Welcome to Week In Review
From new tools transforming creative work, to campaigns reshaped by automation, we track the biggest shifts at the intersection of AI, media, and marketing. This week, Anthropic embeds an invisible watermark in Claude outputs, OpenAI sets sights on SMB advertisers, and Perplexity blocks Time’s AI agent ads.
Top Stories of the Week
Anthropic Embeds Invisible Watermark
Anthropic, the parent company of LLM Claude, announced this week it will be embedding invisible watermarks into text generated by new Claude models starting August 2nd. The move means anything copied and pasted from Claude will include a hidden marker, so platforms and organisations can identify when something has been created by the tool.
Why it matters: The move is driven by the EU AI Act’s Article 50 transparency obligations, but the watermarks will apply worldwide across every Claude surface, including the API, Claude Code, Claude Cowork and Claude Tag. Reactions to the news have been mixed – particularly as the watermark will be included in anything Claude generates, even for light-touch work like proofreading. At the same time, many have praised the move as one of the most significant transparency commitments from a frontier model.
OpenAI Targets Small Business Advertisers
OpenAI is reportedly building out a dedicated SMB ads unit, according to six live job postings reviewed by Digiday. The roles have spanned across growth, data science, demand strategy and sales, with spectators assuming these types of ads hint at the AI giant forming the skeleton of a performance ads business.
Why it matters: OpenAI signalling it is going after SMB customers for its ads business mirrors what makes up the majority of Google and Meta’s customers to-date. This is a departure from building a boutique premium ad product for big brands – which the company initially opted for – which is arguably a more ambitious task, particularly if it plans to build a self-serve tool.
Perplexity Blocks Time’s AI Agent Ads
Less than two weeks after it was reported that the publication Time has started serving ads inside the markdown versions of its webpages – for AI agents over humans – Perplexity confirmed it blocks those ads from influencing its search index, Digiday reported.
Why it matters:
Perplexity’s chief communications officer Jesse Dwyer said in an email statement that publishers who deploy “deceptive advertising” risk a reputational downgrade within the AI search engine. This scenario opens up one of the first debates over what advertising within the AI agent layer online ought to look like.
Quote of the Week
Brands & Agencies
Screwfix Appoints Incubeta to Build AI-Driven Performance Engine
Screwfix has appointed digital marketing agency Incubeta to manage its pay-per-click account across UK and Ireland, with a major focus on building an AI-driven performance engine that can manage tens of thousands of products at scale, ProlificNorth reported.
Stanley Adapts Its Marketing for the AI Search Era
Water bottle and travel mug brand Stanley is reportedly structuring its content specifically for AI discoverability, according to Digiday. In the article, it is highlighted that the brand is treating AI search as a long game, instead of opting for strategic quick wins – including clear links between product features and customer benefits and adding FAQs.
Publicis Stock Holds Above €99 as LiveRamp Acquisition Reshapes Strategy
Publicis Groupe’s share price held firmly above the €99 mark – near the top of its usual range – this week as investors continued to price in the strategic significance of the pending LiveRamp acquisition – with analysts noting the acquisition would give Publicis a data connectivity layer making its AI-driven marketing services hard to replicate for competitors.
Dentsu Launches Charamo, an AI Platform for Creator Commerce
Dentsu has launched Charamo, a new AI-powered creator commerce platform developed in partnership with Yoshimoto Kogyo – one of Japan’s largest entertainment companies – designed to connect brands with talent-driven commerce opportunities at scale.
Media
Apple in Talks to Pay Publishers for AI-Powered Siri
The Wall Street Journal reported that Apple is in discussions with news publishers to pay for access to their content to improve its AI-powered Siri. The deals are being positioned as licensing agreements that would give Apple editorial content for training and powering Siri’s responses, at a moment when the rebuilt Siri remains the most closely watched AI product in consumer technology.
French Newspapers Files Complaint Against Google AI Overviews
A federation of nearly 300 French newspapers have filed a formal complaint with France’s competition authority targeting Google’s AI-generated search summaries, accusing the tech giant’s AI feature of pulling traffic away from its online webpages.
Roku Distributed GenAI Film & TV Channel Slammed
A new free AI-generated film channel – Fairground AI Creator TV – was distributed this week on Roku and has been slammed by onlookers, almost universally. Those critics have described the channel as hollow, repetitive and devoid of the creative instinct that makes film and TV distinct.
Tech
InMobi Unveils Conversational AI Agent for Media Buyers
InMobi Advertising has launched a conversational AI Agent for media buyers, enabling advertisers and agencies to plan, activate and optimise campaigns through natural language prompts rather than navigating traditional dashboards – extending the agentic buying trend into mobile advertising infrastructure.
AdRoll Expands Into ChatGPT Ads
AdRoll has joined OpenAI’s ChatGPT Ads pilot, expanding its multichannel advertising capabilities to include the fast-growing ChatGPT advertising surface – giving brands running campaigns through AdRoll’s platform access to ChatGPT inventory alongside their existing social, display and email channels.
Adobe Launches AI-Powered Product Discovery for ChatGPT and Copilot
Adobe has launched an AI-powered product discovery tool designed to help retailers surface products inside ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and other AI shopping assistants – allowing brands to feed structured product data into AI recommendation systems so their inventory appears in AI-generated shopping responses alongside traditional retail search.
ChatGPT Ads Adds Descriptive Heading
Search Engine Roundtable reported this week that ChatGPT Ads has introduced descriptive headings to its ad format, giving advertisers more control over how their ads appear in AI-generated responses and making the format more legible and contextually relevant for users encountering sponsored content inside ChatGPT conversations.
Adobe Releases AI Collaborators in Adobe Workfront
Adobe has launched AI Collaborators inside Adobe Workfront, its enterprise work management platform – AI agents that participate directly in campaign workflows, reviewing briefs, flagging inconsistencies, suggesting optimisations and accelerating the review and approval processes that typically slow creative production timelines.
Startup of the Week
Marketing platform Ahrefs launched Letaido this week, an agent-powered marketing workspace that enables teams to move beyond AI chatbots to plan and execute multi-step tasks, automate recurring workflows, build dashboards and reports, and continuously monitor websites and competitors without custom integrations or APIs.
Number of the Week
The survey also found that 73 percent of AI users research via LLMs before deciding on a particular brand or product, meaning AI is shaping consideration before preferences have even been formed, while 39 percent validate AI recommendations across four or more sources before buying.
