People want AI's benefits, fear its mistakes and increasingly expect companies to explain what their systems are doing.
Digital twins aren't generic chatbots wearing fake mustaches and claiming to understand consumers. Instead, they're AI models trained on data from real individuals.
AI media is the top category for planned spending increases, with 60% of marketers expecting to raise investment in the second half of the year.
Noam Shazeer also co-founded and served as CEO of Character.AI before returning to Google's AI initiative in 2024, following a $2.7 billion licensing acquisition of his startup.
When chatbots become the preferred, trusted news source for readers, they also will become the ad source for media buyers.
AI referrals are increasingly delivering users who show up with a purpose rather than a vague desire to browse.
Newsroom leaders say they want stronger audience relationships, but their production systems still behave as though homepage traffic circa 2012 is about to make a triumphant comeback.
Financial investments in performance advertising are rising as AI-driven marketing methods lead to measurable gains in customer acquisition, incremental sales and retail traffic. The latest data from
the Winterberry Group explains why.
Former Apple, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Meta Superintelligence Labs, and Scale AI researchers will train models on real-world user interactions.
Nearly two-thirds of Americans now distrust AI, and yet, usage keeps climbing.
Skyrocketing AI shakes up the playing field, as a record four brands now top the $1 trillion mark.
Massive datasets are used by AI models to determine what works, replacing gut feel with something closer to algorithmic judgment day.
Consumers reported using AI tools most often for electronic and tech shopping, travel planning, grocery and meal planning, vehicle research and apparel shopping.
Whether it would lower costs for the entire industry by applying it to AI targeted ads and content remains to be seen.
So far, the data shows a tradeoff: Equity is down in most segments, but parts of the funnel are moving in the right direction.
A full 80% of consumers say they want more video from brands, yet only 13% say they actually get it regularly.
About three quarters of B2B buyers now use AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity during research on products and brands.
As AI follows digital advertising's playbook by optimizing for engagement, constant validation may also reinforce harmful beliefs.
The Comcast report demonstrates TV's role as a full-funnel driver of performance and impact on other ad channels. It finds brand recall increases when TV is part of the media mix compared with
stand-alone channel efforts, according to the data. Recall rises 8.7X when TV is paired with search, 1.8X with social media, and 1.6X with podcasts, according to data in its most recent report.
Brands still close the sale, but AI gets the first date and sometimes picks the outfit.
People who linger longer with chatbots reported higher loneliness, less interaction with actual humans and more signs of emotional dependence.
Perplexity seems to have abandoned its ad model in February to focus on optimizing results for search queries and AI agents and software for enterprises - despite the court ruling it must stop using
its web browser agent to make purchases on behalf of shoppers on Amazon's online marketplace. That's not the case.
Traditional web search still leads the pack with 44% of survey respondents relying on it most, but AI chatbots have already captured 34% of search activity.
AI is becoming part of the infrastructure for brand discovery and comparison, along with content creation.
AI literacy is becoming cultural literacy, making brand presence inside AI ecosystems matter as much as a presence in social feeds.
CMOs now expect media to drive growth, relevance and transformation all at once.
Consumers feel informed and optimistic, but they are also alert, cautious and paying close attention to how AI shows up in content and advertising.
New UC San Diego research finds LLMs frequently alter review sentiment - and the shifts measurably change human decisions.
Nearly two thirds of Americans say having ads in AI search results would make them trust those results less.
Research from Taboola and several universities suggests AI-generated ads perform comparably to human-made ads when humans in ads look real. Here's what the data reveals.