American Express is tightening up access to 4X earning categories on its business gold card, effective in February 2027, Inside Flyer reports. The 4X rate applies to a cardholders two biggest spending categories per billing cycle with a combined annual cap of $150,000. The result is that firms using advertising or wireless bills for 4X earning will have fewer qualifying vendors. Advertising will qualify for 4X only when directly purchased from Meta, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, GoDaddy or Yelp.

One-fifth of U.S. adults regularly get their news on TikTok, the Pew Research Center reports. While the share is flat from 2025, 39% of Americans ages 18 to 29 regularly go to TikTok for news, compared with 25% of people in the 30-49 age category and 11% of those ages 50 to 64. In addition, 32% of Black Americans and 35% of Hispanic consumers regularly get news there, versus 14% of White and Asian consumers.   

Publishers are seeking revenue diversification, moving beyond traditional advertising and subscriptions, Editor & Publisher reports. The goal is to build a more sustainable business. Editor & Publisher interviewed three news media executives: Melissa Bell, CEO Chicago Public Media; Ryan Dohrn, president and founder of Brain Swell Media, and owner and CEO of Niche Media LLC; Uriah Kizer, founder and publisher of Potomac Local News. 

Chronicle Media is using artificial intelligence to help brands  target find audiences that will engage with their content, Variety reports. The start-up helps brands and creators reach those consumers across such platforms as YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. Co-founders Aaron Sisto and Scott Greenberg believe this task has taken on a new urgency as AI makes content more plentiful while attention is wandering. Sisto says that changes the basic calculus for any firm developing IP.

Over $137 million has been spent on AI-generated ads by campaigns and political groups during this election cycle, a new high, according to the Wesleyan Media Project, Campaigns & Elections reports -- up from the $50,000 reported by the Wesleyan Media Project in 2024. But the new total may be an undercount, given than only 30 states require a disclaimer when AI is utilized in political ads. A separate study by the American Association of Political Consultants stated that 83% of political professionals used AI tools once a week or more, compared to 59% in the prior year. 

Social media bans for young people are easily circumvented, and could actually backfire, MIT Technology Review writes. Early lessons from Australia, which implemented an age ban in 2024, shows that teens have used tactics ranging from substituting an older sibling’s face for ID to drawing fake facial hair on their own. The downside of bans is that they suppress access to information, including some that helps their development, identity formation and socialization. 

Omnicom Media Partner Intelligence has partnered with video network Vevo to create what they call a Brand Fandom metric that can measure the strength of consumers’ emotional connection through four behaviors, Advanced Television reports. It determines whether people intend to talk about the brand as they differentiate it from those of competitors, whether they are proud to buy it and whether they plan to recommend it to others. “The opportunity for brands isn’t to manufacture fandom, but to understand where passion already exists and find meaningful ways to become part of it,” said Kara Manatt, executive vice president, intelligence solutions, Omnicom …

Cumulus Media has emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy, having eliminated roughly $550 million in debt, Inside Radio reports. The company began its prepackaged Chapter 11 reorganization in March. Cumulus canceled 100% of its indebtedness in return for 100% of the company’s equity. The deal also called for issuing $50 million in convertible notes to its former lenders. Cumulus will provide “engaging content across our national footprint, serving as a lifeline and voice for the local communities we serve,” said CEO Mary Berner. 

The ad-to-sales ratio of 25 U.S. advertisers declined more than half a percentage point to 5.5% in the period between 2019 and last year even in the face of robust global advertising revenue, according to WARC, Marketing Dive reports. Consumer goods were the outlier. "The expansion of digital platform spend by smaller businesses and cross-border e-commerce sellers is by far outpacing growth in ad investment by big brands," said Alex Brownsell, head of content for WARC. "This has major implications for the ecosystem of agencies and vendors operating in the enterprise market."

The Media Bias Detector, a project that uses artificial intelligence to analyze news articles for topic, tone and political leaning, has published a data set consisting of more than 140,000 articles published during the 2024 U.S. presidential election year. Launched that year by Penn, the Media Bias Detector was focused on “the public-facing side of the project, while this paper describes the underlying scientific framework that powers the dashboard," says Samar Haider, lead researcher of the study. "We present a rigorous evaluation of our data annotation pipeline, [showcasing] illustrative findings from the underlying data that cannot yet be visualized on …