based on what's already in shoppers' carts.

Apple settles $250M false advertising lawsuit over nonexistent ‘Apple Intelligence’ features - Apple promoted Siri AI features that still haven't fully arrived two years later. It's a cautionary tale for any brand making AI capability claims it can't deliver on.

Beauty giant Coty partners with Pencil for gen-AI content system - Starting July 1st, Pencil will embed a dedicated team of humans inside Coty to help brands like CoverGirl, Rimmel, and Sally Hansen generate and optimize images and video at scale, with Coty retaining full ownership of its assets and data.

Anthropic and OpenAI use private equity to get to midsize businesses - Both are launching joint ventures backed by major PE firms to send human engineers directly into client companies to build custom AI solutions.

AI agents are already making media buying mistakes🔒 - In early tests, AI agents have hallucinated ad prices and booked media incorrectly even after receiving the right information and human approval. Experts recommend auditing every step of an agent's decision-making, restricting its scope, and bringing in HUMAN AI governance partners before mistakes scale.

Maury Povich starred in a 15-minute AI ad, and it's exactly what you'd expect -

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