It is the Friday before the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity begins, and I definitely don’t have fomo 🥲 It’s Ad Age Insider host Parker Herren here. This week, to fill the void in my soul left by all my colleagues hitting the sunny South of France, I talked to a few of them about what will be going down at the festival.

Agency reporters Brian Bonilla and Ewan Larkin break down the key topics, trends and questions to watch at this year’s Cannes Lions. From how industry mergers including Omnicom-IPG will shift agency priorities to the rise of independent agencies, they describe what factors are impacting the awards, events and conversations on the ground this year.

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In this episode, Ad Age Insider host Parker Herren interviewed Ad Age’s Brian Bonilla, senior agency reporter, and Ewan Larkin, agency reporter. Below, the transcript, which has been lightly edited for clarity.

Parker:​ How many times have each of you been to Cannes, and what would you say the vibe around the town is for this year’s festival?

Brian:​ This is my fourth or fifth Cannes in a row. When I first went, I had no idea the gravity of the festival. This year, the feeling is Cannes has officially made the leap from a creative conference to a business conference. I was just talking to a few executives about that today and that is the ultimate feeling. It’s kind of been the inside joke for a few years. Creativity needs to matter—and it does matter—but that’s no longer the reason that a lot of people are going to Cannes this year.

Ewan:​ Last year was my first, and that was really interesting because the shift toward it being a business conference was much more pronounced last year. You could finally feel that everybody was embracing that aspect of the festival, and that’ll certainly remain this year.

Parker:​ What do each of you think will be the biggest change about this year’s festival? I know you just mentioned the business versus creativity aspect, but if somebody went last year and they’re packing up right now and about to hop on their flight, what should they really be prepped for when they hit the ground that might look different than last year?

Ewan:​ You’re going to see much more AI conversation, if that’s possible. There was certainly plenty of it last year, but there’s going to be more of it this year undoubtedly, and a lot of that will focus on agentic tools and agentic marketing and how agencies and ad tech can help marketers navigate this moment.

As well as that, you will actually see a bit more of the AI players themselves. OpenAI and Anthropic will be there. I don’t think there’s going to be an OpenAI beach or anything like that, but more of them will be making the rounds for various different reasons. Some of it will be for the ads business that they’re building in terms of OpenAI, but also trying to get more enterprises to sign on to their business. There’ll be a lot more focus on B2B marketing. So those are two of the changes you can expect around AI and agentic marketing, but surely there are plenty more.

Parker:​ I remember the first year I went, it was like, the streaming companies are all here; this is no longer a creativity festival, it’s a media festival. Then it was, the creators are here; this is a creator festival. And now it’s the AI festival.

Brian:​ You mentioned the other really big trend, which is creators. It’s not a surprise, but people don’t really understand how much more creators are showing up this year. It feels way more significant than it’s ever felt. Before, it was kind of like a joke: “I’m going to meet an influencer.” But now it’s being taken very seriously.

Accenture Song, with them acquiring Whalar, and Publicis has been making a lot of investments there as well—influencer platforms like Influential and Captiv8 and others. WPP is making investments there. So I’m seeing the full-on acceptance that creators are here to stay, and they’re also controlling the conversation. Anthropic is hosting an event with creators. It’s a really interesting acknowledgement this year compared to previous years.

Ewan:​ So many of the pitches that I’ve gotten this year leading up to Cannes have “first-ever” and then “creators” in the subject line. Everybody is kind of clamoring to have a presence with creators in the south of France. I think they know they need to, and a lot of people are stepping up the investment they’re putting behind creators at Cannes.

Brian:​ I spoke to one agency who said it’s not necessarily about them meeting creators, but meeting other agencies or businesses that have a social and influencer practice integrated with their traditional media practice and learning how that can exist. A lot of people are looking to modernize their media through the creator lens.

What agencies and independents want to get out of Cannes

Parker:​ What are you hearing from agencies about their goals for this year’s festival?

Ewan:​ It depends on who the agency is, but a lot of people are going in with a very specific set of goals. You have to really tightly define what ROI at Cannes is because of how expensive it is.

In a lot of cases, agencies are really focused on their operating systems, which are backed by AI, and selling more of those services to clients. So a lot of them will be looking to do demos and show how they can actually drive growth for clients’ businesses using this technology. Here’s how it can be additive, not just used for efficiencies.

You’ll also get people that are trying to dominate the conversation around sports marketing. We talked about creators, we talked about AI, and then we might as well go for the third buzziest topic, which is sports marketing. A lot of people will be making announcements about that. Athletes are obviously everywhere in Cannes now; there’ll probably be more of them there. So a lot of people are really trying to hone in on those spaces.

And then also, it’s just a very good ground for surveying where everybody else is at. It’s kind of the ultimate temperature check. You go there and see if people are actually ahead of you. Are you ahead in some other ways? What kind of technology should you be using? It’s a really healthy benchmark against your competitive set.

Brian:​ I’m hearing a lot of agencies specifically this year are using Cannes for recruiting purposes, which is always a thing. But now, following the Omnicom acquisition of IPG, we’re seeing layoffs across the board in the industry—and not just this industry, every industry. That means there’s a lot of talent out there.

We’re seeing a much bigger independent agency presence. That also comes with, “I can find really good talent somewhere else that I maybe wouldn’t have been able to before.” So I think that’s a huge focus for a lot of agencies.

Parker:​ Brian, is there any other reason behind a larger number of indie agencies attending this year outside of talent, or why would we be seeing that this year?

Brian:​ The industry is in the most confusing place it’s been in a while, just because there’s so much going on that agencies need to be experts on—or at least they feel like they need to be experts on. We’re seeing agencies that have 10 people win business from agencies that have 100 people.

Everyone’s trying to figure out how do they need to structure their business and how they can learn from other independent agencies. I think also independent agencies are willing to put more money behind it because they are seeing wins. We saw Quality Meats win a Grand Prix last year. We’re also seeing Cannes giving out passes specifically for small businesses—a cheaper ticket. They’re investing more in small agencies and small businesses. I think independents are feeling that attention a bit more.

And honestly, clients are hiring independent agencies more than ever. If you’re an agency in the Midwest or you’re just not in these circles often, this is probably one of your best opportunities to get a hold of a CMO that you would never be able to before.

How the Omnicom-IPG deal and awards changes will shape this year’s festival

Parker:​ Ewan wrote a fabulous story about the impact of the Omnicom-IPG acquisition, and we’re seeing plenty of small acquisitions in the industry this year. If I’m on the plane on my way to France right now, how is the festival going to look different because of what the industry has gone through this past year?

Brian:​ The one big thing is the Creative Company of the Year award, which was one of the most coveted awards for the holding companies, is no longer going to exist.

There was this big point system that—I don’t know if most people in the industry paid attention to it, but if you were at a holding company, you paid attention to it. Your bonuses were tied to it, a lot of things were tied to it. I don’t know if Cannes directly admits this, but it’s very clear that Omnicom is much more likely to have a favorable lead in a point system situation if they just blitz the competition. It became unnecessary, especially coming out of the awards scandal from last year. I think Cannes recognized it needed to hone some things back.

That’s going to be a big difference because there was a lot of pressure for people during Cannes just to count these points. I talked to creatives who feel like they can now just breathe and focus on the work while they’re there. I think that’s going to be a big change.

Parker:​ And I just want to clarify, when you’re talking about this point system, you mean the way that the actual winners of the awards are tallied, right?

Brian:​ Exactly. A Grand Prix award is more points than a bronze award. Overall, those points were added up and the holding company or any company that had the most points at the end of the week was named Creative Company of the Year.

Ewan:​ From the people that I spoke to, they seem to be optimistic about it, saying that it puts the focus back on the Grand Prix, the golds, the silvers and the bronzes—and winning Lions is what the creative contest was supposed to be about in the first place. So I think that’s a healthy change.

In terms of what the merger means for the festival, it is an interesting time because every holding company is in a very specific circumstance. Omnicom is arriving to the festival with IPG in the fold. They still have a beach space; they actually have a slightly larger beach space now. They made some technical changes to accommodate for more clients that they’ll have in the mix.

It’s an important festival for them because outside of CES, which was their first opportunity to present the new offering, this is the biggest stage they have to talk to clients about the new merger and why it’s a benefit to them. It’s going to be a very client-centric festival for Omnicom. They’ll be doing a keynote on one of the days talking about their agentic marketing and communicating to clients what’s in it for them.

I’m sure they’ll be hosting some meetings with prospective clients as well. It’s a good opportunity for that, no matter what anybody says. I know everybody says new business doesn’t happen at Cannes. There are conversations that are going to happen.

It comes at an interesting time because WPP is pulling back on its presence. Brian reported about that a couple of months ago, but they’re ceding the beach space they’ve had for a couple of years to an independent agency, PMG, which is really interesting and kind of ties back to our conversation a couple of minutes ago. WPP will have a slightly quieter presence, which makes sense given the broader restructuring efforts and the turnaround that they’re in.

It comes at a really interesting time. Publicis has kind of always favored a more low-key approach and closed-door meetings, and now WPP seems to be playing into that a little. They’ll still have a rooftop space, so I’m sure they’ll be hosting some stuff for clients there as well.

For Omnicom, it’s a big opportunity. It is the biggest global gathering that the industry has, so what better time to tell marketers, “Here’s everything that we can do now that we have IPG?”

The challenge for them, which was noted in my story, is to make sure that IPG clients feel the festival is still giving them that intimate and personal care. Some marketing consultants felt like, because IPG was still massive but just not quite as big as the likes of Publicis, WPP and Omnicom, there was a more personal relationship at things like Cannes.

They’ll be continuing some of the things that IPG has done in the past, continuing some of those traditions but putting a new spin on them, which feels right given a new company.

Parker:​ What do you think the goals for the holding companies are, that they would feel really victorious coming out on the other side of the week with?

Brian:​ Every holding company has a different goal, mostly, and a different storyline. Dentsu, coming out of its failed attempt to sell its U.S. operations, now has to prove why that pivot is better.

It’s Cindy Rose’s first Cannes as CEO of WPP. Obviously WPP’s stock has struggled, so she needs to help instill confidence from that standpoint with existing and new clients. There’s the Coke pitch going on between WPP and Publicis, too.

Publicis has been operating from a point of strength for the past few years. They’re probably going to stick to their continued strategy of behind-the-scenes meetings and meeting with existing clients. I think it’s more about existing clients this year than ever before, even though new business is always a thing.

And then Omnicom needs to prove why this acquisition is better than what exists already. While everyone is not just shrinking but getting more efficient in their operations, Omnicom went the other way and brought in a lot more assets to simplify and structure. They need to convince clients that they’re on track for something that’s better than the rest of the industry.

Pitches, media accounts and new-business conversations on the Croisette

Parker:​ You’ve mentioned a few times that new business might not be the primary goal for agencies, but are there any accounts on the market right now or any deals that we should be keeping an ear out for movement on at Cannes?

Ewan:​ Well, the Coke pitch that Brian mentioned is a good one. That doesn’t actually start until July, but that doesn’t stop conversations from happening on the ground.

Coca-Cola is obviously going to be there in a big way. I’m sure conversations will be had between WPP, Publicis and Coke while they’re there. That’s the one I think everybody is looking at for the rest of the year. It doesn’t start till July and it won’t end until the fall, but that doesn’t stop people. They’re both existing clients already, so there’s nothing to stop them from having those conversations, maybe showing off some new tech and tools.

So I think that’s the one really on the top of people’s minds heading into the festival, especially since it was announced so recently. But the sheer volume of media pitches this year in particular is huge, so there’s plenty of stuff to talk about on the ground as well.

Brian:​ I’d also add Adidas’ media account as another one to watch. That’s been going on for a while. Oftentimes we have seen—I’m not saying this is, in fact, happening—pitches happen at Cannes and get closed at Cannes. There’s always one or two of those that happen, especially when you’re dealing with an international client where France might make more sense for them to close a deal than anywhere else.

Key questions about AI, awards and new players at Cannes

Parker:​ What is the question that each of you has on your mind as you go into the week? Is there one thing that you’re really curious about that you’d love to come out the other side of Cannes having answered?

Ewan:​ I’m really interested to see what OpenAI and Anthropic choose to talk about on the ground. OpenAI is going to have a couple of sessions. They’ll have one at the Palais early on in the week. That’s a big stage for them to kind of make their proper debut at the festival.

I’m sure their focus will be on advertising in the age of AI, when people are using chatbots to search for things as opposed to search engines, but I’m really interested to see where they go with that conversation. I’m sure they may have some announcements throughout the week as well. So that’s one: what are AI companies choosing to focus on there? Is it more consumers? Is it more B2B? Is it more their advertising business?

Another thing that I think is really interesting is the presence of CEOs at the festival. There was a CEO forum for the first time last year. That’s returning this year. I know a lot of CMOs have said it’s good to bring CEOs to the festival so they can show what’s going on with the marketing landscape, because of how chaotic it can be.

If more CEOs are coming, I’d love to talk to them if they’re there as well. I’d be interested to see if more of the C-suite is showing up to the south of France—at an interesting time, too, because it is getting so expensive and harder to prove the return on investment. So let’s see if CEOs want to come in, check out what’s going on and see if it’s worth it.

Brian:​ For me, it’s two things. One I’m always curious about, and one that’s new for this year. With the awards changes that happened and the amount of scrutiny that was put on the submission process, will this change the types of campaigns that win awards? Are we going to see a big difference in the types of work that gets awarded at the highest level of the industry? And is that a good or bad thing? Because if it does change completely, that means the industry was going in a direction that it maybe shouldn’t have been. Maybe it doesn’t change anything, and maybe that’s a good thing.

Parker: Brian, you’re referring to the scandal last year that arose from Omnicom’s agency DM9 having to withdraw several award-winning submissions over misleading case studies, which then led to other allegations as well.

Brian: I’m always curious, are there new players that are going to be on the rise? When I say players, I mean businesses. We talk a lot about holding companies, but creators are launching agencies and media companies. You talked about traditional media companies. We’re talking about sports companies getting into the fold now. We’re talking about entertainment companies launching agency-like services. Brands launching in-house teams. We’re seeing a big presence of consulting companies—Boston Consulting Group, Accenture, Deloitte.

Is there a new player that’s going to be on the rise? For advertising holding companies, everyone’s trying to eat their lunch right now, and I’m always curious who is going to get the next bite.

Happy World Cup week ⚽️ It’s Ad Age Insider host Parker. This week, I not only broke down the top World Cup marketing trends with Creativity Editor Tim Nudd and Senior Marketing Reporter Jon Springer, but I also got their picks for the best campaigns from the tournament so far. Read, watch or listen to our top picks below 📚📺🎧

There’s a lot changing in the sports marketing landscape, so here are three of my top takeaways:

Subscribe to Ad Age Insider on Apple Podcasts, Spotify (above), Amazon Music/Audible and YouTube Music. Or watch Ad Age Insider on YouTube (below).

In this episode, Ad Age Insider host Parker Herren interviewed Ad Age’s Tim Nudd and Jon Springer. Below, the transcript, which has been lightly edited for clarity.

Parker:​ I’ve been hearing about the World Cup for at least two years now. When I was the media reporter, it was like the beast on the horizon of everybody’s media budgets. I heard so much enthusiasm for it for so long.

But in the past month, there have been multiple dramas that have emerged around this, whether that’s the outrageous ticket prices and procedures that FIFA was part of putting on the fans, or the geopolitical controversies with the U.S.’s immigration policies in the Iran War. Jon, what’s the vibe with marketers, and has it changed as the game is actually now on our doorstep?

Jon:​ Publicly everything’s OK, but everybody’s a little bit worried on the inside. And it’s not so much about the geopolitical situation. I talk to a lot of people around the marketing world. They’ve said that they ultimately see the World Cup as something that brings the world together. And that is what is working against holding a World Cup in the U.S., Mexico and Canada.

FIFA’s sucking up to the president and giving him a peace prize is probably a means of keeping the president from interfering too much so far. At least that’s the hope, I would guess. But people are optimistic on the outside—there’s the idea that soccer’s going to bring people together above all and hopefully we get through this without any real repercussions.

Parker:​ Tim, as those controversies have come to bear, are we seeing any of that reflected in the creative or the marketing that we’ll be seeing throughout the tournament?

Tim:​ Not a lot, because all advertising, including World Cup advertising, has to live on this plane of unreality. Anything bad in the world doesn’t make it into advertising often, particularly when brands want to be inspiring.

But that’s the thing about the ticket prices—they’ve made it into a few campaigns. These are brands that aren’t necessarily World Cup advertisers, but they’re playing into the cultural tension around that. So a good example is a Canadian airline called Air Transat, which had some ads in which they suggested rather than paying $3,000 or $4,000 for a game ticket, you should just hop on a plane and actually visit those competing nations for a lot cheaper.

Those ads were really awesome. We actually highlighted those in our ad of the month for May. So when there’s tension, sometimes brands can lean in, but the geopolitical stuff they’re just going to leave alone.

Parker:​ What’s interesting about that campaign is the craftiness of how it’s speaking to the actual process of interacting with the World Cup for fans rather than necessarily doom-and-glooming about a bad thing.

Tim:​ For sure. And creatively they’re super fun. On one side it says “Watch France,” and it’s like $5,000 and then it’s “See France” for $700. So a really nice creative framework and one of my favorites so far.

Parker:​ That reminds me of some of Jon’s reporting he did on one unique new trend that has emerged around the World Cup does have to do with the ticket prices and getting fans access to the actual tournament. So what’s going on with that trend, and why has that been so innovative this year?

Jon:​ Well, I wouldn’t say that sponsors dangling tickets around a sporting event is a rare thing, but some brands have done so creatively this year. One that caught my attention was Total Wireless, which is the budget version of Verizon. They did a promotion where they put a handbill on city streets with the little rip-off tabs saying “free World Cup tickets.” And so people looked at it and didn’t know whether it was for real, but people actually did take them into a Total Wireless store and got themselves free tickets.

That campaign made a lot of sense because Total Wireless’s customers aren’t the kind that have the budget to buy tickets to the games. I think of Verizon, for example, as the parent brand doing much more glitzy giveaways. But the way that Total Wireless went about it was acknowledging that the World Cup is difficult to get to. The fact that the tickets are so expensive makes ticket giveaways more useful. And more valuable to fans.

Tim:​ On the morning radio every day, there are concert ticket giveaways. The fact that these World Cup tickets are going for hundreds and hundreds—in some cases thousands of dollars—seems like ticket giveaways are unexpectedly a great thing for some of these brands that have tickets to give away.

Jon:​ Yeah. Many, many, many of them are finding a way to do it, whether it’s a little contest on the side of a package that’s enter-and-win sweepstakes, that kind of thing.

Parker:​ I was reading some reporting from The New York Times that tickets are three to 10 times more expensive than the last World Cup, causing a big hubbub that is in contrast to the image of the World Cup being this big moment of international unity, the way we would think of the Olympics. But when you’re forced to pay $10,000 for a ticket in one of the later matches, it’s interesting the way that brands are becoming an enabler for people to actually take part in that.

Are there any other pro trends that we’ve seen pop around the World Cup this year?

World Cup marketing trends to watch

Tim:​ Obviously we’re seeing so many celebrity-driven campaigns, but beyond that, what’s interesting is that we’ve seen some longer-form storytelling, some kind of documentary work that is really kind of cool.

Chobani did a series where they profiled some U.S. soccer stars, three of them, in a campaign from Uncommon. Those were really well done.

WhatsApp actually made a 42-minute documentary about Bukayo Saka, who’s the England and Arsenal player. Longer-form documentary-style storytelling isn’t really new, but we’re seeing it at this level for the first time in the World Cup.

Jon, you’ve written about some of this stuff. It’s like the endless merch and the interesting products that are being created, both real products and kind of gag products. So you’ve got a brand like McDonald’s, which always seems to do collectible cups nowadays for everything. They’ve got their cup collection plus a limited-edition meal.

Miller Lite and Coors Light both made gag products. The Miller Lite product is a ball that holds cans in its full circumference. It’s very strange-looking.

Coors Light made what they’re calling a taller boy, which is like a three-can-size tallboy. It’s like a cooler—not actually a can you can open, but it holds three cans.

One campaign I really liked is from Café Bustelo, which is the coffee brand. It’s celebrating Latin American culture. They’ve made collectible cans with artwork from those nations. When you actually open the can, you get a temporary tattoo that fits on your face so that you can support whichever of those four nations that you like.

Interactive, surprising things that are a gift to the consumer do really well. We’re seeing a bit more of those things this year.

Jon:​ I was thinking of the Budweiser historical World Cup bottles that you can get now. They’re aluminum style and each one has got the World Cup branding going back however many years into the past, which emphasizes Anheuser-Busch’s long association with the tournament, but is also something that people will see on the shelves and want to get for themselves, particularly as the tournament gets going.

Parker:​ Tim and Jon, as you’re describing these trends, they all sound like these brands are really trying a lot to stand out.

We talk about this around the Super Bowl as well, but I wonder why we’re seeing a brand make a 42-minute video while another is doing a three-can-tall drink. Is there any sense behind the madness of these campaigns that diverge from the traditional advertising you would just see in a spot during a sports tournament?

Jon:​ One of the reasons is that the tournament is 39 days long, so it’s not just a single event. Even a World Series or something is only going to go on for a week or a week and a half, so that’s one thing.

And then there’s this tension between the official brands that have the ability to use the World Cup marks and get in the stadium and do those kinds of things, be on the TV, and then everybody else who also wants to participate in it and has to do a little bit of ambush marketing. So they’ve been a little bit more active and creative that way. They want to get attention, whereas they have to work a little bit harder to get attention than the official sponsors would.

Tim:​ Also, the traditional spots are just becoming really interchangeable. They’ve got the same athletes in them, they’ve got the same messaging, they’ve got the same sort of montage-style footage. And so it’s one thing to try to make a spot that’s different, but another way is just to go and create something else that’s not a spot. So more brands than ever are doing that.

With something like Lay’s creating special new flavors—those end up on store shelves. It’s just a different media moment for consumers.

And Jon’s right. It’s also a month-long tournament, so if you put that much money into a spot, the spot’s going to tire out the audience too. If people see it 30 times, it can get a little irritating. So the World Cup is a great opportunity to experiment with nontraditional media in general because of those constraints.

How to stand out in sports marketing: less celebrities, more big ideas

Parker:​ There seems to be an evolution of what the traditional sports marketing tactics might be looking like—if it’s for the World Cup or if it’s for something that we might see recurring annually or regularly. Could each of you give me one thing that’s really working right now with consumers or from the work that you’re seeing, and maybe one thing that may have worked in the past but is feeling a little tired at this moment. Tim, do you want to start us off?

Tim:​ The typical 60- or 90-second hero spot with the big global soccer star—that was the playbook in 2006, 2010, 2014. It doesn’t break through anymore, particularly if you use the same celeb. It’s one thing to share the equity with a celeb in a commercial, but when you’re sharing that celeb with five other brands, I don’t know what the takeaway is there.

So some of these spots have become quite interchangeable. What Nike has done this year is quite interesting, because they’re sort of the main purveyor of that type of advertising in the past. They’ve recognized that you need to be in online cultures more. These huge spots—people love them, the broadcast spots—but they don’t really play necessarily in these smaller internet moments.

And so Nike really downplayed their hero spot this year. And the irony is their hero spot turned out to be great, and everyone loves it. But they also took characters from that commercial, and they’re creating what they’re calling a universe of football. It’s like a month-long series of interconnected stories where the hero spot seeds these different stories, which then take on a life of their own in the real world with activations in different parts of the internet.

It’s smart to get away from that big hero asset and figure out where soccer culture is, where people are talking about it, how you can be authentic in those spaces and not just pay through the nose for the broadcast time with a single asset. I think that’s really a tired strategy at this point.

Jon:​ There are still too few recognizable soccer personalities in the U.S. You’ve got so many ads that have David Beckham and Messi. Tim Howard, the goalie—that’s about as big a U.S. soccer player as you can get now—he’s in half a dozen, if not more, national ads. Moving away from the celebrity approach might actually be a little refreshing.

Tim:​ And Jon, even the emerging stars are becoming overused. Erling Haaland, the Norwegian player, and Lamine Yamal, who’s the young Spanish player, are both in six to 10 commercials this year. So even when you try to freshen it up by using a different face other than Messi and Ronaldo, and you use these younger guys, they’re already overexposed too.

Changing up who you’re picking isn’t enough of a change. You have to actually get out of the whole cycle of what you’re used to, which is building your brand message around a person, and maybe build it around an interesting idea or something that’s going to break through culturally.

Jon:​ That makes sense. I think a lot of brands are waiting to see what happens in the tournament.

Parker:​ Jon, in your coverage of Coca-Cola’s campaign, you wrote about a certain amount of budget that they are reserving for something more spontaneous in social media work—being able to spend that in the tournament and not have it all filed away before it even starts. It seems like being in the moment and relating to the culture of the sport and the fans as the tournament progresses seems like another takeaway.

Jon:​ You need to be flexible and adjust your approach to the rhythms of the tournament. Every tournament is different, and there’s going to be a Cinderella, but we don’t know who yet. So watching the contours of the tournament and adjusting your marketing to speak to that is going to be a challenge.

2026 FIFA World Cup marketing winners

Parker:​ The time has come. I am so excited for the first-ever Ad Age World Cup Marketing Awards. Winners are going to emerge victorious, and everyone else will cry.

So I have come up with a couple of thrilling and exciting categories that I’m going to present to the room, and I would love to hear both of your picks for the winner in each category. The first category is the most unique World Cup campaign.

Tim:​ OK, I’m going to pick for most unique—I like “most unique,” by the way, because it doesn’t mean it has to be good. I’m going to pick Coca-Cola’s AI José Mourinho versus José Mourinho.

For those who haven’t read Jon’s story, he’s a famed soccer coach. They’ve created two AI versions of him who are going to debate different topics throughout the tournament. Hats off to Coca-Cola for doing this. I watched the trailer, and I was so put off by it, but it’s undeniably unique. And I guess kudos to Coke for just going down this AI road, caution be damned. They’re just going to do whatever.

And God bless, because they’re putting a lot of money behind it. This thing is going to be out there. People are going to see this, and they’re opening themselves up to the criticism from people who are not going to like it. And who knows, maybe it’ll have fun moments. I’m not super hopeful about that, but unique? Absolutely.

Parker:​ Yeah, I was going to say that could also be nominated for most risky or most potential blowup, but also maybe most surprising and successful. Jon, do you have a pick for most unique?

Jon:​ Tim convinced me that it’s Coke.

Parker:​ Congratulations, Coke. We actually had consensus, so you’ve won. The next category is the best strategy for a 2026 World Cup campaign. Jon, why don’t you kick this one off?

Jon:​ I mentioned earlier Total Wireless. I don’t know if that necessarily qualifies as best strategy, but I feel it’s clever; it’s understated. It was not big, it was—I’m sure—cheap to run, but I felt like that was an effective piece of work.

Parker:​ That is a great example of something that is totally in tune with the culture around this year’s tournament. So I think that is a great pick.

Tim:​ I’m going to go with something somewhat similar, which is those Air Transat ads from Canada that I mentioned, which is “See France, watch France.” I just thought that was such a clever way to get people to think about the cost of travel versus the cost of going to a game. Creatively, it was awesome, but strategically, I think that was just super spot on.

Parker:​ Congratulations to those two brands. And our last award: the best campaign of the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

Tim:​ I think it’s a toss-up between Nike and Adidas. And it’s interesting, because these are two campaigns that are in some ways opposed to each other.

Adidas went the route of a five-minute film that’s traditional, old-school, celeb-filled, Timothée Chalamet narrating, lots of stars—kind of old school but really, really well done. Mark Molloy directed it, Lola USA made it.

And then Nike had their hero spot, which is also wonderful. It felt almost like the viral internet in some ways. I think they’re both five-, six-minute films and I think they’d be battling it out. I go back and forth on which one is better.

Parker:​ Yeah, absolutely. Jon, who is your pick?

Jon:​ I like the Nike one too, but I’ll go with McDonald’s, which I thought was kind of interesting. A simple idea: the World Cup goes to McDonald’s, not that McDonald’s goes to the World Cup. They’ve got a bunch of soccer stars interacting in the restaurant. They have a giveaway that’s driving traffic. They have a special meal.

It was a very McDonald’s-y way to do it. There was a lot of fun creative that came out of it that they’ll be showing digitally throughout the tournament.

Howdy 🤠 Ad Age Insider host Parker here. This week, I asked Senior Tech Editor Garett Sloane to break down the implications of Publicis Groupe’s acquisition of LiveRamp, why this deal is a major moment for brand leaders, first steps for preparing your tech stack and whether or not LiveRamp clients need to jump ship.

Read the basics here

The topic is a bit in the industry weeds, so here are three major takeaways:

Subscribe to Ad Age Insider on Apple Podcasts, Spotify (above), Amazon Music/Audible and YouTube Music. Or watch Ad Age Insider on YouTube (below).

In this episode, Ad Age Insider host Parker Herren interviewed Ad Age’s Garett Sloane, senior technology and AI editor. Below, the transcript, which has been lightly edited for clarity.

Parker: If I’m a brand leader, the Publicis-LiveRamp deal might even feel like someone else’s problem, maybe my agency’s problem. So why is it important?

Garett: It just reaffirms a lot of the themes we’ve been talking about for a couple of years, but now that there’s AI in every ad tech product, it’s given new high stakes to the conversation about what data platforms you’re using, what data you’re training your models on and who has access to those models.

So AI ramped up that debate. Ramped up—that’s not a pun I meant to make. It’s raised the stakes of what you’re supposed to be doing as you’re developing your ad tech with AI in mind.

In the past, we were talking about machine learning and who your identity stack is, who your data collaboration platform holder is, what cookies you’re relying on. Now it’s the AI debate. But it’s still the same debate in a lot of ways.

You still need to have a lot of infrastructure in place around ad tech—that’s relevant no matter what you’re talking about.

Parker: So you’re saying that basically this is like a cold plunge, a wake-up call for inertia about set-it-and-forget-it ad tech partnerships like LiveRamp?

Garett: Yeah. From what I was gathering—and every time we’ve covered LiveRamp, and we have covered them extensively throughout the years, they seem like the off-the-shelf platform you go to if you don’t have tons of data on your own or you’re not building your own, you don’t have a first-party data infrastructure. It’s a platform you can go into and start playing with data in a way that maybe you didn’t have much access to. And that seemed like the big-box store of data collaboration in the marketing industry.

Now that it will be owned by Publicis, you may have different thoughts about working with them because they were supposed to be the neutral player in that space. And now some people are questioning the neutrality, obviously.

Parker: Not to rewind my original question completely, but if I’m on the brand side, is this my problem?

Garett: I think there’s even more interest from brands to have control over their data identity—and eventually AI platforms—in a way that they may not have had the same demand to do in the past because of just how important this stuff is going to be into the future.

This is a moment to think about owning your own ad tech, owning your own data. I do think you should have some—even if you do give it to an agency to manage for you—you should have some awareness of what you’re feeding on the agency side. You want some control, some ownership. So I do think brands should have some say here.

How agencies and rivals are responding to LiveRamp’s sale

Parker: As I have come to understand from your reporting—which has been prolific and amazing and really breaks it down for a small brain like mine—LiveRamp has become pretty deeply rooted in these data workflows across the industry. And Publicis, like you said, is promising that it will remain neutral after their acquisition closes.

But I am struggling a little bit to see how conflicts of interest between agencies and clients of other agency networks could be avoided. Are you hearing anything specifically about how competitors of Publicis are reacting to this?

Garett: Yeah, that was the first story we saw as the reaction to it—the direct rivals to Publicis who don’t want to be feeding its competitive intelligence in any way, no matter how much it says it’s neutral running LiveRamp going forward. It’s still the deciding factor on that company now with Publicis as the owner.

If you’re Omnicom or you’re a smaller agency that still has to compete for clients with Publicis, you’re considering how much you’re feeding its data collaboration platform going forward. We’ve seen that already.

John Wren, CEO of Omnicom, said they’re going to transition off of LiveRamp’s ID system, which they’ve had strong ties with because Omnicom now owns IPG. IPG owns Acxiom. Acxiom used to be united with LiveRamp in one company until LiveRamp spun out. So all of a sudden Omnicom owns this huge data infrastructure that was built on LiveRamp.

That’s, first of all, an interesting industry story to cover. Second of all, it’s interesting to see John Wren’s reaction to Publicis buying LiveRamp by saying they’re going to have a whole new identity system within the next year. The urgency to get that done has now become way more.

We’ve seen Horizon Media express similar concerns about non-neutrality in this data space now. So agencies have come out and said concerns, and we’re just seeing it all take shape.

Parker: So if I’m wondering what to do about my data infrastructure and I’m not a Publicis client, one option per Omnicom and others is to jump ship. Is that the only option, or are there first steps that I could be taking to keep LiveRamp on?

Garett: Yeah, that was feedback from consultants: “Let’s not panic here.” First of all, the deal won’t close for a little bit. And LiveRamp will continue.

And then also seeing it as an opportunity. Publicis and LiveRamp don’t want to lose everyone who works in that ecosystem. So you have leverage to renegotiate terms, build some transparency into the contract so that you know exactly how data is being used and how that neutrality is planned to go forward.

One thing that came up: Omnicom said that it made $50 million a year licensing data to LiveRamp. So companies that have good data assets were able to go into the LiveRamp marketplace and license their data there. Maybe you get better terms for your data licensing agreements now. There are different pressure points you might be able to twist and turn.

Parker: If I am looking to cut ties with LiveRamp, is there an alternative offering I can copy-paste my business to?

Garett: That’s what I’ve been looking for—who directly competes with LiveRamp that is copy-paste, like you said, and it’s never that simple in these data places because everyone has an overlapping service. Which makes this exercise a good one for auditing your own stack.

Review your stack and see where you rely on which partners for what. Do you use LiveRamp for this data collaboration part, but maybe get this data set through The Trade Desk when you’re buying programmatically? Maybe you’re using different parties for activation than you use for onboarding data.

So you can reflect and audit your own stack. Maybe there’s not a clean one-to-one for LiveRamp, but a set of different pieces that you’ll put in place that will wind up replacing different parts where you relied on LiveRamp. Maybe you’ll just continue to use LiveRamp for certain parts and not other parts.

But that gets us to the most interesting term of the month: composable ad tech. This is what everyone says: you want a composable ad tech stack, which is explained to me as a Lego set for your ad tech. So it’s all mix-and-match parts.

Why Publicis calls LiveRamp an AI play

Parker: You mentioned at the beginning of this conversation a couple of forward-looking ideas about how this conversation about data plays into the broader conversation about AI. And I believe that Publicis CEO Arthur Sadoun also said that this acquisition is less of a data play and more of an AI play.

Break down what that means for the layman. How is this an AI play?

Garett: I mean, it just sounds good—like, it’s for AI. Of course it is. It’s going to help AI do whatever it has to do, right? But there’s some truth to that.

Your AI agents—buying agents, your selling agents—these autonomous new tools within the programmatic landscape that are starting to learn media plans and activate those media plans using large language models and AI, those are going to be trained on data that’s made available through platforms like LiveRamp.

So if I’m a brand and I want to go into a platform with my data and sync it with another third party’s data that I’m licensing, you’re using that data and analyzing that data to come up with audiences you want to buy, market research you want to do or just any sort of media plan you’re making.

If that’s going to help your AI be smarter, then that’s where AI comes into it. So all this data could be used to train agents that will be better at their jobs than people eventually.

Parker: And is the idea that LiveRamp has the biggest collection of data that will help train that AI, or is there some quality of data that is why this is so valuable for training AI?

Said another way, if I am weaning myself off of LiveRamp data and I’m trying to train my AI in the same way, am I looking for the broadest data that I can find, or am I looking for specific data that Publicis has identified LiveRamp can provide them?

Garett: That’s where it gets tricky in terms of knowing exactly what they have access to or who has the—you know, Omnicom is licensing data through there. So if you’re able to use some sort of Omnicom version of data within LiveRamp and you go in as a client to train some sort of AI agent or help train one that you’re developing, there could be all sorts of data sets within LiveRamp that might be accessible.

It’s not the only place, though. There are a lot of different platforms that are making data collaboration possible. Cadent, who I had spoken to for one story, or Narrative I/O is another company I’ve been talking to about their data collaboration. Snowflake offers data collaboration. There are tons of others.

So there are places you can go to do this work that’s not just LiveRamp. They just seem to be a huge marketplace.

What not to panic about—and what to watch next

Parker: If I’m listening to this conversation and I’m freaking out about what’s going to happen to my data stack with this deal, what is one thing I shouldn’t freak out about?

Garett: What you should not freak out about is—there’s time, first thing. Everyone says this won’t close until at least the end of the year, and they’re not going to rock the boat or anything within the year. So you have a little time. That still doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be thinking ahead, but that’s one thing—having a little time.

And maybe I wouldn’t freak out about being too far behind. That’s always a good voice-of-reason comment, because people freak out that they’re missing out. FOMO—don’t have it. It doesn’t matter. Nobody’s up to speed yet. Everyone’s trying to get data, figure out how to use data, use it to develop AI in ways that will make them more efficient. Nobody’s got it figured out.

Parker: What is your biggest outstanding question about this whole situation—something that we can keep our eye on to see if it gets answered over the coming months as this news cycle continues to unravel?

Garett: First, how does LiveRamp stay neutral in this in the way they’re promising to? Who’s going to trust that, and does Publicis count on that being a trusted value?

So they may have something else in store for what they’re doing with it than what it does right now, because the whole marketplace may change with LiveRamp. Keeping an eye on how that changes.

And keeping an eye on it, it’s not just rivals of Publicis—think Omnicom or other agencies that might be thinking of new strategies. There are a lot of marketers and brands that are worried about: if that platform is not neutral, what do they do? So it’s not just the agencies to look out for.

Hi friends! It’s Parker, the host of Ad Age Insider 👋 In recent episodes, my colleagues have pulled apart what AI actually means for marketers—the strategy, the fear, the talent questions that have been developing across the industry. This week, I went back through the tape and pulled the clips worth rewinding.

From what consumers are actually scared of, to worst-case brand scenarios and the new talent pipeline problem, this supercut has a lot of lessons to teach. Give it a listen.

Take a listen to the roundup (above), and subscribe to Ad Age Insider on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music/Audible and YouTube Music. Or watch Ad Age Insider on YouTube or read some key quotes from the episode (below).

Ep. 22: Your AI ad playbook: red flags, hard lessons and brand wins

“Manipulation is the biggest fear of consumers—being manipulated to thinking something is real when it’s not. And right now it’s still early in what that manipulation can look like.” —Asa Hiken, tech reporter, Ad Age

Ep. 17: Decoding 2026 hype vs. reality for marketers

“Because ultimately everyone’s pulling from the same small pool of AI tools, how are you using those tools to actually add value? When everyone’s using the same tools and doing the same thing, how can you be smart about this and do it in a way that differentiates yourself?” —E.J. Schultz, news editor, Ad Age

Ep. 28: ‘Fruit Love Island’ brand lessons: skip this viral trend

“Just because something is popular in the AI space and the kids are playing with it doesn’t mean that you have a place there. You probably could get some pushback if you’re not a brand that it would make sense to do that.” —Gillian Follett, social media and influencer trends reporter, Ad Age

Ep. 31: What’s driving marketing impact: lessons from award-winning campaigns

“Pure AI creations are, I think, still a few months out from being truly convincing.” —Tim Nudd, Creativity editor, Ad Age

Ep. 32: Agency hiring in the AI era: What grads need now

“If you talk to agency leaders, they would prefer that [entry-level talent] was learning AI at school. But there are some universities that I’m hearing are still very much against even allowing their students to use AI tools in the classroom. And I think that’s short sighted because industry leaders want them to have that training.” —Lindsay Rittenhouse, senior agency reporter, Ad Age

If you’re reading this, I’m glad I caught you before you unplug for the long weekend! It’s Parker, the host of Ad Age Insider. You clearly have your priorities straight if reading this newsletter made your list of holiday activities 🙌

So as a thank you, I’ve scoured the Ad Age Insider archives for some of my favorite words of wisdom for brand leaders. In recent months, my colleagues have shared insights on why the power of the idea is more important than ever in an AI-saturated market, what Gen Z brand loyalty actually requires from marketers, what questions every CMO should be asking their agency right now and more.

Take a listen to the roundup (above), and subscribe to Ad Age Insider on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music/Audible and YouTube Music. Or watch Ad Age Insider on YouTube or read some key quotes from the episode (below). You can even listen to all the episodes those quotes are from, if you have ~

Ep. 31: What’s driving marketing impact: lessons from award-winning campaigns

“Most CMOs lately have been moving away from creativity. The power of the idea is just as important or more important than ever. When AI can create uniformly perfect imagery for everybody, the idea is what stands out.” —Tim Nudd, Creativity editor, Ad Age

Ep. 34: Winning Gen Z brand loyalty—quality, service and community

“Don’t lie. Gen Z will call out false quality claims quickly—and publicly.” —Erika Wheless, consumer culture and brand behavior reporter, Ad Age

Ep. 17: Decoding 2026 hype vs. reality for marketers

“We’re moving from the theoretical curiosity phase into the implementation phase [of AI]. The CEO is looking over their shoulder. Where’s the efficiency in my marketing department?” —E.J. Schultz, news editor, Ad Age

Ep. 24: How to win new business in 2026

“Clients are looking for agencies to be even more of a partner … that’s closer to the original idea of what ad agencies were supposed to be.” —Brian Bonilla, senior agency reporter, Ad Age

Ep. 23: What are media rebates? Agency transparency in the hot seat

“You should be making it explicitly clear whether you’re opting in or opting out of having incentives with media deals. But then you should also be asking: What kinds of money are we getting back? Are we getting inventory back? Let’s double-check that.” —Ewan Larkin, agency reporter, Ad Age

Ep. 25: How to win the Ad Age A-List

“I think there’s this misnomer, particularly with the advent of AI, that the ad industry is a declining industry. It’s not growing leaps and bounds like it was when I first started back in the dark ages, but I do think that it’s still a very vibrant, very exciting and cool place to be.” —Judy Pollack, executive editor, Ad Age

Hiya 👋 Ad Age Insider host Parker here. This week, I asked my fellow reporter Erika Wheless to dig deeper into the traits Gen Z values most from brands, the things that make them want to stick up for a favorite product in the comments when a dupe is getting the spotlight 🫣 We covered the basics in this week’s One Thing to Know newsletter, but Erika breaks down strategies brands are implementing around product quality, marketer missteps, brand loyalty tips and more.

Here are three highlights from our convo, which you can also listen to, watch or read in full below.

Subscribe to Ad Age Insider on Apple Podcasts, Spotify (above), Amazon Music/Audible and YouTube Music. Or watch Ad Age Insider on YouTube (below).

In this episode, Ad Age Insider host Parker Herren interviewed Ad Age’s Erika Wheless, consumer culture and brand behavior reporter. Below, the transcript, which has been lightly edited for clarity.

Gen Z’s economic reality and why it matters for brand loyalty

Parker: Walk me through the economic setting in which we’re discussing spending, and how the headspace Gen Z is in right now financially might be relevant to the conversation we’re going to be having on brand loyalty.

Erika: Gen Z are early in their careers, so they don’t have the same level of disposable income as older generations. But they definitely have it. They’re very judicious about what they’re spending that on.

And even more so because it’s no surprise to anybody that when gas is over $4 a gallon, you’re really making some life decisions now. So we’ve got the high gas prices, general economic uncertainty of when that will end and also this general feeling of resentment from Gen Z.

Edelman has a trust survey that they put out every year, and they found that it was almost 60% of Gen Zers who have this feeling of grievance—that the system does not favor them, institutions are working against them. We talk about people voting with their feet—now it’s voting with their wallets, for sure.

Parker: You’ve published a couple of articles about the biggest influences on Gen Z brand loyalty, the top being product quality. Before we even get into the data on that, what led you to seek out this info on what Gen Z is looking to put their money on?

Erika: This actually was born out of my friends at Morning Consult, which tracks a lot of brands. They have a big database and shared a look at what brands Gen Z deem luxurious now—not ranking luxury brands; it’s which brands feel luxurious to Gen Z.

So that was our starting point: what feels luxurious. But then, when we actually dug into it, why do these brands feel luxurious to Gen Z? What are aspects or qualities of the products that make Gen Z say they want to spend money on them?

It was very interesting to see that brands feel luxurious but are still in budget—Nike, Coach, Gucci, Lululemon—these were some that were in there. What was really interesting was to note that in that top 10, it was not all luxury brands. Nike, Lululemon, Adidas, the Jordan line—Jordan or Air Jordan—and Ralph Lauren, those were all in the top 10. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t consider those luxury brands. But to Gen Z, they have that feeling of something a little more elevated. You’re looking cool if you’ve got your Nike sweats on and your Lululemon top.

What Gen Z is really prioritizing—product quality or dupes

Parker: I may be an old geezer, but I thought Gen Z was more into dupes and—maybe Shein is more of a millennial thing. But I did not equate Gen Z with seeking out quality. Product quality is their top factor in brand loyalty, per Morning Consult’s data. What did you find out in your reporting that led you to understand that my assumption might not be the case?

Erika: Yeah, I also had this notion as well. And it makes sense—again, not as much disposable income as other generations—so maybe they’re not as brand loyal, they’re trading down or trading up depending on what they’re looking at.

But product quality—on a scale of 1 to 5, around 80% gave it a 4 or 5. And I think it’s one of those things where Gen Z is not a monolith. The things that are important to one are not important to another.

So maybe you are OK with having the Fenty Beauty mascara and buying the L’Oréal at the drugstore. Or maybe that’s something you really care about. Maybe you’re looking at your face all day and you’re willing to splurge on that.

I think it just comes down to maybe you’re OK with Shein for Coachella, or the bachelorette trip, or the themed birthday party. But if you need a new suitcase or new running shoes, and you are a traveler or a runner, that’s something where you’re willing to spend more.

Parker: When we are saying “product quality,” what do you mean?

What ‘quality’ means to Gen Z

Erika: There are a couple of factors. Some things can be literally the quality of what you’re buying. So a Coach bag is a good example. This is a leather bag. Leather, if you take care of it, can last many, many years. And they talk about it as an investment piece. It might be a little more expensive, but again, you’re going to have it for years.

My mom has bags that she’s had for 30-plus years because she takes care of them.

It can also be the quality in terms of the stitching of something—how something is put together, how it is made. Creator Joe Ng is the CEO of Shift Fashion Group, and he’s on TikTok. I love to watch his stuff, where he’ll literally cut apart a Canada Goose jacket and lay it out and be like, “All right, this is made from this material. They’ve done a double-lock stitching.” He gets very technical into how a brand has done this on the neck—“OK, that’s not going to wear well over time.”

Everybody loves when he’s like, “This is a $500 T-shirt. You do not need to buy this because it’s not well-made.” So it can literally be how it is put together that can be part of that quality.

Also, customer service. Good customer service is not something that brands always have front and center in an ad, but there are brands that I know that I recommend to people because they have great customer service. If it doesn’t work—if it breaks—let them know, they’ll replace it.

Parker: That’s a really interesting point you bring up with influencer content. I’m always looking up whether I’m paying for a logo or for an actual good-quality product.

This is where we can start talking more about what brands are doing to actually showcase that they are more than a logo and that they have quality products. Do you have any examples of brands that have successfully done some sort of marketing to signal to consumers that they are a seller of high-quality products?

How brands are signaling quality

Erika: I think there are a couple. My personal favorite is Patagonia. I think they have done a really good job. They show their products in action. I talked to Gin Ando, their communications guy over there, and I did not realize this, but now that I know it, I can tell it in the pictures.

He said the photos they post on social media—that’s old stuff. Those are people who have had their climbing pants or ski jackets for years.

He said Patagonia is not going to inundate you with the newest season, all their new stuff. They love to show people who have been wearing products for years, or who have a Patagonia as a staple in their backpack.

That’s one way to show quality: this lasts over time.

And then another one is Milani Cosmetics. Because it’s a mass beauty brand—it’s in your CVS, Walmart or Target—you can’t try it. For those who are not familiar, if you go into a Sephora or an Ulta, they have testers. You can take a swatch of lipstick and try it on your hand to see what that color looks like on you. You can’t do that in a CVS. So how do you show that you’re picking the right color?

They have redone their packaging to be more literally transparent, so it’s clear. But also, their marketing has talked a lot about what’s in it. They actually reformulated a best-selling blush to add skincare into it because, since the pandemic, skincare has become a very integral part of makeup.

Parker: You shouldn’t test products in CVS. But go to my CVS and you’ll see people do test products in CVS.

Affordable luxury surprises: Walmart, Target and Amazon

Parker: You mentioned earlier that among the data you collected was a list of brands that Gen Z considers affordable luxury brands. You already mentioned the top five. But there are 25 in total on that list.

Out of all the brands on that list, Erika, what did you find most surprising, or what were your shock takeaways from that list of brands?

Erika: Yeah, I’m glad you asked this. No. 14 was Walmart, which I was very surprised to see. No. 22 was Target. No. 24, Amazon was on there. So these big, big-box retailers—that’s truly not luxury.

If I hazard a guess on this—this is just me thinking out loud—I would wonder if it has to do with surprise at what these brands sometimes offer. I think we’ve all been in a situation where you see someone’s bag and think it’s great, and they’re like, “Thank you, it’s from Target.” We love when that happens.

Or same thing, “I love your dress, it looks great.” “Yeah, it’s Walmart, can you believe?” So I wonder if it’s a little bit of surprise at the look or feel of a product that comes from one of these big-box retailers, and people are just shocked that it is from there. Maybe that’s what it is.

Luxury, resale and sustainability as signals of quality

Parker: For the actual luxury brands on the list—including Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Coach—what are they doing? Are they just assumed to be luxury and that’s all it takes for Gen Z to like them? Is there anything specific that might set them apart from the brands we just mentioned in this brand loyalty convo?

Erika: You could argue, yes, that the price tag is a part of that. And I’m sure that there are people out there who may also say you’re just paying for that Louis Vuitton brown print, or it’s not that great a bag.

Again, there’s another creator—he goes by Tanner Leatherstein on TikTok, and he is known for taking apart luxury bags and rating them.

So I think within luxury, it can depend. Some of them do very well—showing the behind-the-scenes of how the bag is made. Watching somebody hand-stitch a bag together—that’s really cool. To know somebody put their hands on this and put it together.

We’ve also seen that secondhand can be a big part of this. I know that luxury brands perhaps do not tout this as much as other brands, but many of them have a re-loved or pre-loved cycle that they go through. They clean it up and resell it. You get it at a lower price. So that’s nice, good for the environment, putting the bag back out into circulation.

Parker: Yes, and I believe sustainability was on your list of things that Gen Z looks for in brands.

Erika: That’s right. Not as high as I would have originally thought before doing this. I know we always think about Gen Z as really big on the environment, but that’s a great way to show there is a way to tap into that, even as a luxury brand, with reselling options.

And that shows quality in itself. If you get something secondhand, and it looks great.

It didn’t make it into the story, but I know that New Balance does this as well. They have a secondary website. It’s New Balance shoes sold at a slight discount because there’s some imperfection in them. I have bought several pairs of shoes from them. I can’t tell.

Cautionary tales: Greenwashing and quality claims that backfire

Parker: Do you have any cautionary tales from the reporting you’ve done—any case studies that went wrong or words of warning from sources about how efforts in product quality marketing might not go the way you plan?

Erika: Don’t lie. It just comes down to: don’t lie about it.

Gen Z, as we all know, are savvy consumers and they know how to dig into any claims, especially around sustainability. If you’re trying to greenwash, you can really get called out for that. I did have a couple of sources who said that if you are not in it—if it is not quality and you know that—just don’t mention it. Don’t say anything about it because false claims about quality will be called out and called out quickly, and knowing Gen Z, probably pretty publicly as well.

One example of where it went wrong—coming back to Coach, actually—they released a new line called Coachtopia leather. It was supposed to be sustainable leather. And Tanner Leatherstein, that TikTok guy, looked at it, and he normally really loves Coach, but he did several tests on the leather and said it was essentially plastic; the backing was not real leather, it was leftover leather shavings. So this is not sustainable at all. He said, “This feels very greenwashed.” And he was frankly really surprised, because a traditional leather Coach bag is made really well.

@tanner.leathersteinAlthough there's potential, I'm keeping my eyes peeled for more mature improvements in presentation, description, and pricing on Coachtopia bags... DISCLAIMER: This is an UNSPONSORED review. I purchased all of these products myself and am not affiliated with the brand mentioned in any way. All statements and expressions made about the products are solely the opinion of Tanner Leatherstein and are not meant to be conclusive or definitive. The purpose of this video is for informational and educational purposes only. We recommend that as a consumer, you exercise your due diligence and research on the products before adopting the opinion of Tanner Leatherstein. #coachtopia #sustainablefashion #coach #coachbag #coachbags #coachbagoriginal #recycledfashion #recycledmaterials #tannerleatherstein #leatherexpert #bagtok #luxurytok #leathertok #fashion #luxuryfashion #fashionreview #leather

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So again, greenwashing just—he was like, this doesn’t pass the sniff test.

We’ve also seen it go the other way, where it went well. The Bogg Bag folks—I appreciate that their CEO was like, “I would love to take on these dupes head-on.” They get a big wave of them in the summer, and she said she’d love to put their bags side-by-side and show why theirs is better.

They do not—they don’t want to give the dupes airtime. But they make a quality product and have really good customer service. When you stand behind your product and make something good, your consumers will stand behind it too.

She mentioned that she had seen a “this or that” video on TikTok, and I believe it was between a real Bogg Bag and then a dupe. The video picked the dupe. And there were people in the comments who are Bogg Bag customers who said it was wrong, Bogg Bag was better, they’d had theirs for several years.

Your consumers will come in and proselytize for your brand, too, if it’s really good.

@_brittanymwBOGG BAG VS DUPE #boggbag #boggbags #boggbagforever #temuhaul #temufinds #boggbagdupe #splurgeorsave

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Customer service, return policies and chatbots

Parker: You could also probably apply some of these tactics to brands that don’t necessarily sell high-quality products. I’m thinking of Costco. I love that I can buy something, find out that it sucks, and I can return anything to Costco. When you were talking about loyalty—I feel a little less pressed when I’m in the scrum of Costco trying to get out of there, and I see something, it doesn’t have to be perfect. If I find out it’s not, I just pop back in there and give it back.

Erika: Exactly. Yeah, I’m a big fan, I’m a big reader of the return policy on things. I have zero problem dropping several hundred dollars on clothes or shoes, or—I’m trying to find a new rug for my dining room, and I’ve bought three rugs. I don’t care, because two of them are going to go back because the companies I bought from have really good return policies. That can be part of my buying decision as well, for sure.

Parker: Yeah, don’t get me started on rugs.

What is your biggest outstanding question in this story? Is there anything unanswered that we can keep an eye on, anything interesting that could emerge over time in this conversation?

Erika: I have a real answer and then my glib answer.

My real question that I have outstanding on this actually is the customer service side of things. I feel like this is the underground thing that brands don’t talk about, but you hear about it all the time from friends or family who’ve bought something.

What comes to mind is that there’s a great Reddit thread about “buy it once.” So it’s people who are looking for a new vacuum cleaner or a set of pots and pans. “Buy once, cry once” is the saying—you might be paying more, but it will last you a really long time, or they have really good customer service. I have definitely seen that come up on there.

Maybe brands don’t say it in advertising, but you get to their website, and they have free shipping over a certain price. I just think it’s funny that’s not in those upper-funnel marketing moments. That’s just for when you’re on the website. If I knew that it was free shipping, maybe I would go ahead and skip over the other guy and go straight to you because I know that I’m going to get free shipping on something.

So that would be my outstanding answer. It would be interesting to see more around customer service, especially now when I think the feeling of trust is eroding among consumers, and when everybody—not just Gen Z, but everybody—is worried about their budget. Inflation shot up the most it has in many years last month. People are pinching pennies.

My glib answer to this is, why don’t the airlines do a better job about this? But that is an entirely separate podcast that I could rant about—airlines and just being not good at customer service.

Parker: Yeah, I actually was just on a Delta flight this week, and I was going to say that in your comments about customer service—be wary of your AI customer service chatbots. Because, girl, me and this Delta bot were back and forth, and I exchanged serious words with that chatbot. We got nowhere.

OK, my last question for you: Is there a wrong takeaway from everything we’ve discussed? Something that might lead to disaster if a listener implements it carelessly?

Erika: Don’t feel like you have to be talking about quality in the quality space if you can’t stand behind it. It’s not worth the blowback.

Howdy 🤠 Ad Age Insider host Parker here. This week, I called upon my colleague Brandon Doerrer, brave leader of our media coverage, to break down this year’s trends impacting the TV upfronts. We get into the top questions to look out for from upfront week presenters including Disney, Netflix and Amazon, and how CMOs can ensure greater transparency in their investment strategy.

Here are three highlights from our convo, which you can also listen to, watch or read in full below.

Subscribe to Ad Age Insider on Apple Podcasts, Spotify (above), Amazon Music/Audible and YouTube Music. Or watch Ad Age Insider on YouTube (below).

In this episode, Ad Age Insider host Parker Herren interviewed Ad Age’s Brandon Doerrer, creativity and media innovation reporter. Below, the transcript, which has been lightly edited for clarity.

Parker: Are you so thrilled and excited that next week is finally the TV upfronts?

Brandon: I am—it’s going to be a lot of work. I know you’ve talked about it in the past, having done this yourself many times, it is a lot of work. And you kind of finish that week feeling pretty ragged. But this will be my first year actually covering the whole thing, attending all of the major presentations. When I’ve done some of them in the past, they’ve been a lot of fun, actually. So I’m not looking forward to how tired I will be, but I am actually looking forward to going.

Parker: Yes, getting your steps in, finding random coffee shops to chill in between shows, all of that fun stuff.

As you’ve been talking to media buyers and sales leaders about the upfront market this year, what’s stacking up to be different about this one compared to last year?

Measurement, outcomes and agentic media buying

Brandon: I have a few trends in mind. And actually, since you covered this last year, maybe you can even talk a little bit about how what I’m talking about this year is different from what you saw last year.

Parker: A year in media is maybe 10 years. It’s like dog years.

Brandon: Yeah. So, measurement is going to be a big conversation, but specifically outcomes-focused measurement. This is not a brand-new trend, but the economy is still in flux. Marketing budgets are still being pretty heavily scrutinized. And TV—and the very idea of making upfront commitments to TV—is one of the first things that gets put on the chopping block when marketing budgets get reviewed and need to be shrunk down.

So publishers have been pretty transparent in telling me this year that the battle is not just with each other, but with those digital performance channels, such as Google and Meta. So part of this conversation about outcomes-focused measurement is to give the upfronts a little bit more relevance in that battle.

Outcomes-based measurement is being pointed to as a solution, but it is far more complicated than various presenters are going to make it seem next week. All of these things exist within walled gardens. If you want to try to compare the performance of one thing to the other, and then even within these specific companies, teams do not always communicate super well.

So one team will be saying, “Yeah, your campaign’s killing, it’s doing super well.” And then you look at the numbers and you’re like, “It’s not actually.”

Parker: Drag them. Name names.

Brandon: All of them—the whole industry.

On the tech front, increasingly, we are seeing the upfront be more and more about tech. We’re seeing a lot of agentic media buying, selling, strategy and planning tech come out.

We’ve seen a couple of publishers launch new offerings in this regard. I reported last week that Disney is part of an agentic media buying test with Magnite. Amazon is going to be talking about its Ads Agent, which it launched last November. NBCU has also been talking since early this year about agentic media buying and selling tests it’s been a part of.

I’m expecting there to be a decent amount of chatter about that this year. Agentic media buying is kind of in a weird place where most people think it’s pretty overhyped in terms of what it’s actually capable of doing without having a human check the work all the time. But I’m expecting that to be talked about a lot this year.

Parker: What’s so interesting is, on measurement and agentic AI buying—it all always boils down to who’s going to be the easiest to work with and who’s just going to tell me in straight-up numbers that I can give to our CFO or CEO that it’s working.

And it always seems the companies that do that the best are always one step ahead.

TikTok-ification of streaming and leadership changes

Brandon: reads So Peacock and Disney+ are getting vertical video feeds, sharing and community features. It makes me wonder how that interacts. Do we start to see social media trends and microdramas—does that become a thing that publishers talk about at the upfront if they are social media-ifying their streaming apps?

Parker: On the front of vertical video and microdramas, one could say there is an amazing episode of the Ad Age Insider podcast that you could go back and find featuring myself and Brandon talking about that very subject. So you’ll want to listen to that.

Brandon, I’m curious, as you’ve been talking to media buyers and sellers, what is the vibe? I feel like often I find a bit of doom and gloom ahead of the upfronts—“TV is dead, what are we even doing?” What are you hearing this year is the temperature of the room going into the upfronts?

Brandon: Yeah, I mean, it depends on who you talk to. When I talk to some of the more digital performance-oriented agencies and buyers, there is very much the question of what they’ll actually get out of this. Will the upfronts actually address their needs?

I think you actually summed it up perfectly. The TV sizzles and the new TV shows—I don’t care. How are sellers going to, at the end of the day, give buyers the best numbers and be the easiest to work with on the tech front, on the measurement front?

Parker: You mentioned before that you have been to a couple of pre-upfront-week upfronts. I believe you’ve been to AMC Networks’ and Paramount’s upfronts. What did you take away from those presentations? Is there anything we can learn about how media companies might be presenting themselves this year, how they’re confronting some of these concerns that we’ve mentioned?

Early signals from AMC Networks and Paramount

Brandon: I will say those two events are different from what you are going to get next week—hence why they’re kind of not part of next week. AMC is in a unique position where it has actively tried to distance itself from the way that the other upfronts are becoming more about tech and measurement. AMC’s was a content showcase. It was a tight, hour-long presentation.

Parker: Gorgeous.

Brandon: Yeah, it’s lovely. It’s nice to have all the celebrities sitting with you. Not at the press table, though. Celebrities don’t sit at the press table.

Parker: Well, how many millions are you paying them? Then we’ll see if we can get a celebrity there.

Brandon: That’s actually a really good point.

AMC has a separate tech breakfast earlier in the year, so you don’t quite see those two things blend in the same way that you will next week.

Paramount—I believe this is the first time that Paramount has opened their presentations to us. You haven’t been to a Paramount upfront?

Parker: I have not. Ever since they took themselves off the upfront week, I have never been invited.

Brandon: Yeah, I was expecting it to be more different from the other upfront presentations. Paramount has, instead of just one presentation, a handful of dinners that they cater to specific agencies that they invite. So it was kind of the same as other upfront presentations I’ve been to—content was still a really big part of it, but they did have some tech people come on and talk about new offerings, and CTV was a big part of the conversation as well.

I’d say the biggest difference, though, is that that conversation is very tailored to the agency that’s in the room. So when Jay gets on stage, he is referencing specific pieces of tech that this agency owns and his experience and relationships. He’s calling people out by name that he’s worked with in the past.

Parker: Yes, you’re referencing Jay Askinasi, the new ad chief of Paramount.

Brandon: Next week, I don’t think that presentations are actually going to look all that different this year. I still think there’s going to be big conversation about live sports and exclusivity rights, the new TV shows, celebrities and jokes that may or may not land.

What to watch for at NBCU, Amazon, Disney, Netflix, Warner Bros. Discovery

Parker: So now I want to go through some presenters that are going to be on stage next week during the TV upfronts. I want to hear any points of interest from you, any top-of-mind questions that you might have or questions that they might need to be answering for buyers to make them really feel confident in them.

The first presenter that we’ll have next week during the upfronts is NBCUniversal.

Brandon: NBCU has been more active than other publishers in pushing agentic media. That’s something that distinguishes them from other presenters. They have tech that can do the buying and the selling, they’ve done tests and it’s ready. Maybe not for sale yet, but they have proven that it works.

Again, I think any buyer should be skeptical about that tech and their ability to just handle spend and spend it properly. When I did the story on agentic media buying at the upfronts, someone from Wpromote told me that one thing this tech is still really bad at is quality assurance. Checking itself before it actually says it’s done to make sure that it has done everything correctly and in accordance with the guidelines that you have given it. Still pretty bad at that.

Parker: Let’s go to Amazon.

Brandon: Amazon’s DSP is continuing to grow. They are getting access to inventory from all of these different publishers. Netflix is a part of it now. The authenticated graph is still a really enticing way, I think, for buyers to track audiences.

If you’re going to have walled gardens inside one of these companies, Amazon is a place where buyers tend to not mind it so much because you have content, commerce, Prime Video, the authenticated graph and the Ads Agent, and there’s just so much data inside that platform.

The DSP can access Netflix inventory and a variety of inventory from other publishers too. So I think there’s a lot of excitement about Amazon.

Amazon has always been a company that I think doesn’t fit super neatly into the idea of the upfronts. It’s kind of funny to me when they lean on some of the same tropes that other presenters do, because I’m just like, you don’t have to do that. You’re a very different thing.

Parker: Let’s skip over to Disney. What’s outstanding about Disney right now that we should have our eyes on?

Brandon: The Super Bowl.

Parker: Their first one in quite a while, so it’ll be interesting to see what they are bringing to it.

Brandon: Yes, Disney is asking for $10 million for the Super Bowl. That’s a lot of money. So I think it’ll be interesting what sort of content or programming or shows they come up with, whether it be on ESPN or Disney+ or other platforms, ahead of the show.

And Disney+ is also leaning into this social media, vertical video-ification with the Disney+ app.

Parker: Yeah, it’ll be interesting. They had that big deal with OpenAI and Sora to have an AI-generated hub on Disney+. And obviously, with the sunset of Sora, that deal is out the window. So it’ll be interesting if they have more creative-oriented AI solutions coming out, since clearly that was of interest at one point.

Parker: This one writes itself, but Warner Bros. Discovery. What questions might someone have about Warner Bros. Discovery right now?

Brandon: No, no, I don’t have any questions.

I think that this deal with Paramount will be particularly interesting. These are two massive companies. This would be a massive joining of content and intellectual properties and just the sheer amount that you could buy against. I think it’s going to be interesting for buyers and something that they may have on their mind.

Parker: And probably the many pains of a transition that comes before that. They’ve only recently just come out of that, and you can find many Q&As with John Steinlauf, their previous ad chief, with myself and others about how unpleasant it was selling Discovery as it was being merged with Warner Bros. And now here we are again.

Brandon: Here we are again. What is old is new again. And I mean, I don’t know if this is going to come up. Paramount didn’t really say anything about it at their dinner.

Parker: Well, it’s interesting—if you listen to our Marketer’s Brief podcast, which you should, Warner Bros. Discovery Ads has been a sponsor and their ad reads something like a man saying something, “You may have heard lots of changes at Warner Bros. Discovery, but…” So they may not be as closed off to, at least, as you said, some jokes about it. Answers, perhaps not.

Brandon: Yes, that is a good point. References, perhaps.

Parker: So, Netflix. Do you think they have officially arrived with their ads business, or are they still trying to prove themselves around the block?

Brandon: I think they’ve arrived. They have huge projections for their ad growth this year. They are coming up with cool, innovative ways to get involved and sponsor a lot of great IP that they are collecting. Yeah, I’d say it’s here.

Who has leverage in this year’s upfronts

Parker: Alright, I have a couple of wrap-up questions for you. As you’ve talked to buyers, which of those companies that we’ve mentioned do you think has the most leverage this year with buyers?

Brandon: I think Disney, with the Super Bowl, is in a great spot. I think Netflix, like we were just talking about, is in a great spot—a lot of great IP, business growing super fast. Amazon is in a great spot with having so many different things within its walls that you can leverage when you make these commitments.

Parker: And are there any that you think really have something to prove this year?

Brandon: We haven’t talked about them much. TelevisaUnivision having a new ad sales chief a week before probably does not bode super well. I think they will have to address what is going on, why they are making these changes and what they are trying to fix at the last minute, if they are trying to make fixes.

Why CMOs should stay close to upfront negotiations

Parker: My last question for you, Brandon: If I’m a CMO and I’m listening to this podcast thinking, “Sure, I’m looking forward to a nice dinner next week, but for the most part, everything they’ve been talking about is something for my agency to worry about.” What do you think is the most critical thing for a CMO to know about the upfronts this year?

Brandon: Yeah, I just wrote a piece about transparency and how the transparency conversation is translating to upfront negotiations. One of the big takeaways that I got speaking both to in-house media leads and consultancies is that it is really important to have your in-house media strategists involved in these conversations—not just at the event, but actually involved in the negotiations themselves.

I spoke with a consultant who used to be on the brand and agency side, and he’s said that’s a very different thing—just being there versus being in the conversations. Letting procurement handle it alone, they do not necessarily have great insight into—they can ask about principal buying; they don’t necessarily know how it affects the media strategy.

So I’ve been hearing that it’s going to be really, really important to have your in-house media team actually involved in the negotiations this year, so you know what your agency’s doing, you know what they’re up to.

Parker: Yes. Hold those feet to the fire. Make sure you’re getting what’s best for you and not what’s best for your agency.

Hi 👋 It’s Parker, the host of Ad Age Insider. This week, I talked to my colleague Lindsay Rittenhouse about the major challenges AI has made for getting an entry-level jobs in advertising, including the skills young talent should have on their resumes to stand out. Below are three highlights from our convo, which you can listen to, watch or read in full below.

What are your top tips for getting started in advertising right now? Let’s collect some resources in the comments!

Subscribe to Ad Age Insider on Apple Podcasts, Spotify (above), Amazon Music/Audible and YouTube Music. Or watch Ad Age Insider on YouTube (below).

In this episode, Ad Age Insider host Parker Herren interviewed Ad Age’s Lindsay Rittenhouse, senior agency reporter. Below, the transcript, which has been lightly edited for clarity.

Parker: You’ve come on Ad Age Insider a couple of times, but specifically, you guested on an episode from last November about the very topic that we’re checking back in on today: what the rapid growth of AI means for entry-level roles and paths to breaking into the ad industry.

Before we recorded this, I was listening back to that episode, and I was really fascinated by how much has changed in what leaders are doing to approach this topic, but also how little has changed in the uncertainty.

As you’ve been following this conversation, what are the biggest changes in what you’re discussing now with industry leaders versus six months ago?

Lindsay: This is actually why I wanted to do this story, and I feel like this conversation will just keep evolving. So I imagine we’ll be having another conversation in six months to a year, and it will be completely different.

What’s changed since last time is that there was a lot of figuring out going on last time. I couldn’t find too many agencies that had really figured out what new entry-level positions looked like in the industry. There was a lot of discussing the challenges and that AI is taking over some responsibilities.

But now, I talked to 18 different agency leaders and hiring managers, and they have figured out some roles. They’re finding places and new titles that are coming up that I did not hear about last year—apprenticeships, shadowing. So there are new things, and it feels like agencies are at least experimenting and finding success.

Are agencies really scaling back junior hiring?

Parker: And we’re going to dig into all of those things in just a minute. I wanted to level set before we get there. Generally, the thread through all of your reporting is that there is an air of anxiety. People are worried about what AI means for the changes that we’re seeing to entry points into the industry.

We’re talking here at the end of April; this will publish at the beginning of May—graduation season is upon us. And so this is very top of mind. How justified is that anxiety? Are we seeing a scale-back on entry-level opportunities in advertising?

Lindsay: The short answer is yes. I won’t gloss over it. It’s tough out there. It’s a tough market.

There was a report that came out last August, which found that 57% of agencies had slowed down or reduced entry-level hiring. That is the reality. But there are opportunities out there. So I wouldn’t say get discouraged—just keep trying.

And I wrote another story in which agency leaders lend their advice on how to land some of these new jobs. So, be persistent and look for the opportunities.

Parker: Give me a vibe check: as you’ve talked to industry leaders about this topic, are you hearing optimism about the continued evolution? Anxiety? Doom and gloom? How are people feeling about the current state of this new talent pipeline?

Lindsay: It’s a mix. It definitely depends on who you’re talking to. I talked to some agency leaders as I was asking around about what the new jobs look like and whether they are hiring juniors. I got some responses back that were, “No.” Or I talked to some hiring leaders about talent specifically, and they were disappointed by seeing a lot of applications that clearly were relying too heavily on AI to fill them out—things like that.

But then I talked to some leaders who are really optimistic, who are seeing this new wave of talent as early AI adopters. They have tools at their fingertips that, when you think about other really revolutionary periods in the ad industry—the dot-com boom, the rise of digital advertising—not everyone had access to the tools to make a website. But everyone has access to these AI tools.

And so I think you’re seeing a lot of emerging talent that is trying these things out, if they’re hungry and want to be in advertising. They’re not fearful of AI; they are trying to adopt it. And so I think it’s inspiring and it’s exciting for some agency leaders.

How specific junior roles are changing because of AI and new opportunities

Parker: Give me an example of tasks or jobs that might have been assigned to a fresh-from-college agency employee two or three years ago that are now just totally automated.

Lindsay: Jeremy Heilpern, CEO and founder of independent agency Ammunition, gave me the example that they don’t need account coordinators anymore. Those jobs were largely to set meetings, attend those meetings and take notes—that reporting aspect. A lot of those tedious tasks that interns were given, those things are going away.

Parker: And did he give you an example of what they’re making that’s new that those roles might be transitioned into moving forward?

Lindsay: He did. Instead of just saying, “OK, well, we’re not going to hire interns,” he said, “No, we’re going to bring them on, and we’re going to take them on as project coordinators.” That’s organizing resources for a project, tracking progress against deadlines—things you still need human oversight for.

And his thinking was that a senior leader will always need to know how a project is put together. So these are roles, these are fundamental parts of advertising, that still should be taught to entry-level talent. So that’s a shift that I saw.

Parker: Are there any totally new roles that are being made specifically for entry-level?

Lindsay: I don’t know if this is entirely new, because Andrew Graff at Allen & Gerritsen said that they’ve had this for a little while, but more agencies I’m hearing are adopting apprenticeships over internships.

An intern would come in and, like I just said, they would take over some of those reporting and tedious tasks that no one wants to do, that AI is now taking over. Apprenticeships are when somebody comes in, and they get access to one-on-one training with different leaders.

And a lot of times with those apprenticeships, you can move around from creative to strategy and sit in on different leadership meetings. Then you’re understanding and learning from the leaders, and you’re getting insight into client relationships and high-level things while learning the ad business.

A lot of these agencies are hiring people right out of those apprenticeships, and they get a better sense of where these people should be placed. They say it’s a really great opportunity just for young talent to come in and learn.

Parker: So kind of like an all-you-can-eat buffet of what you might do at an agency. And then I also imagine that might scale you up to the next phase after what had been traditionally thought of as entry level. Is that getting entry-level talent into more advanced roles more quickly, or is it changing the pipeline in any way?

Lindsay: Yes, it is definitely giving them access to clients early on. I spoke with Translation, and they said they put their junior talent in front of clients now.

So I think apprenticeships give you that training of how to interact in these meetings, and they’re taking on bigger roles as they come in. Translation has a Gen Z panel where it’s informing campaigns. And then their leadership brings on the people who are coming up with these ideas into those client meetings, and the clients can hear directly from them. So you are seeing entry-level talent taking on more senior responsibilities earlier.

Do you still need an ad degree—and what schools are getting wrong about AI

Parker: Does that change in any way the traditional path of getting into the industry? Do I need a degree in advertising if I’m doing this on-the-job learning in an apprenticeship model? Or does it value different types of talent than were traditionally coming into internships at an agency?

Lindsay: I think that’s a big question, because I hear different things. We’ve heard for a while that agencies aren’t relying as much on recruiting from portfolio schools, and they’re taking other types of talent. And I think AI has only opened that up because, if you’re able to access these tools and make mock projects in Claude and get in front of the right people, you might not necessarily have to go to a portfolio school.

But I still hear that agencies hire primarily from portfolio schools because it gives them that foundational understanding of the ad business. They’re coming out with knowledge and a desire to go and be a part of the industry.

So I hear it both ways.

Parker: You point out something that I thought was maybe the most fascinating point in your reporting, which is that there is this tension in marketing programs right now about what to do with AI.

Obviously, this is a bigger conversation within universities and programs where they want students to learn the manual skills—the traditional critical thinking and writing skills—that you’ve always needed. You don’t want students just writing essays with AI.

But in your reporting, it seemed like that was having an adverse effect as well, where graduates weren’t coming out of school with as much AI knowledge as they needed. So what’s going on there?

Lindsay: Absolutely. I think if you talk to agency leaders, they would prefer that students were learning AI at school. But there are some universities that I’m hearing are still very much against even allowing their students to use AI tools in the classroom. And that’s short-sighted because industry leaders want them to have that training.

And then you’re hearing from certain agencies that say they are getting great candidates but are having to provide the AI training themselves. Others tell them, “Here, here’s some guidance on how to use AI. Come back to me when you’ve mastered some things.”

It’s also setting this tone where entry-level talent is either all-in on AI—if maybe they went to a school that didn’t ingrain in them that these things are bad—or some are coming out with a negative outlook on AI themselves. They think it’s going to take their job. They don’t want to be overreliant. They don’t want to use it, and art should be art. That sort of thinking.

Agency leaders are definitely seeing that from some emerging talent and are having to correct it.

What AI skills and tools should grads actually learn?

Parker: Did you hear of any specific skills in AI that agencies are looking for that a listener might want to brush up on?

Lindsay: Not necessarily specific skills, but you should just be showing that you’re playing in AI. Nano Banana is an AI image generator. Make a song in Suno, an AI music generator. Whatever you’re trying to be and whatever field—if you’re a creator or a copywriter or something—just be playing around in the tools and show that you’re interested.

Just showing that interest and curiosity is hands down what I heard overall from everyone.

Parker: And that’s not a new skill. You should be lightly familiar with things that you might be asked to do. Even if you’re not a music specialist, like you said, even knowing how to use some sort of audio-generating tool in AI—you never know what’s going to come up.

How to stand out when applying for entry-level roles

Parker: I want to get more specifically into the tips that you mentioned. If I’m a graduating student with my eyes on advertising, what are a few things that I should make sure are on my resume right now?

Lindsay: Okay, so it’s that you’re showing that you’re playing in AI, yes, but also do not use AI to write your application. Definitely try to stand out.

There are a lot of applications, so more than the resume itself, I’ve talked to hiring managers who said there are so many resumes coming in, and AI is filtering out a lot of things. So try to connect with leaders. Email specific leaders. Email them a project. That’s more important than just applying—making connections. This industry has always been relationship-driven. That is still important today, and I think it’s even more important today to get in front of those leaders.

So it’s less about the resume and more about getting in front of the leaders to make sure that they see your resume, they know who you are, and they’re seeing what you do.

Parker: Outside of AI, is there anything that you’ve heard from agencies that they’re missing in the new class of entry-level employees?

Lindsay: Mary Lou Bunn at Flower Shop said something to the effect of, “If you’re just someone who thinks they want a job in advertising and you don’t really love it, you might not get a job today because there are so many candidates out there. You really have to love advertising. You really have to show that you want to help brands and you love the work.”

So if you’re applying for an agency job, show that you know their clients. Make a mock project for a client they have. Go and research, maybe using AI, what the biggest challenges are facing Coca-Cola—whatever the brand is—and then come up with a solution. Just show that you are proactive and you want to work in the industry, because there are a lot of candidates out there. Just being lukewarm on the industry—you’re probably not going to get hired.

Parker: Yes. And if there’s one thing we know, agencies are thirsty for Gen Z input and to hear ideas from young people. So if you can take it that one step further and show that you have those ideas and you have a perspective that you can bring to clients, that seems like such an easy win to me.

Lindsay: And another just little anecdote: Chris Byrne, he’s the founder of the AI-backed shop Winston—he brought on some promising people to be shadows at his agency, and none of them showed up.

So, I mean, that’s another thing. Show up. I don’t know what that says about maybe the virtual aspect of the industry or what. He was trying to figure it out. But if you’re given the opportunity, take it.

What agency leaders should know about junior talent anxiety

Parker: As you’ve been reporting on this topic, I’m curious what surprised you the most about how this conversation has evolved?

Lindsay: One surprising thing that came up, and it didn’t make its way into the story—and I don’t know if it’s necessarily even an ad industry-specific thing. Two separate people brought up to me that they had employees who developed a skill with AI, or an agent that was helping them do their job better. And they kept it a secret from their managers because they were worried that if they showed that they had done this, it would jeopardize their position. If AI can do it, they might lose their job.

So there’s this fear out there that I also think leaders should be aware of. You have to set the tone for your employees: it’s safe, you can come to us, we’re not trying to replace you. But it just shows the tension that still exists out there. There is a lot of anxiety still.

Will today’s AI-era solutions for junior talent last?

Parker: I find that anytime I talk about AI and how it’s impacting industries, I wonder if we’re talking about right now or if this is a new normal. Do you have any sense from the sources you’ve talked to that the solves being implemented right now for junior talent are ones that will be permanent, that will continue to grow? Or is this just a for-now solution, and then we’ll see what the truth is later?

Lindsay: I think everyone’s still figuring it out. Even Jeremy from Ammunition said that he’s now focusing on those project coordinators, but that’s a role that maybe a year from now they’ll figure out can be done with AI. And then there will be another solve.

I think everyone’s taking it day by day. Like I said at the very start of this conversation, we’re going to be having a completely different conversation a year from now. AI is changing so rapidly, and we have no idea what our jobs are going to be in the future. I think there will always be a need for humans, but to say that we have it all figured out—I don’t think anyone does.

Strong laughs, innovative experiences and exceptional craft—ads that are currently resonating with audiences give them an escape, make genuine connections with consumers or stand out from the sameness that AI brings to productions. But overall, award-worthy work differentiates itself through an exceptional concept.

Ad Age Creativity Editor Tim Nudd spoke on Ad Age Insider about the takeaways from this year’s Creativity Awards, and the hours of jury meetings in which he heard directly from industry leaders. He shares the takeaways from close calls between finalists and the lesson that chief marketing officers should learn from reading the list.

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In this episode, Ad Age Insider host Parker Herren interviewed Ad Age’s Tim Nudd, Creativity editor. Below, the transcript, which has been lightly edited for clarity.

Parker: We’re going to hear all the tea about your past few weeks being immersed in Ad Age’s Creativity Awards, hearing from the industry’s top creatives about the top work. We’re going to talk trends and BTS, but first, I wanted to get a vibe check from you.

You’ve been on many hours of Zooms, hearing from industry leaders about top work. Describe the vibe of these conversations compared to previous years.

Tim: I will say the jury days, the Zoom days that we do with the juries, they’re so fun. They last all day for four days. We have four different juries, and it is a bit of a slog. Before coming to Ad Age, I actually worked at an awards company, but I do more awards work now—which is fine because I enjoy it.

The vibe this year—they were super respectful, really dug into the online portion of the judging, which they do for three weeks leading up to the Zoom day. On the Zoom day, everyone’s fast friends. What really struck me this year is that several of the juries really went back and went through everything again. Even after four or five hours of doing this, they wanted to make absolutely sure that the winners lists were good.

We’re so grateful to have these people doing this. It’s a lot of work, both the online portion and the Zoom day. “Love fest” sounds like a little bit too much, maybe, but we had a blast.

Parker: Okay, Miss America, Tim Nudd—the tea is lukewarm this year.

Across those conversations, were there any sentiments or conversation you heard that felt really new or different this year?

Tim: Well, I think we’ll probably get into this later, but not necessarily new: a lot of discussion around AI, which has been encroaching on the human creative process for a while.

I can’t remember who it was, but a year ago, somebody predicted that the majority of work in the Creativity Awards would have some sort of AI element. We didn’t find that to be true at all. I think that human-led creativity is still far and away the most interesting to look at.

But there were certainly different elements of AI that we were looking at. There were new aspects of that older conversation. That was one thing.

And then we had a few new categories this year, which I think we’ll also get into. Those were different conversations just by nature of what the categories are.

Parker: A tease for what’s to come. Keep listening. I love it.

Before we get to talking about all of that, let’s take a little dip into the behind-the-scenes pool of our Creativity Awards. And this is where those hoping to win a prize next year might want to get out that notepad.

What makes a strong Creativity Awards submission

Parker: From the start, what makes a good Creativity Awards submission?

Tim: The very first thing that makes a good submission is following the instructions.

Parker: Groundbreaking.

Tim: Yeah, groundbreaking, I know. Each category has a description of what you should be entering and what information we need to make a decision. Our show is a little unusual. We have people awards. We’ve got some awards that other shows don’t have. So understanding the category is job one.

Secondly, just be thorough. We got so many entries this year. They were good entries—good people being put forth, good work being put forth. But that last part, which is to really describe the person or the work, often just isn’t thorough enough. It doesn’t really answer the kind of things that we’re looking for.

If you’re putting forth a person for one of our people awards, include some testimonials, include specifics about what they did in their role. Don’t include information from three, four years ago that’s not relevant to the entry period. These are basic guidelines that we have in our entry kit, and you’d be surprised how often folks don’t really follow them.

People would also be surprised that even if the actual person or work being put forth is not necessarily superlative, if the entry itself is, it gives it a much better chance of winning an award. I think it’s early December when our entries are due. I speak to a lot of PR folks who are pulling their hair out in the weeks leading up, so I know it’s a lot of work. But I do think trying to carve out a little extra time to be extra thorough, to go the extra mile with these entries, makes a huge difference when the jury sits down to look at them.

How winners get chosen

Parker: Take us into the judging Zoom. I imagine there are often neck-and-neck pieces of work vying for one award. Is there any common differentiator that you often see that inches the actual winner past the rest?

Tim: It’s hard to point to that. What I will say is that every jury is different. I went through this when I was at Clio’s: every jury room that you’re in is so different from another. I honestly think sometimes the winners’ list could look fairly different from one jury to the next because it’s just people’s taste.

But what really happens when our juries are working well is that people are open to hearing the other side, and people’s minds get completely changed often.

A good example of that is our jurors do the online scoring, and we bring those online scores to the room. We show everybody what each entry got in the online scoring. So often, the campaign or the person or the entry that scored the highest doesn’t end up winning. That’s because people actually talk it out. That’s the reason we have these Zoom days: to change each other’s minds and explain each person’s thinking on an entry.

It’s impressive how flexible folks can be. It’s such a business of nuance. As you’re reviewing an entry, sometimes you just don’t think about a certain aspect of a piece of work, or you don’t necessarily understand the impact that a certain executive had in their role until you hear the entire jury discussing it.

I think that openness is so key, and it’s why we always end up with a pretty robust winners list.

AI at the awards—brands, anxiety and what actually wins

Parker: OK, so now let’s get into some of those trends that we’ve been teasing. What’s a topic or a common theme that you heard across these judging meetings?

Tim: Not just within advertising but within culture, AI is such a looming presence. There’s an anxiety to it. There’s a promise to it.

What’s really interesting is that several of the major AI companies won awards this year—and not just any awards. OpenAI’s ChatGPT campaign won Campaign of the Year, and Anthropic, one of OpenAI’s top competitors, won Best B2B Campaign of the Year.

What’s really interesting about these two campaigns is that some pretty accomplished creative agencies worked on that stuff. Isle of Any, which was Ad Age’s Creative Agency of the Year this year, created the ChatGPT campaign, and Mother, which is on an incredible roll creatively, made the Anthropic work.

Here you have these companies that are introducing brand new technology that no one knows what to do with, and they have to express a humaneness or humanity to what they’re trying to do. A lot of people are skeptical that this is going to be good for humanity.

You can compare what these companies are trying to do today with what the Googles and Facebooks of 20 years ago were trying to do, because they were bringing new technology to people then. I think Google learned quicker than Facebook, but they both eventually learned that really strong brand advertising with a creative human touch can be really disarming to people. That was a hard lesson to learn for Facebook, whose entire business was built around the opposite of brand advertising. They’ve been smart in engaging some of the most creative folks in advertising to do their brand work.

Everyone knows about the ChatGPT ads with the film-like scrolling credits—those ads launched last year. They were so well known that Anthropic actually spoofed them in the Super Bowl. And then Mother’s work for Anthropic, which broke last year in September, was also super creative.

I think that allows people to feel a warmth for these companies and their products that they wouldn’t otherwise. Both of those campaigns were super strong.

Parker: Yeah, and I love how you’re saying the AI makers are the ones really leaning into the human craft of it. I think especially Anthropic’s ads felt very textural to me. You could feel those ads.

Tim: I don’t think there was much of anything in the show that was just a purely AI-created piece of work that everybody universally embraced. In fact, just over the last month or two is when we’re finally seeing [AI-generated] spots that are indistinguishable, I would say. Maybe in the coming year, there might be some interesting stuff. But I do think that the conversations around AI are still filled with anxiety. Pure AI creations are, I think, still a few months out from being truly convincing.

Parker: Yeah, some of the ads I’ve seen recently—I’m shivering and shaking because I would not have guessed they were AI until I read that they were.

OK, let’s get off of AI. I talk too much about it. What’s another trend that emerged that you were interested in from these conversations?

Humor’s comeback and the rise of comedic campaigns

Tim: There was just so much fun and funny work this year. Humor has been making such a comeback from the days when purpose-driven things were dominating all the award shows. We’re many years out from that now, and a lot of funny work has been winning.

We did have a new category this year, Best Comedic Campaign, which was cool. I think we decided it was worth singling that stuff out because there is so much of it lately. A rather obscure video from Australia ended up winning, from a TV network called SBS. It was a Droga5 campaign from Australia, about a TV network that does all sorts of quite provocative programming.

It was a spot with full-frontal nudity, a guy running through scenes mimicking programming that’s on there—steamy foreign-language films and what have you. It was a laugh-out-loud thing. That one in the end, I think, came down to that and a campaign that a lot of our listeners will know here in the U.S., which was the Mr. Submarine campaign from Quality Meats, where they made, I think, 50 commercials celebrating 50 years.

There was some funny AI stuff in there, by the way. A few of those executions played around with AI and had fun with it. For the first year of a category, we got tons of submissions for that, which was really cool.

Humor also went beyond that actual humor category. We saw it across a lot of different categories. The experiential winner this year was the Wienie 500 that Johannes Leonardo did for Oscar Mayer, in collaboration with the Indianapolis Motor Speedway that does the Indy 500. They had a companion race called the Wienie 500 with Wienermobiles racing each other around the track. It was really insanely goofy, such a fun collab.

Just the fact that it was a big, full-blown event that had a several-hour broadcast showing it as it happened was amazing. In our world of terrifying news headlines by the hour, everyone’s seeking an escape, and the humorous work this year really helped.

Why craft still stands out in an AI world

Parker: I think you have one more trend for me.

Tim: Just the craft—the craft of work that we saw this year. Again, a bit in contrast to some of what’s happening in AI, where the craft is not great or it just feels kind of cheeky and cartoony.

Several of the big winners just had really wonderfully crafted work. Craft of the Year is a category that we have that went to The New York Times and Isle of Any for their campaign called “It’s Your World to Understand.”

The guys at Isle of Any used to work at Droga5. They handled the Times account over there. Several of their campaigns won big, big awards for craft at the big shows, and those guys are continuing what they’ve done before for The Times. That was really amazing.

Then Nike won Film of the Year for “So Win.” New York Times, Nike—these are companies that we’ve known for years do great, highly crafted advertising work, and it’s nice to see them continuing that.

Parker: Another one of our new categories was Best Body of Work for a Single Client. I loved how earlier you talked about the vibe in the room for talking about a new category. Tell me a little bit more about this category, how it was judged and the winner.

Tim: In previous years, oftentimes in the jury room, we’ll be talking about a certain client or a certain agency, and it’ll come up like, “Wow, they did such great work all year for this client.” And we’d have to stop and say, “Well, that’s not what we’re awarding here. We’re considering one piece of work.” But it comes up so often.

I think consistency in marketing, consistency with agency-client relationships, is so important, and we wanted to recognize companies and agencies that stick it out together and throughout the year, do multiple potentially award-winning pieces of work, often over multiple years. That’s what this was about—trying to recognize those relationships.

This isn’t like the new Cannes category that recognizes a client-agency relationship over 10 years. This is just within the one-year entry window.

Honestly, I felt sure that Apple and TBWA\Media Arts Lab were a shoo-in for this category because they do such amazing work all the time. But in fact, an interloper from Australia came along, in the form of the amusingly named agency Bear Meets Eagle on Fire. They do work for Telstra, which is a telecom down in Australia. They’ve been doing great work together for several years now. It’s become one of those brands where, when I see an email come in that they have new work, I know it’s going to be interesting, I know it’s going to be good.

They won Best Body of Work for a Single Client.

There were also some other really strong finalists. Special U.S. for Uber Eats was a finalist. Then Wieden+Kennedy had two finalists: their work for Nike and their work for Jordan Brand, which is obviously related but a separate brand.

I think this was a really important category because it points to the really strong bonds between agencies and clients. In a world of project work, some clients are less inclined to really forge those deep relationships with agencies. And I love the Telstra work. That stuff certainly can stand up to—and obviously surpassed—the Apple work in the estimation of our jury.

Parker: Yes, a sneaky trend is perhaps just to be Australian.

Tim: Yeah, it always helps.

How smarter experiential work is trending

Parker: Something interesting about these awards is we do all of this judging in the spring of 2026, but of course, the submissions come in in 2025. They’re about work from the past year.

I’m curious if there are any whispers of trends that are rising up now that maybe weren’t present in this set of work, but you think will be really important for next year’s set of winners.

Tim: If I think back to the past couple of months—we’re just coming off Coachella, where I saw a lot of experiential work—I think experiential is getting even more and more interesting.

Beyond the cookie-cutter activations that you think of when you think of festival marketing, the ideas that are being injected into experiential are more interesting than ever, not just the execution. It’s hard for experiential to be captured on film. For journalists like us, it’s almost like you have to be there to really fully experience it, and I totally get that. But you can sometimes tell, even from a case study or from photographs, the energy in some of these is really cool.

There’s a creative hook that has often been missing from experiential for years, where it makes you go, “That’s a really fun idea.” Obviously, the experiential-focused companies have been doing this for a long time, but other creative agencies are coming in and bringing the idea part of the equation to the on-site engagement. That combination can be super powerful.

Even something like “Steph Curry Shoots the Moon,” which was a campaign for Random House that Known did, and that was a winner in the Creativity Awards this year—that was an interesting sort of experiential. People went to the billboard and they saw Steph shooting a basketball, but it looked like the moon was coming off the billboard. It was a finalist in several categories. It won in one of them.

That’s an example of experiential that goes beyond the playbook of experiential in the past. When you bring a more inventive, bottom-up approach to experiential, it can be even more impactful than just what we’re used to, which is onsite execution.

I think that’s one thing that people are excited about. By this time next year, maybe we’ll be talking about more experiential stuff.

Parker: All right, Tim, you’ve got to get to Coachella next year. Start finding your crop top now.

Advice to CMOs from this year’s winners

Parker: My last question for you is: If I’m a CMO and I’m looking at the winners, what is something that you think I should learn—or you would want me to learn—from this year’s set of winners and take away to my own work?

Tim: I think most CMOs lately have been moving away from creativity. There’s an obsession with efficiencies and things like this. The power of the idea is just as important or more important than ever.

We talk about AI—when AI can create uniformly perfect imagery for everybody, the idea, more than ever, is what stands out. You can’t hide a bad idea behind good execution anymore, because everyone’s going to have good execution.

When you look through our list of winners, I think you see ideas that are fun, playful, unexpected, entertaining. Drilling back to the idea and saying, “What are we trying to say? How does coming at this from a different angle, and not just relying on spectacle, help?”

We saw so many Super Bowl ads this year where the idea was so lame, and it was dressed up to be supposedly fun. People see through that. That stuff doesn’t really connect, doesn’t get shared.

What CMOs really need to think about is less the execution piece and more the concepts—and going back to what creativity has always been about, which is finding that concept that’s going to break through, the concept that doesn’t necessarily logically make sense, but that people are going to embrace. So many of the campaigns this year that we recognized did that, and I think raising those up is critical today.

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In this episode, Ad Age Insider host Parker Herren interviewed Ad Age’s Asa Hiken, tech reporter. Below, the transcript, which has been lightly edited for clarity.

How advertisers are feeling about OpenAI right now

Parker: Let’s start with a little vibe check. What is your read on how advertisers are currently feeling about OpenAI?

Asa: I think it’s a question that has a bunch of different possible answers. If you look at just the ads in ChatGPT, you probably have some initial frustration because it’s a slow-moving product. There’s not a lot of measurement tools. It’s all impressions-based. You don’t really know what it’s getting you.

But there’s also optimism that it’s going to grow into something big. I mean, they just launched it in February. Two months later, of course, it’s not going to be a Meta-like offering, but it’s definitely a slow development.

There are some of the other products, like, as I’m sure we’ll get to, Instant Checkout, which basically got the boot. Sora, which definitely got the boot. These were two things that advertisers were really kind of interested in.

And then, subsuming all of that, is just OpenAI’s crazy optics. They’re in the news a lot, but they’re in the news increasingly for bad reasons. I think at least once, maybe twice, OpenAI has declared a code red because they’re falling behind competitors, or they might be soon.

So I think one common perception is that they cast too wide of a net. They’ve tried to do video generation, commerce, coding, enterprise, all this stuff, and now they’re having to hyper-focus on just a couple of things as competitors start pulling ahead. So I think there’s probably some frustration there with what OpenAI is as a potential partner to advertisers.

What OpenAI is trying to be (and what it isn’t)

Parker: I want to stay for a second on the bigger business questions that OpenAI is experiencing. What’s your read on the current evolution of OpenAI’s business? You mentioned, they know what they’re not. Have they mapped out what they are trying to become?

Asa: That’s a good question. No, I don’t think they have, and I don’t think it’s necessarily a fair expectation for them to know exactly what they’re going to be, given that they’re developing a very unpredictable technology.

They have these two focuses of the company. One is the big, ambitious super intelligence—formerly AGI—which is like, “We’re going to change society; we’re going to change the whole world with this technology.” And then they have this other level, which is, “But we need to make revenue in order to survive as a company.” So that’s where you see them invest in ChatGPT subscriptions, these enterprise partnerships and building out its Codex platform.

They benefited early on greatly from the launch of ChatGPT. Just like Uber is the ride-share verb, ChatGPT was just the AI chat representative. So they benefited a lot from that.

And now that some of these other players, such as Anthropic and Google, have fully caught up, they’re really struggling to continue as a leader just on the laurels of their technology, not on anything else. So it will be interesting to see in five years what OpenAI is most known for. Is it going to be the company that cracks super intelligence and gets us to Mars or whatever? Or is it going to fall behind and be second-rate behind Anthropic and Google? There’s a lot that needs to happen before we have a better idea of that.

Where ChatGPT sits in the broader AI ‘channel’

Parker: That’s a good note mentioning OpenAI’s competitors, because anytime we’re talking about media—and today we’re talking about OpenAI, which is one platform in this emerging AI channel. What your read is on the broader AI channel, if we can call it an individual channel. Is ChatGPT the key player that advertisers have identified? Where do these companies lie when an advertiser is looking at their partners and how they might do business with them?

Asa: I think that ChatGPT is still seen as the leader in consumer-focused AI. Maybe Google—it’s unclear what their numbers are just because they kind of mash it all together—“We reach seven and a half billion people.” Well, what specifically is reaching them? Are they seeking out AI overviews? Of course not; they just show up on the page.

Whereas ChatGPT, you have to actually go into the app. And so I think OpenAI is still a leader in that category. And as a result, ChatGPT is seen from a lot of brands as the top-of-mind player if they want to reach AI-interested consumers who are using AI to shop or for research or whatever it is.

They rolled out their first ad product in February. Google has preceded ChatGPT with their own ads in AI overviews and AI mode. They’ve just been doing it longer. And Google has a much more robust ads business, so it’s a pretty solid thing they’ve got going on. We hear it discussed less just because I think there was a lot of hope that OpenAI was going to be this new player, whereas everyone’s been advertising with Google sort of begrudgingly because Google is a black box. And the fact they have AI ads is just not as exciting.

And then you have Anthropic, which is more enterprise-focused, no ads. I doubt they’ll ever do ads on their platform. In fact, that was sort of the premise of their Super Bowl ad, which was like, “Shame on OpenAI for doing this; we would never do this.”

So between those three companies, that’s how advertisers see it. And definitely, ChatGPT is the most promising, exciting platform to show up in to meet consumers.

How marketers can test AI Ads

Parker: Our colleague Garrett Sloane covered the launch of ads on ChatGPT. That’s only been about two months since launch. Like you said, it is a young product. There are many gripes about measurement and targeting, but we can assume that will mature over time.

What should marketers be doing right now to make sure they aren’t behind in that conversation? Is it as simple as, go buy some ads on ChatGPT and see what happens? Or are you hearing more specific advice in your reporting on how brands are navigating this space as it’s so young?

Asa: If you’re a big brand with a lot of money and experimentation is something you’re really interested in, then yeah, I think it would make total sense to go join that program. I think they have more than 600 advertisers at this point on ChatGPT, so you could just go be 601 and see what it’s like. And you probably won’t get a whole lot of information back, but you get a more direct understanding of what it’s like advertising with OpenAI as a partner, and what it’s like showing up on ChatGPT.

If you’re a brand that has to be a little more budget-conscious, there’s really been no evidence that suggests that ads in ChatGPT are incredibly strong-performing placements. So it’s certainly not like, if you don’t advertise now in ChatGPT, you’re behind. I wouldn’t go that far at all.

But I think it’s worth considering just having conversations and consistent deliberation about what advertising in an AI-native experience would look like for you. Who would you try to reach that you aren’t already reaching? Are your consumers going there for things that you could actually show up for? It seems too embryonic at this point to think you’re going to get anything out of it—you have to know that there’s something there waiting for you.

So I think just developing your strategy and waiting. There’s so much emphasis on being a first mover, but if you weren’t one of the first hundred people who advertised on Facebook, are you screwed now, all these years later? No. Eventually, it made sense and you jumped in. So I think probably the same goes here. You can’t resist it, you’ve got to keep it in mind, but you don’t need to go first.

Pricing and accessibility of ChatGPT ads

Parker: Yeah, and you mentioned price. When we first reported this, Garett Sloane, our tech editor, had reported $60 CPMs on those first movers. And I’m assuming since we’re only two months in, it’s still looking similar.

Asa: Yeah, it’s still $60 CPMs. The only change on the numbers that I’m aware of is that in the beginning, OpenAI was asking for minimum commitments of $200,000. And now they’ve expanded to partner with ad-tech players like Criteo. Their minimum requirements are $100,000 to $150,000. So it’s making it more accessible, but no change yet on the CPM dollar figures. Though I think the general understanding is that will come down over time.

[Editor’s note: After this interview was recorded, Senior Tech Editor Garett Sloane reported that although initial advertisers were required to meet $200,000 minimums, limited impressions have prevented them from being able to fulfill that commitment so far. Some categories have seen reduced CPMs as a result, ranging between $15 and $40. Read more here.]

How paid ads intersect with answer engine optimization

Parker: You came on this very podcast in September, if you can even remember back that far, and you talked me through the ins and outs of brands’ AEO, or answer engine optimization, strategy. I’m curious how this introduction of paid ads in these platforms—you mentioned Google and of course we’re talking about ChatGPT—how does that change the conversation that we were having about brand AEO strategy now that they can actually pay to be on some of these platforms?

Asa: I think this is a really interesting question because one of the big consumer fears about advertising in AI—and this is what Anthropic was saying in its Super Bowl ad—is that ads are going to change the content. They’re going to change which content it shows to you and therefore it’s going to completely erode these platforms as reliable tools.

So that’s the fear. And advertisers and OpenAI, of course, are like, no, that’s not going to happen and ads aren’t going to change anything. And so from that point of view, there’s no AEO or GEO impact here.

But I think advertisers are hoping it messes with the content a little bit, because then that would help them show up more visibly. There’s the hope that just by showing an ad, you’re going to somehow impact brand recall later, or you’re going to show up in a search result that you weren’t otherwise going to show up in. And so in that way, I guess ads could maybe have a GEO, AEO-related influence.

But of course, I think it’s important—you have your paid media, which is ads, and you have your organic media, which is AEO, GEO. And it’s important to keep those two things separate.

Parker: Yeah, I have to say that in my own personal use of ChatGPT, I have seen ads, but they’re never particularly relevant to what I’m chatting about. Is the idea of what these advertisers think might happen that if I were to search, “Tell me about the best table saw I can buy right now,” that it would tell me about Home Depot and Lowe’s and Bob’s Hardware Store down the street. But then I see at the bottom that Home Depot has sponsored it so that makes me as a consumer click the Home Depot link?

Or is the idea—and I’m making this up, no accusations here—if Home Depot has paid ChatGPT that I would ask that question, and it would just say, “Home Depot’s the best one, go buy it”?

Asa: Well, what you just said is the consumer fear. But I think advertisers, even the ones who are most like, “Ooh, I hope this changes things”—they probably don’t want that either because then the whole platform will be unreliable. No one will use it and this will be a useless placement. So I think they’re looking for something maybe a little more subtle.

A live test of how ChatGPT ads can influence results

Parker: I’m doing live research right now. I just asked ChatGPT this very question: “What’s the best table saw and where can I buy it?”

So what’s funny here is that it has given me a lot of information about table saws, and it has made a chart for me comparing four different models from three different brands—two of them are from the same brand. And it’s giving me the comparison of specs, and then it never answers my question on where I can buy it. However, my response is sponsored by Home Depot, and it does have a link at the bottom—with clear disclaimers that it is sponsored—for me to go directly to a table saw page on Home Depot.

So I asked again. I picked one of the models that it recommended, and I said, “Where can I buy it?” And it’s telling me what an amazing choice I’ve made. And then it says, for where to buy, “Best overall for price and reliability: Home Depot.” It says easy returns, often in stock, sometimes it has discounts and this is the safest bet for good price and pickup.

Then in much smaller text after that, it says “also solid options,” and a bullet-point list that says Lowe’s, Tractor Supply, Acme Tools.

Asa: Some of the ways that AI is very clearly trying to point you to one thing and away from others—I think that could be gamed. It’s just hard because I don’t think OpenAI is back there with a fully mapped-out understanding of ChatGPT, and that they know exactly that this input, this ad, is going to affect this thing. They pull this lever and boom. I think it’s just the AI going on its own and they’re just trying to contain it as much as possible.

So, you know, maybe this is an outlier that you just stumbled upon, maybe it’s a developing norm, who knows? But it’s interesting nonetheless.

Parker: Yes. All of this is just anecdotal, not serious claims.

Why Instant Checkout flopped

Parker: I do want to connect this to what we were saying earlier about Instant Checkout. There was a product that ChatGPT was hype on for a second that would do us one step further than what I just experienced and allow me to buy that table saw on ChatGPT. It was called Instant Checkout. And my understanding is that it was a flop. So what happened there and why didn’t it work?

Asa: Yeah, it was a flop, in large part because I think there was this assumption that consumers are shopping on AI—which not everyone is, but a fair amount of people and a growing amount of people are using AI as a shopping tool. And so everyone wants as frictionless an experience as possible. So let’s just not have to punt them to a third-party website. They can find what they’re looking for, buy it right there, boom, all done, one-stop shop. Everything’s faster and more convenient.

But there was just no evidence—and in fact, there’s a lot of evidence to the fact that people don’t want to shop in AI. They don’t want to buy products in ChatGPT because there’s a lot of ambiguities that arise through that. Like if I buy a product through ChatGPT and it doesn’t show up, who do I contact: the brand or OpenAI? Who am I getting a confirmation message from? If OpenAI sends me one, does that mean the brand is even in their system?

And also, it’s not like buying products online on brands’ websites is difficult or complicated. It’s what people have been doing for a long time. It’s what they’re used to. So, to introduce this new thing is actually adding in more friction. It’s like you’re trying to force people to adopt a new consumer behavior and no one was really interested in that.

So that’s a big reason why it flopped. And OpenAI very quietly put this to the side and pushed Instant Checkout into their Apps feature, which there’s not a lot of big brands with Apps.

One piece of advice for overwhelmed marketers

Parker: Given all that we’ve talked about, if you have one piece of advice for marketers who feel overwhelmed by everything you’ve just described—how to tell what’s real and what’s fake—what is your tip for figuring that out?

Asa: Maybe my biggest tip here is that you don’t have to figure it out because OpenAI is just one company. All of the stuff that’s happening around OpenAI, there’s a lot of attention, but as a marketer, you don’t need to really understand why OpenAI got rid of Sora. You just need to know if the AI video tool you use is creating stuff that is useful to your brand.

Take the crazy, super-fast rocket of the AI space and pair it with the always-on media cycle and you just get so many stories, so much to think about. But really, I think what you should be doing if you’re a marketer is to slow down, unravel some of those stories and just focus on which company, which provider is going to help you the most, and worry less about who’s going to be around in 10 years. If OpenAI isn’t around in 10 years, it’s going to be the biggest business fail of all time. So I think, just chill out and don’t try to understand it all.

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In this episode, Ad Age Insider host Mark Fischer interviewed Ad Age’s Sabrina Sanchez, community growth editor, and Parker Herren, editorial innovation lead. Below, the transcript, which has been lightly edited for clarity.

Mark: Sabrina, Ad Age has covered community building for years now. What is it like for you being on the other side of it—building the Small Agency Network, The List and the NextGen communities?

[Editor’s note: If you’re an early-career professional and want to sign up for Ad Age’s NextGen community, send an email to nextgen@adage.com. Applications for the Small Agency Network will reopen this summer. Stay tuned for more information.]

Sabrina: It’s been really interesting being on the other side of it and trying to grow a community ourselves. It is very involved. But I think the important thing that I’ve learned is that sometimes these audiences already exist. So it’s more about tapping into your existing audience base, which I think is what brands have been doing as well, and trying to develop more connections beyond just a one-way interaction, more of a two-way conversation.

I think the strongest brands today are designing behaviors. So it’s less about how many people you reach and more about how people participate once they’re already in your circle.

Mark: How has our coverage informed your strategies in building all of these Ad Age communities, which have really taken off over the last six to eight months since you’ve been in this role? Obviously, you’re a former reporter yourself.

Sabrina: I’ve learned from a lot of different brands that try to build with their audiences instead of for them, if that makes sense.

Recently, we actually talked about this at our NextGen Marketing conference. I hosted a panel on designing communities with Hinge, Topicals and Strava. They’re very different communities, but a lot of what they had in common was that they tried to build with their communities by having two-way interaction—real-time feedback and incorporating that into their product. They develop a system where they can continue to have that dialogue. They were also meeting their audiences where they already are, so not necessarily trying to build new habits but building from existing ones.

And then the other thing is that the communities were also designed to exist even beyond the platform or product. Strava is a good example. You think of Strava when you’re sharing your running streak on social media. It’s taking people off Strava and bringing them to another platform where they’re still sharing Strava branding.

So that’s what I’ve tried to incorporate into our Small Agency Network, with our NextGen Community for early-career professionals and with The List, which is our executive network: How can we get people to talk about these things even beyond visiting the Ad Age website or being at Ad Age events?

Legacy brands can’t rest on being legacy brands

Mark: All good stuff. I want to home in on one thing you said and toss it over to Parker—meeting audiences where they are. I feel like that is the origin of Ad Age getting onto Substack. We’ve seen multiple brands have success with it—Hinge, Lofty, which is a sleep wellness marketer, and agencies like Mischief. And if you haven’t already read our debut Substack collab with Mischief, you definitely should.

Parker, I’m curious how all of that has informed your strategy for Ad Age’s Substack?

Parker: I think it’s funny because I don’t always think of Ad Age as a brand, but Ad Age is a brand. And like many brands, we are dealing with a lot of cultural disruption.

It’s easy when you’re a legacy brand—Ad Age has been around for almost 100 years—to think that that’s all you need, to say, “Hey, we’ve been around for 100 years. They talk about us on ‘Mad Men.’ So everyone must know who we are and want to read Ad Age.” And it’s not necessarily as easy as that.

When we think about journalism, when we think about media and the disruption that social media has brought—and the fact that we have the same access to channels that creators have on social media, who are aggregating news or doing their own reporting or talking about marketing, and that the brands we cover have the same access to talking to their audiences as well—that means we have to be doing everything that those disruptors and challengers are doing.

People aren’t necessarily going to come to AdAge.com to read everything we write. So how can we go to platforms where we can make it really easy for them to read what Ad Age has to offer, to feature other voices in these communities and to have a two-way dialogue, like Sabrina was saying, with our audience—who need to know that Ad Age is not just some big, faceless monolith, but a smaller collection of people than you might imagine, who just want to do the best that we can.

Be a connector and amplify audience voices

Mark: Right on. You mentioned featuring other voices. What does that mean?

Parker: We want to be a connector. I think that’s part of our communities’ strategy as well. Sabrina, you can tell me if I’m wrong, but we want to be a piece of the puzzle and not the whole picture.

I’ve been really excited, as we have launched our Substack this week, to see how many people have commented and interacted with our Substack account saying, “Please read us as well.” And on the flip side, we can also let them be part of Ad Age’s Substack as well in the future.

I think that’s really important for being a curator, being a hundred-year-old brand in these spaces—lifting everybody else up with us and not assuming that it can only be one thing or one team or one brand that owns everything.

Sabrina: Yeah, I want to just add to that because, Parker, you kind of hit the nail on the head. Being a connector is such a huge part of what we’re doing through communities—and Substack is also a part of that.

We’ve had a lot of discoverability through our communities. Our NextGen group is early-career professionals and students who maybe don’t read Ad Age and are not necessarily used to having it as a resource. But they talk to us and they talk with us. They talk with each other, with their peers who are also entering the industry, and we can give them valuable tools and resources to learn how to navigate it.

So I think that’s such an important part of what we’re doing. It’s not just “come to Ad Age to read breaking news.” It’s also, “Have a conversation about what you want to see from us and let us know what you’re thinking about, what’s on your mind.”

Parker: Yeah, and one more thing, because Sabrina, you’re so right. There was a time in this world when maybe a print edition of Ad Age—if you can even fathom it—might have been circulated at a university among marketing majors, or at an agency office among all levels of employees.

That’s not the expectation anymore. I don’t want to say it’s not accessible—it is still accessible to type into your computer AdAge.com and voila—but it is not the expectation of audiences that they have to go and find us.

Being able to implement tools like Substack and our communities, where we remove that obstacle for people to find us and can consistently have those conversations, is huge.

What audiences want now: access, experiences and belonging

Mark: I think it’s so interesting because we’re trying to do a lot of the things that many marketers and agencies are trying to do as well. And of course, the entire media ecosystem is so fragmented—everybody knows that. So I think, to your point, showing up where they are and then also, Sabrina, within Ad Age communities, how we can talk to our members and see what they want from us.

That reminds me of—we spoke to someone from Bubble Skincare’s community—she was saying they’ll go out to their community members and ask for recommendations on products, what to name products and also just testing products, which B2C marketers can continue to do and use communities for.

I’m interested in your take on this, Sabrina. Reed Litman and Anthony Po recently wrote a column for us about what people want from brands right now. They drilled it down to three things: access, experiences and belonging. Not being spectators, but being participants.

When you hear all of that, how are you folding that into what you’re doing with communities? And for a marketer listening who maybe has a community within their brand, what can they take from that as well?

Sabrina: Yeah, that’s a really interesting session that you referenced. It was the “touching grass” session at our NextGen Marketing Summit, which, honestly, was one of my favorite sessions.

During that session, they really reinforced the idea that people want to pull away from social and have more analog experiences. What that looks like is in-person experiences—curated experiences where they get to have a say.

Imagine in a community you’re giving the brand feedback, and now they put on exactly the event that you just asked for. One stat that stood out is that more than 80% of Gen Z say they want to disconnect from their screens more often, which signals a really significant cultural shift.

We recently did that. Our executive editor, Judy Pollack, is planning our Small Agency Conference right now, and she dropped a message in our Small Agency Network: “Hey, what are some sessions you guys want to see?” We got a long list of feedback.

So that’s what we’re doing, and how brands can incorporate that themselves is by establishing a format that works for you where you can have that dialogue. I’m not necessarily saying it’s a WhatsApp group or a group chat at all. There could be other formats.

Substack is a good example, to Parker’s point, where people can comment back to you. I’ve seen a lot of brands use Instagram channels where they can blast messages. Maybe it’s Discord—a lot of brands have Discord communities as well, where they can talk to their members.

A lot of it is establishing trust with your members and the people that use your product so they feel comfortable that if they give you feedback, you’re actually going to execute on it.

Face-to-face—brand leaders as community voices

Mark: You mentioned Judy Pollack, Ad Age’s executive editor, who has been at Ad Age for a long time and is a wealth of knowledge. It’s been fun to see her flourish in the Small Agency Network because we’re really seeing her personality shine.

This is a question for both of you, but we’ll start with Sabrina. What has it been like getting Ad Age editors and reporters on board with showing a different side of themselves within these communities?

Sabrina: Yeah, that’s a really good question. The people love Judy.

I think it’s interesting because Ad Age is a brand, but the reporters are also brands. Having that voice that can be the face of something is really important for Ad Age and for any brand, really: finding voices that people trust.

You’d be surprised—I was surprised, certainly—to see how much people follow individuals instead of just Ad Age the brand. So getting reporters on board has been super key to our community strategy.

Mark: I think we’re seeing it all across the marketing industry. As part of our NextGen Marketing Playbook, we wrote about five CMOs who are becoming influencers of sorts.

Parker, similar question for you. That is a large part of what you want Substack to be—not just daily roundups, but also setting up individual accounts for Judy, for Jeanine Poggi, our editor-in-chief, for Tim Nudd, our creativity editor. Can you talk a little bit about that as well?

Parker: Yes. Everyone should go follow judypollack3 on Substack because she has written at least one—but I’m told more are coming—real ragers of personal essays that have really gotten me laughing.

What’s so interesting is what Sabrina was saying earlier—the craving for analog experiences. I think we hear that, and at least I’m like, “All right, back to the medieval ages, get me on my horse and buggy.” But really, a one-on-one conversation—whether that’s face-to-face, through WhatsApp, through a chat on Substack or on Instagram—those are analog experiences in the current age.

Getting back to less of this state, where I have a million reels scrolling on my phone while I have reality TV in the background and a podcast going and just a blur of media around me, and more to having intention in consuming one thing, accessing knowledge, accessing another perspective in that one-on-one setting is so important.

That’s where we’re trying to dig in with our Substack launch and with our communities. That’s where I see a lot of brands doing really interesting work, like some of the brands Sabrina mentioned.

I was just looking at e.l.f. Beauty—they have a Substack publication where they do behind-the-scenes looks at their formulations and their marketing campaigns, but they also feature op-ed–type voices. They have a career advice series going right now where they’re connecting with their audience and providing additional value to their many young consumers beyond just going to the store and buying a beauty product.

You mentioned that Mischief collaborated with us on our Substack launch. It’s really interesting because they’re an agency, and agencies don’t typically market themselves like brands the way Mischief has on TikTok or now on Substack.

In that Q&A that our editor-in-chief, Jeanine, did with the head of their Substack, Ollie, he said it’s about wanting to be known before they’re needed. I think that’s pretty critical. Consumers need to feel comfortable and like they’re, as Sabrina said, part of something. Then when they say, “I need to know what’s in the news today in the advertising industry,” or “I need to go buy a lip balm or a foundation,” or “I need to hire a marketing agency,” they’re already part of that community and are going to be more inclined to seek you out rather than your competitors.

Recenter trust

Sabrina: Parker, I’m doing the applause sign.

Honestly, I think you just said a word. To your point, trust is a huge thing. Going back to the whole analog thing, it’s not really an anti-digital movement per se. It’s more of a rebalancing. We’re all super overstimulated. I think we want to know that there are real people behind things, and that is true of brands as well as media publications—because we don’t know what’s AI and what’s not these days.

Everything that we’re doing has to do with reflecting the real people behind things and having real conversations with other real people. Brands that are doing that, and we’re doing that, are seeing a lot of success with two-way dialogue because it establishes more trust.

Show up for your audience

Mark: Say I’m a listener who is trying to build either a Substack or a community where I want the CEO or a C-suite executive to be in the middle of it and showcase their personality. It might be something they don’t feel comfortable doing, but that you think, like you two are saying, is truly necessary to stay relevant and build foundations of trust with existing consumers and new consumers as well.

Parker: Something you said is really important: being comfortable. There are different platforms and formats that brands are using to do what we’re talking about, and they don’t all look the same.

If you’re not somebody who’s comfortable on camera, who doesn’t want to be a TikTok star—someone could have said this to the McDonald’s CEO, maybe. It’s great to try; I appreciate that from them.

But at the same time, we are a print publication, and that’s part of the reason why Substack is such an easy yes for us: It’s the medium we’re comfortable in. That’s where many of the people at Ad Age have built their careers.

Part of it is being comfortable, and then recognizing what we were talking about earlier—the consumer side of what they want from you. I think in the social media age, everybody thinks they’re the most interesting person in the world and that someone will subscribe to their content just because it’s them. That is, sorry to tell you, not true.

You really have to think, one, about yourself and what you feel you can do well, and then, two, about what you can bring to a consumer or an audience member that is going to incentivize them to interact with you on this platform. Are you providing entertainment? Are you providing, like Sabrina was saying, extra resources or career advice? Are you providing a behind-the-scenes look at your product?

What are you going to be able to do well—and consistently, which is important in this conversation—that someone who comes and finds you will think is worth subscribing to or following you on that platform for?

All of these things take a lot of work. It’s not enough to say, “Hey, this is me, I’ll do this whenever,” and assume that people will think that’s important enough to follow along with, given this barrage of information and media being thrown at us.

Sabrina: Yeah, everything Parker said. The only thing I would really add is what I tell the reporters on our team—and I tell community members the same thing—you only get what you put in. People are willing to give if you’re willing to give. That’s something to communicate to any team if you’re starting to build community. Of course, we have to give, but how much we give is what we get out.

Where to start: advice for marketers and agencies

Mark: Put yourself in the shoes of either an agency person or a marketer who wants to spin up a community or wants to spin up a Substack. What would be their first step? Or what would be your number one piece of advice for them?

Sabrina: I would say do an audit of your audience. Understand who you’re targeting. Do they already exist in your ecosystem? I think we did that for the Small Agency Network. We’d had the Small Agency Conference running for more than 15 years, so we knew that audience was already in our ecosystem. We knew from years of conversations with them that they wanted more touchpoints beyond one annual conference.

Once we did that audit, we understood there would be a lot of value in a community where we could create more touchpoints, have more conversations, more in-person events and that people would show up.

We did an audit of our communities: What is an opportunity we’re missing to reach those people? I think that’s the very first step.

The second step—and I’m giving you a little extra than you asked for—is to think about any repeatable, community-driven experiences you can create. Of course, this is all done through consistency and repetition. How much legwork does that look like? How many logistics do you have to think about? How can you execute that with pretty low lift to start? You have to build these things over time. You’re going to have some lurkers in the chat; you’re not going to have people talking all the time. That’s OK. It takes time.

So think about repeatable, community-driven experiences you can build, how to build that trust, and remember these are owned channels. That’s a really big, probably understated, important part of this—because that’s going to determine how much flexibility you have when you’re building these platforms.

Parker: Yeah, you’re right. There’s been too much letting the wind take us where it wants with algorithms and not enough of us leading our distribution strategies, which is part of the reason we’re correcting that with these platforms.

Something else: We’ve talked a lot about what these efforts mean for consumers and audiences. The other thing is that a brand needs to think about what it wants out of the consumer or audience on the platform it’s going to activate on.

It would be very easy for me to ask ChatGPT, “Where should Ad Age go next?” and it might say Substack. But that’s not how we started that conversation. Instead, start the process with your own human noggin and go on these platforms yourself. See what content is being shared, how Substack users are interacting with other brands, media companies and each other versus TikTok versus Instagram or any of the platforms you might want to dig deeper into.

Get really comfortable with the tone and the language and the vibe, versus just saying, “Here’s what my competitors are doing,” or “I saw this one brand do something cool here, let’s copy it,” which is what an AI assistant is able to tell you—what other people have done.

Instead, you want to feel confident in your decisions, in your strategy, in why you’re doing something and—whether or not it flops—what you expect it might give you back in return. I think that is so important.

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In this episode, Ad Age Insider host Parker Herren interviewed Ad Age influencer and social media marketing reporter Gillian Follett. Below, the transcript, which has been lightly edited for clarity.

Parker: The “Fruit Love Island” virality breaks at least my understanding of what consumers’ tolerance for watching AI is. But 200 million views is crazy. So what are we misunderstanding or getting wrong about how people feel about AI?

How ‘Fruit Love Island’ tests our tolerance for AI-made entertainment

@ai.cinema021FRUIT LOVE ISLAND: FINALE 🎊 Thank you guys for watching this has been fun! Sorry it had to end so crazily! #ai #aifruit #fyp #fruit #fruitloveisland

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Gillian: I was also very surprised with how viral it went, just because, especially on TikTok, people have been so critical of AI. But I guess the main takeaway I found was that when it comes to AI used for entertainment purposes, people are a little more forgiving, it seems.

I had actually not put the pieces together here, but there was a trend a few months ago: “Italian brain rot.” That was these weird hybrids of things, like a shark with sneakers and legs or an elephant that wore giant flip-flops. Those got a ton of engagement, lots of people making their own twists on them. There were some brands including them in their content as well.

Parker: You’re skipping out on “Ballerina Cappuccina.”

Gillian: Oh, of course—how could I forget her?

That was a whole phenomenon. It was mostly entertainment-focused, people just playing around with these characters, and that got a ton of engagement. That was setting a precedent here for the AI-generated “Fruit Love Island” because these are also anthropomorphized AI characters.

And also just the guilty-pleasure aspect of it. People love “Love Island.” They love seeing these people fighting and trying to find their romantic match and all that. That also is playing a role here. So it’s a combination of the entertainment focus and that guilty-pleasure vibe.

Parker: This also takes me back even further than “Ballerina Cappuccina” to—do you remember the cats who were cheating on each other and saving each other from car wrecks, to the Billie Eilish song?

@mpwildStay unique ! #catsoftiktok #cat #aiart #ai #poorcat #

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Gillian: Yes. I didn’t get as many of those on my feed. I definitely have seen a couple, but maybe that was your feed.

Parker: It’s cats top to bottom.

Gillian: There was a similar situation here with the fruit theming, because one of the sources I talked to mentioned that “Fruit Love Island” uses a similar—or maybe even the same—custom GPT model as these fruit soap operas that were going on before this. Similar to the cats cheating on each other and getting into accidents, there was a similar phenomenon with anthropomorphized fruit earlier in March.

@ai.fruit.storiesPart 3 : The Wedding Secret #aifruitstories #talkingfood #brainrot #foodstory #strawberry

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There were lots of TikToks where people were like, “Oh my god, I’m actually just sitting here watching these fruits cheat on each other.” There was this ongoing path to “Fruit Love Island.”

Parker: Yes, the path we’re all on inevitably.

Is the trend actually watching “Fruit Love Island,” or is it more to post about “Fruit Love Island”? It seems the novelty of saying that you’re watching it is just as viral as actually watching it.

Gillian: Yeah, the conversation around it definitely contributed to it going so viral, because I’m sure people saw videos of people talking about it and wondered what “Fruit Love Island” is. So they went to look it up.

But there was also a fandom that emerged around “Fruit Love Island.” There were some genuine fans who were posting videos about their favorite fruit couples. And there was a voting aspect to it—I think there was a link in the creator’s bio—where they could vote for new fruits they wanted on the island or ones to kick off. So that was also some added engagement there.

But, of course, TikTok being TikTok, there were also some critics, people saying, “Why are you guys rotting your brains watching this? We’re doomed.”

Parker: The line of when AI is OK is so blurry. And I think a little spoiler for the point of this conversation is the popularity of “Fruit Love Island” doesn’t necessarily have everything to do with AI. Why do you think this specifically is going viral?

Gillian: The reason it’s going so viral is, like I said, this desire for entertainment content on social now.

The focus of social media now is entertainment and not to necessarily connect with friends and family anymore. “Social” has left the meaning of social media. So people are increasingly expecting more serialized content, or more brain-rotty content where you can just turn your mind off and watch fruits cheat on each other.

That kind of content is what people are expecting more on social. I think that’s part of this overarching trend where creators are putting out series that involve a lot more effort than AI fruit. That shift toward entertainment-driven content on social is responsible here, and AI is just the tool that was used to put out this “Fruit Love Island” series so quickly.

What brands should and shouldn’t learn from ‘Fruit Love Island’

Parker: If I’m a brand, I’m seeing “Fruit Love Island” go viral, and I, of course, want 200 million people to interact with me. What should I do?

Gillian: You pointed out the tension here. Consumers have definitely been a lot more critical of brands using AI than just the everyday user playing around with these tools to make these silly stories.

Rachel Karten, who’s a social media consultant, put it really well. She told me that when a brand uses AI, there’s a subtext or implication that they could have paid a real artist to animate this. They had the budget; they could have paid. People don’t necessarily want to support a brand that is cutting corners like this and using AI instead of working with artists in the pursuit of efficiency and cost savings.

That’s not necessarily part of the conversation when it’s just an everyday user playing with AI. Obviously, people will criticize the fact that it’s contributing to environmental damage when you’re using AI just for fun. That’s definitely there as well when it comes to brands.

For a brand, you’re not going to get as positive a response if you’re trying to put out an AI series like this, even if it is in the service of entertaining users. It’s going to come with the baggage of the fact that you could be working with real artists.

Serialized social content: creators, cats and bed-rotting

Parker: Are you seeing brands be more successful work with creators to be part of their content rather than making their own? Are you seeing more success one way or the other?

Gillian: I’ve seen brands doing it both ways, where brands will integrate into an ongoing creator series. I talk a lot about “Shop Cats” because I love cats and I know you do too. It involves this host going to bodegas and talking to people who work there about the cats that work there and hang around there.

@shopcatsshowMeet Bunz in the Upper East Side for some hardware store fun brought to you by @Cash App 🔨🐈💰 A show by Mad Realities host @MICHELLADONNA creative producer christian wallace shriver dp Joao Sanchez stylist @BERRIEZ editor sean fitzmaurice ae Ryan Novak pa Vivienne Shriver Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App’s bank partners. Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC. #cat #nyc #hardware #cashapp #catvideo

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That will sometimes bring in brand sponsors, and they’re integrated either in the middle or at the end. They’re not necessarily part of the story, but they’re surrounding it, and those have performed pretty well.

But then there are also examples of brands starting net-new series with creators. I think Converse did one with Amelia Dimoldenberg, the “Chicken Shop Date” host. That was a sneaker-themed dating show, which made sense for her brand and for Converse.

There are success stories with both, but I think the overarching takeaway here is that people are enjoying these serialized stories that they can keep coming back to and engaging with, in the same way that they would a TV show, but on their social feeds and usually with quicker turnaround because it’s shorter episodes.

Parker: You’ve mentioned partnering with creators in all these examples. Have you seen brands independently make a short-form content series that don’t lean into creator support as much, but is just a brand on its own making a series that people want to watch à la “Fruit Love Island,” maybe without the AI?

Gillian: It’s not a dating show, but one of the first examples that comes to my head is Bilt, which is a finance platform. They have this series where I don’t think Bilt is involved at all in the actual plot. It’s just this person who is new to New York and is trying to navigate the city in her early mid-20s. It’s sort of like a sitcom-type show.

It has nothing to do with the brand necessarily, but it gets a lot of attention. They’re in the bio, but I don’t know what the ROI is for them. That has done really well on TikTok.

@roomiesroomiesroomiesS2 Ep 1: Will Ellie get to stay?

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There’s also one that’s a little more niche. There’s this brand called Cozy Earth, a bedding brand. They launched this competition series called “Bed Rot Challenge.” Bed rotting is when people just hang out in bed, wasting their days on their phone and stuff.

Cozy Earth did a bed-rotting challenge series where they challenged people to stay in bed for as long as they could. That also got a lot of engagement as well. So there are examples of brands launching serialized content without the involvement of a creator necessarily.

@cozyearthWe’re OFFICIALLY live #bedrotting #officegames #cozy #competition #winner

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Parker: Love and respect to those brands, but is there a reason why I’ve never heard of the brands that are doing it? Why are we not talking about brands that are a little more mainstream household names?

Gillian: I think last year was the year when I really noticed a lot of these branded series emerging, whether it was with a creator or their own series independent of creators. It’s still relatively new, but I think we’re going to continue seeing a lot of these emerge because, as we’ve been saying throughout this episode, that’s what people want to see more and more.

So it’s still on the up-and-up.

Brand dos and don’ts from AI brain rot

Parker: I have a couple of quick rapid fires. What is one thing a brand should learn from “Fruit Love Island” and apply right now?

Gillian: We’ve said this already, but entertainment should be the focus of your content.

Parker: What is one thing that they shouldn’t take from “Fruit Love Island” and replicate because it will go horribly?

Gillian: Don’t just use AI for the sake of using AI.

Parker: What is the biggest mistake brands could make right now with AI use?

Gillian: Using AI to make a post without disclosing it.

Parker: Is there a use of AI that you are seeing brands use in their social marketing that is successful—or at least not being called out?

Gillian: Off the top of my head, not really. What I have seen that’s interesting is this pushback to AI content, in the form of brands instead partnering with artists more and more.

Rachel Karten called it evidence of effort—content where you can see it involved an artist and effort, versus just using AI. That’s an interesting countertrend we’ve seen. As more people are using AI for content, a lot of brands are instead partnering with human artists as a sort of anti-AI statement.

How platforms are putting brands into entertainment and creator partnerships

Parker: You were at the NewFronts last week, and considering the conversation we’ve just had about new things that brands are trying in the digital media space, did you see anything on the ground at the NewFronts that is helping brands do this?

Gillian: TikTok and Tubi, ahead of the NewFronts, announced this new partnership where TikTok is going to help feed creators to Tubi to help short-form creators make longer-form TV shows and films for Tubi.

I talked to an executive at Tubi who told me that while advertisers won’t necessarily be able to be part of these series right away, that’s their ultimate goal down the line: to allow brands to integrate themselves or their products into these creator-led projects. That was definitely something I saw—platforms are trying to facilitate those opportunities for brands.

What a brand shouldn’t do when it comes to AI-generated content

Parker: If there’s one misinterpretation that you’re afraid a brand would take away from either your “Fruit Love Island” reporting or our conversation today, what would it be?

Gillian: Just because people are engaging a lot with things like “Italian Brain Rot” and “Fruit Love Island” doesn’t mean there’s necessarily a place for brands in that conversation.

We did see a couple brands—DoorDash and Slim Jim—participate in the “Fruit Love Island” conversation. Slim Jim was in all the comment sections; they were having a great time. But just because they did it doesn’t mean every brand should.

Just because something is popular in the AI space and the kids are playing with it, doesn’t mean that you have a place there. You probably could get some pushback if you’re not a brand that it would make sense to do that.

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In this episode, Ad Age Insider host Parker Herren interviewed Ad Age senior marketing reporter Jon Springer. Below, the transcript, which has been lightly edited for clarity.

Parker: One story you wrote recently, part of our NextGen Marketing Playbook, was all about beverages as social badges. Give me a quick rundown of what you mean by that.

Why Gen Z wants to show off beverage brands

Jon: Beverage as a social badge is a term that goes back decades. It basically describes how a person’s beverage choice says a lot about them. So if you are in a bar with a Heineken, you are a Heineken person. The brand attributes associated with that brand are passed on to you.

That’s been the case for a long time with beverages, and it’s undergoing a lot of change now with the new generation and fragmented media.

Parker: Yeah, absolutely. How is it different for these young ’uns?

Jon: The young ’uns—there’s a couple of things going on. One, there’s been, in the industry, a tremendous explosion of products throughout the beverage world.

But the most important thing has been the social media revolution, where people are pictured on social media with their beverages. In the old days, you could assert your badge value with a beverage while walking into a bar, and that was about it. Now you can do so in the middle of the day. People see it in their algorithms. It shows up everywhere. And that has implications for the brand and for the people.

Parker: On my desk, I have my Stanley LoveShackFancy collab cup—I like to show it off—and I have my iced coffee. I’m gay is the message. Other people are showing this in their social posts, or they’re taking their Stanley to school.

Jon: The Stanley is really interesting because it’s not a beverage, it’s a vessel. And so it defeats the purpose of actually having a beverage in there almost. It could be water, it could be milk, it could be Coca-Cola, it could be Poppi or your iced coffee. But the container itself holds a value.

What I was thinking about when I was talking about how people are posting their videos with beverages could be a fitness influencer that has an Alani Nu can, or actual brand posts that help to broadcast the message for the brand. But it also says a lot about the person who is making the video.

Parker: When you’ve done your reporting on this story, is this trend just a social media thing, or are there broader reasons that marketers have identified this as a place to tap in and connect with Gen Z?

Jon: I think it’s a little bit of both. The person I spoke to from Coca-Cola made a great point in that article where they revived marketing for Diet Coke behind what they saw people doing online. So it illustrates how social media has become the tail that wags the dog in terms of marketing for a lot of these brands.

The Coca-Cola stuff was really interesting. There was an influencer who was talking about “crispy” Diet Coke. I don’t know if you’ve seen any of this, Parker, but they’re funny—the type of ice, people comparing the quality of a Diet Coke they get from McDonald’s versus Burger King, all these kinds of things. Coke, to their credit, saw that and made marketing around it, using the same language that came from these social posts.

Parker: Yeah, and it’s similar to what we saw with Dr Pepper. Somebody on social made that jingle, Dr Pepper picked up the jingle, made it official and collaborated with that partnership, and it got a lot of attention. And so I guess then it probably was a lot more trendy to have a Dr Pepper in hand in your videos after that went viral.

What are other gold standards of how the brands you cover are tapping into this trend and finding success?

Jon: The obvious answer is Poppi. They really are credited, and fairly so, for having developed an audience almost entirely online using packaging cues and influencer campaigns with the right audiences. They got people to become advocates for the brand and became so huge that Pepsi ended up buying them for $2 billion. This was a brand that barely existed five years before. And they’re doing Super Bowl ads now, all generated from this idea that they could cultivate a fan base on social media.

Parker: Poppi is doing a number on my wallet because those little packs are quite expensive.

Jon: That’s part of the story, too. If you have value online, that can go into supporting a higher price.

Signals, identity and what beverages say about people

Parker: The things that we’ve talked about are how these beverage brands are transforming and interacting with social creators as part of their marketing strategy, and that consumers are using these products in a way that is supporting this trend of wanting to be visible and show people who they are. It’s similar to Labubus or fashion trends, but with beverages, you can come and go with different ones throughout the day. People want to really be expressive right now in culture about who they are.

I thought there was a really interesting comparison here to another story that you wrote about what’s called, “hard hydration”. It’s a way that brands are doing the opposite—trying to use package design and product design to signal to consumers what they are.

Before I fill your head with all of my ideas, give us a quick rundown of what this hard hydration trend is.

Jon: It’s basically alcoholic drinks that resemble Gatorade. That trend follows the explosive growth in ready-to-drink (RTD) cocktails. The idea is that iced teas and lemonades come out of the convenience store cooler doors. What else comes out of convenience store cooler doors? Can we make that an alcoholic beverage?

And so a bunch of brands have now taken on, in the last two years, this idea of making vodka and fruit juice that resembles a Gatorade.

Parker: And what’s interesting is that there are literal federal regulations on what these alcohol brands can and cannot say on their packaging about what they are. Is that right?

Jon: Yeah, that’s correct. There are a lot of limits put on them by the Tax and Trade Bureau, called the TTB, that governs what they can or can’t say on labels. One of the guys I spoke to in the article said they want you to shoot from 10 feet behind the line so that you can’t even approach what they will allow you to say.

So they can’t use the word hydration. They can’t use the word electrolytes. They can’t use isotonic. There’s some other words that are forbidden.

Exactly. They can’t use these terms, and so they have to use visual cues. There’s a brand called Lightstrike that uses a plastic bottle that really resembles the kind of bottle that these drinks come from. These other guys—the flavor and the colors are really strong indicators. I like that they all describe that they all have blue. Blue is this thing that’s kind of unique to Gatorade or to the sports drink category.

Products that do the talking

Parker: Like I said earlier—and you tell me if I’m stretching too much on this—but I thought it was so interesting how social is transforming the way that some of these beverage brands are marketing to consumers by feeding into these identity signals. And then on the flip side, these brands are trying to literally, in their package design, signal to consumers their own brand identity.

Is this changing the way that beverage marketers are actually approaching marketing?

Jon: It’s on the rise, but I don’t want to say that it’s new. The packaging and the design of these cans has been part of the beverage world forever because it’s a visible thing. You hold it in your hand.

That’s always been a part of it. One of the people we spoke to in that article said that brands like Poppi and Alani Nu have really put a lot of work into the design that looks good online versus the old that might be optimized to look good on shelf. So that’s something that has changed. But design, branding, cues and all those things have been part of all consumer packaged goods forever, at least back to the ’50s.

Parker: And another element of this is these brands are also doing quite a bit of social listening. And there are concoctions that are trending on social that beverages on shelves are then based off of. Remind me what that was.

Jon: There’s the Water Hazard, which is a drink that originated on golf courses where people from bar carts were mixing Gatorade, vodka, Sprite, and I forget the last ingredient. That was a behavior that was out in the wild that these brands took notice of and then operationalized—put it in a can and followed those trends.

We’ve seen that happen in a lot of categories. I think, for example, the Malibu and Dole, which is a new combination—I think that mimics a drink that people were making at home. They put it in a can. So those are the things that are happening now with the RTD trend. There’s a lot of these drinks recreating home or bar mixed drinks in a can. Convenience is a big deal.

Parker: These products based around trends may be doing great now, but I wonder if they’ll be up against challenges ahead. I’ve seen lots of protein drinks hit the market—not as in post-workout drinks that have been around for a long time, but this big protein craze where we’re seeing protein lattes and protein martinis.

If you’re a brand who is fully formed against one of these trends, does that pose a particular challenge if you’re thinking about the longevity of a brand?

Jon: Yeah. I did an Ad Age podcast with a protein soda brand just recently.

I’m not sure I have the answer, and I’m not sure the brands have the answers either.

In the alcohol space, White Claw and some of these earlier seltzers had a huge early run and then a kind of gradual decline as other brands come up behind. You need, obviously, a strong brand, but people need to believe in you—you need to stand for something that is sustainable in order to be a sustainable brand.

Consumers can smell a lot of things that are too trendy, and they know when a product is ripping off another product. An authentic brand base is table stakes for success in the beverage industry.

Lessons for marketers beyond beverages

Parker: Those could be words of wisdom for many brands, not just beverage brands.

If you had to distill the things that we’ve talked about today into a couple of tips that any marketer, whether beverage or not, could take away from listening to this, what would they be?

Jon: Brands need to keep an eye on what consumers are saying and, in cases like Dr Pepper or Diet Coke, find a way to incorporate that into their own marketing message to deliver the signal that they are listening to their consumers.

Brands also have to be proactive online themselves and see if they can develop not just loyal people but fans who can speak to them, who can advocate for them, and be their allies rather than just showing their product or being a part of that. So fanship is important.

Listening is important. Being aware of the fact that when your brand is out there in the hands of people and they’re using it as badges, you really don’t have control over the brand. The brand is surrendered to the people who are using it. And so to the degree that you can keep an eye on what’s going on with that and be comfortable with that being a part of your world, that’s important as well.

Plus, DraftKings' new creative agencies. And what Milan Cortina Winter Olympics marketers learned about brand safety, and how to apply those lessons to the FIFA World Cup.

Dig deeper on the topics mentioned in this week's episode:

~See 2026 Ad Age A-List winners

~Attend Ad Age's Editors Roundtable on March 26

~Listen to the Marketer's Brief podcast

Plus, the lesson for brands in McDonald's cringe CEO taste test and what ChatGPT's first third-party ad tech partner means for brands.

Dig deeper on the topics mentioned in this week's episode:

~What separates agencies winning 2026 reviews

~How agencies are helping clients become more self-sufficient

~Inside agencies' new self-service platforms

~What are media rebates? Agency transparency in the hot seat

Plus, Estée Lauder's media agency shakeup, and a shocking agency executive exit.

Dig deeper on the topics mentioned in this week's episode:

~Inside the lawsuit against WPP Media

~Acadia's CEO on media rebate transparency

~Get tickets to Ad Age's NextGen Marketing Summit

~Listen to the Marketer's Brief podcast

Plus, why agencies are rushing to get their clients on ChatGPT, including the benefits they predict will come from being a first mover. And Raymour & Flanigan's new media agency.

Dig deeper on the topics mentioned in this week's episode:

~Subscribe to Ad Age's Emerging Tech newsletter

~See AI generated work from Coca-Cola, Google, Progressive, Svedka, McDonald's and Kalshi

~Register for Ad Age's AI-focused Editor's Roundtable

~Listen to Ad Age's Marketer's Brief podcast

Dig deeper on the topics mentioned in this week's episode:

~Ad Age's Super Bowl ad review

~How brands plan for the Monday after the Super Bowl

~Agency winners from Super Bowl LX

~Ad Age's Super Bowl diversity report

~Super Bowl advertisers fall behind on Hispanic representation

And the chaos behind the scenes of TikTok's ownership transition, why auto brands are skipping the Super Bowl and Home Depot's agency shakeup.

Dig deeper on the topics mentioned in this week's episode:

~Universal viral moments are over—what brands need to know

~Inside social trends: Jet2 holiday, 2016 throwback, Brat Summer, ALS Ice Bucket Challenge

~Lessons from Taylor Swift's viral engagement

~Buy tickets for the Ad Age NextGen Marketing Summit

~Listen to the Marketer's Brief podcast

Also, OpenAI has begun testing ads in ChatGPT. Hear Ad Age's reporting on how much it costs to be first to market and strategy takeaways. Plus, how to win the Gen Z 2016 social trend.

Dig deeper on the topics mentioned in this week's episode:

~Inside brands' long-form ad experimentation

~Watch long-form work from Maybelline, Gushers and Doritos

~Buy tickets for Ad Age's NextGen Marketing Summit

~Listen to the Marketer's Brief podcast