June 26th-July 2nd // Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes
In This Edition!
OpenAI NEEDS ads to work
WPP’s AI pivot
Check out Myles Younger on this week’s Open Market podcast! Joe, Eric, and Myles discuss enterprise sales, AI training, and the future of media.
Top Headlines🔥
OpenAI looks beyond a single ad format with image, video, and conversational ads in the works🔒
Source: Digiday
July 1st, 2026
Summary: OpenAI is hiring ad format engineers to build out image, video, native, and conversational ads for ChatGPT. The new formats would require privacy and brand safety controls built-in, according to the job listings. In related news, OpenAI ads boss David Dugan said that third-party ad measurement is coming, calling it "a natural evolution." Right now OpenAI reports its own ad performance with no outside auditor checking the numbers. Meanwhile, ChatGPT is also creeping into Google Maps territory, bundling weather, lodging, and directions into travel answers.
Opinion: OpenAI is “clearly in the advertising business now.” They’re doing all the work to make advertising successful. They need to in order to have a successful IPO. But they have a lot more work ahead of them, and ChatGPT ads are still not a sure bet. It’s not as easy as copying the search ad model. Their experimentation with ad formats proves as much (FWIW Google is doing the same thing). No one has quite figured that part out yet. AI has the potential to be a powerful full-funnel marketing channel, but it’ll need to thread the needle between maintaining user trust, making ads genuinely useful for users, and making ads impactful for marketers. Keep at it, OpenAI!
WPP bolsters enterprise services in bid to be an AI one-stop shop🔒
Source: Adweek
July 1st, 2026
Summary: WPP Enterprise Solutions launched five services: AI Transformation Consulting for strategy, Agentic Commerce for AI-driven shopping, Owned Intelligence for client data, Real-time Relationships for customer personalization, and Intelligent Content for content production. WPP Enterprise Solutions CEO Jeff Geheb wants the unit to compete with Accenture and Deloitte. WPP is partnering with AWS, Adobe, Google, Microsoft, Braze, Shopify, and Salesforce to round out the offering. The unit is one of four pillars in CEO Cindy Rose's Elevate28 turnaround plan. WPP Enterprise Solutions employs around 12K people and generates $1.8B in annual revenue, about 13% of WPP's net revenue.
Opinion: Will clients ever see WPP as a full solutions provider and not just an ad agency? Holding companies have tried this consulting pivot before and have mostly lost to Accenture and Deloitte. Don’t see why it would be any different this time around. (Meanwhile, the big consultancies have been somewhat successful🔒 encroaching on agency territory.)
New Products & Features 🚀
What It Does: Anthropic's new Claude Sonnet 5 model plans tasks and uses tools like browsers and terminals on its own, and beats the previous Sonnet model on reasoning, coding, and tool use. It matches the performance of Opus, a more advanced model, on some tasks but costs less. It's the default model on Free and Pro plans and is also live on Claude Code and the API.
Quick Take: Sonnet used to be the budget pick. Now it's close enough to Opus performance-wise that price may tip the scale towards Sonnet.
What It Does: Google released two new AI models for generating images and video. Nano Banana 2 Lite creates images in 4 seconds at a cost of $0.034 per image. It's built for fast, high-volume work like drafting and prototyping. Gemini Omni Flash generates and edits video from text, image, and video inputs. It costs $0.10 per second of video output, the same price as Veo 3.1 Fast. Both are live now in Google AI Studio and the Gemini API. Developers can chain the two together: Generate an image with Nano Banana 2 Lite and animate it with Omni Flash.
Quick Take: The chaining capability is cool because it provides a pipeline from still image to video without the need to switch tools. Between the Sonnet 5 launch and this, notice how new AI product announcements are becoming more about cost and less about performance.
What It Does: The new TikTok Agentic Hub connects external AI agents directly to TikTok Ads, so they can manage reporting, creative, and optimization without code or API access. Advertisers can use ready-made agentic tools from partners like HubSpot and Wix or build their own and connect straight to the platform.
Quick Take: Ad platforms are increasingly opening their platforms to external agents as opposed to building agents that are meant to live within their platforms.
What It Does: Aim is a background agent that monitors brand visibility, sentiment, and citations across AI platforms, then turns the highest-impact opportunities into structured projects with tasks and recommended workflows. It routes the work to Profound's AI agents for research and content creation, while marketers approve everything before it ships.
Quick Take: GEO platforms are increasingly moving from only providing AI visibility insights into also being marketing activation platforms.
What It Does: LinkedIn added five creative tools to Campaign Manager. Brand kit stores a business's colors, fonts, and tone so AI-generated ads stay on-brand. Draft with AI writes ad copy from a URL and campaign goals. Ads personalization tailors messaging by job title and industry. AI ad variants creates new headlines and text for an existing ad. Flexible ad creation mixes uploaded images and copy into new combinations, then shifts spend to whichever performs best.
Quick Take: If only LinkedIn tried improving their user experience with AI like they are the advertising experience…
AI Use Case of The Week💡
Stitch Fix turned AI styling tools into real revenue growth
The Setup: Stitch Fix had several years of declining sales and sits on billions of data points about client fit, budget, and style preferences. It needed to turn that data into superior, personalized shopping experiences competitors couldn't copy, at scale, while supporting human stylists in the loop.
The AI Solution: Stitch Fix built its AI Style Assistant as a conversational tool that asks clients about their preferences and generates outfit ideas from the conversation. Stitch Fix Vision is an AI platform that shows clients their likeness in curated outfits, based on their style profile. Stitch Fix recently expanded Vision further, letting clients generate their own images in any recommended outfit by selecting "See it on me," and save the images in a gallery
The Results:
• In March, Stitch Fix said net revenue grew 9.4% year over year to $341.3M, its second straight quarter of growth. Stitch Fix's CEO credited performance in part to the AI Style Assistant and Vision.
• Average order value for the company’s curated clothing shipments rose nearly 10% YoY.
• Revenue per active client hit a record of $577.
• 75% of users return to Stitch Fix Vision. Those repeat users doubled their spending on Stitch Fix’s on-demand shop within 90 days.
Why This Matters: Stitch Fix Vision has become so personalized that users are able to assemble their own individual style galleries. This is moving Vision from recommendation tool to flywheel, driving repeat visits and purchases.
Your Action: Can you use AI to create something your customers want to keep? Do you offer your customers any kind of interactive tool, such as product finders, quizzes, or configurators? Add a personalization layer that lets customers build a custom version of your product:
• A personalized product, generated from their inputs, that they can actually buy or share on social media
• A running list that grows with each use, instead of resetting every session
• A saved gallery, like Stitch Fix's, that becomes a record of their own taste over time
• An overlay or badge tied to their profile photo that marks a style or milestone
Track engagement and spending between customers who use the tool once and customers who come back. If repeat users spend more, expand and improve the feature to boost stickiness.
Other Notable Headlines📌
IBM hires Stagwell as lead creative partner: AI capability and speed won out 🔒 - IBM ended a 32-year run with Ogilvy after Stagwell showed it could plug into IBM's existing tech stack instead of pushing its own platform.
Madison Avenue is going all in on AI🔒 - AI was front-and-center at Cannes this year, with brands telling stories of their AI successes. At Hershey, AI has cut ad production time from six weeks to hours and saved several million dollars a year. At Rocket Mortgage, AI is being used to prototype ad scripts and billboard concepts, and its CMO expects the industry to move past "AI slop" within the year.
FTC seeks public comment on policy statement addressing AI accuracy - The statement says AI companies that distort outputs for undisclosed ideological reasons, such as preventing algorithmic discrimination, could be violating consumer protection law.
Meta pops 9% as company makes cloud push to sell excess AI compute power capacity - Meta is building a cloud business to rent out its excess compute capacity for AI. The move reframes Meta’s $145 billion in 2026 capital expenditure towards AI from cost to potential revenue. Myles Younger predicted this in 2024!
Netflix uses AI to re-create Gene Wilder's voice for Willy Wonka show - Netflix worked with ElevenLabs and got permission from Wilder's estate to recreate his voice for the unscripted series "Wonka's The Golden Ticket." The show premieres on September 23rd.
That’s It For This Week 👋
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