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, TripAdvisor’s AI review problem makes headlines, Instacart pushes retail media up the funnel, and WPP expands its Enterprise Solutions unit with five new AI propositions.
Top Stories of the Week
TripAdvisor’s AI Review Summaries Are Glossing Over Serious Safety Warnings
A Which? investigation found that TripAdvisor’s AI-generated hotel review summaries were repeatedly downplaying serious complaints – from food-safety failures to sexual harassment – that appeared plainly in the underlying reviews, The Guardian reported. In one case, a Cape Verde hotel being sued in the High Court by hundreds of guests over alleged illness linked to hygiene failures was summarised as popular and “spotless,” despite reviews describing raw chicken, flies on the buffet and a family left seriously ill.
Why it matters:
This story lands at a moment when AI summaries are being embedded across travel, retail and review platforms at speed, frequently positioned as a convenience feature that helps users make faster decisions. The Which? investigation reveals that AI can actively obscure the very signals that matter most to consumer safety.
Instacart Pushes Retail Media Up the Funnel
Instacart announced an Ads Studio for brand collaborations and an Immersive Feed — a short-form vertical video format inside the Instacart app running between five and 30 seconds, with Hellmann’s, Kettle & Fire and Siete Foods among the pilot brands. The company also laid out its vision for bringing ads into its AI shopping assistant later in the second half of 2026.
Why it matters:
The Immersive Feed is a direct play for the video discovery budgets currently flowing to TikTok and Meta. And the move to bring ads into an AI assistant mirrors a pattern now visible across OpenAI, Amazon and Google: the AI interface is being positioned as the next advertising surface, with monetisation details still deliberately vague while the audience behaviour settles.
WPP Expands Enterprise Solutions With Five New AI Propositions
WPP has announced the expansion of WPP Enterprise Solutions — one of its four strategic operating units — with an initial portfolio of five proprietary service propositions for brands looking to operate in an AI-powered economy. These include AI Transformation Consulting, Agentic Commerce, Owned Intelligence, Adaptive Real-time Relationships, and a fifth content transformation proposition. The unit already works with IKEA, Ford, L’Oréal and Nestlé, employs 12,000 people across 40 markets, and is backed by partnerships with Adobe, AWS, Braze, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce and Shopify.
Why it matters:
The announcement is notable both for its breadth and its timing. WPP is consolidating a range of AI, data and commerce capabilities under a single operating unit just as enterprise demand for end-to-end AI transformation is accelerating — with IDC and Forrester projecting customer experience services will exceed $500 billion by 2028. The five propositions signal that WPP is positioning itself not just as an agency but as the operational layer through which large organisations build and run their AI-powered growth systems.
Quote of the Week
Brands & Agencies
Omnicom Wins Adidas €559m Global Media Account
Omnicom has been awarded the Adidas global media account, estimated at €559 million, following a competitive pitch. The win is one of the largest media account moves of 2026 and extends Omnicom’s growing portfolio of major international sports and lifestyle brands. The holding company will help the brand bolster its AI implementation.
IBM Taps Omnicom Data and Tech for Global Brief
IBM has appointed Omnicom as a global marketing technology and data partner, with the brief spanning customer data strategy, AI-driven personalisation and marketing operations, signalling a broader shift toward holding companies being selected as much for their data and technology infrastructure as for their creative output.
Nestlé Canada CMO Warns AI Obsession Is Killing Brand Distinctiveness
Speaking on the sidelines of Cannes Lions 2026, Nestlé Canada CMO Tracey Cooke warned that the industry risks being pushed toward what she called a “sea of sameness” by over-reliance on AI. “Your competitive advantage is actually being different and having a point of view,” she said. “So if we’re all sort of moving to the mean, then what’s going to separate the brands outside the mean?” Cooke said she can already see this risk emerging on some digital platforms, where AI-generated imagery is beginning to flatten the emotional and aesthetic experience. Asked what AI will never replace, her answer was: “Humanity and emotional engagement.”
Media
Cloudflare Gives Publishers a Deadline on AI Crawlers
Cloudflare announced that from September 15, 2026, its default settings will block “mixed-use” crawlers — bots that simultaneously scrape data for AI training, index pages for search, and power AI agents — from ad-supported websites. The change applies automatically to new customers, new sites created by existing customers, and all existing free-tier users. Cloudflare’s own analysis puts the stakes in sharp relief: Google’s crawler generates roughly one referral visit for every 14 pages it crawls.
Time and Axios Turn AI Visibility Into an Advertising Revenue Stream
Time and Axios have both begun selling “AI prominence” as an advertising product — packaging their editorial authority as a mechanism through which brands can influence how they appear in AI-generated answers. The products reflect a growing consensus among premium publishers that their value in the AI era lies not in driving click-through traffic but in being the sources that AI assistants cite.
Google Could Strike AI Deals That Would Further Reduce Publisher Traffic
Google is reportedly in discussions with publishers about direct licensing agreements for AI training and answer generation — deals that critics argue would compensate a small number of large publishers while further diverting traffic from smaller outlets and reducing the overall incentive for users to click through to original sources.
Tech
Adobe Launches GenStudio for Commerce Media Networks
Adobe has launched GenStudio for Commerce Media Networks, a new product designed to help retailers and retail media networks scale AI-driven advertising by connecting brand-compliant creative generation directly to commerce media activation — bridging the gap between content production and retail media buying in a single workflow.
DoubleVerify Exposes DreamScheme Ad Fraud Operation
DoubleVerify has uncovered and publicly exposed DreamScheme, a large-scale ad fraud operation that exploited AI-generated content and copyrighted material to create fraudulent inventory at scale. The operation used AI to mass-produce content across networks of fake sites, with ad impressions routed through these properties to siphon advertiser spend. The disclosure is one of the first major documented cases of AI being used systematically to power ad fraud infrastructure at scale.
TikTok Launches Agentic Hub for Advertisers
TikTok has launched an Agentic Hub — a centralised environment for third-party AI agents to connect to TikTok for Business accounts and execute advertising workflows autonomously, building on the MCP server it announced earlier this year. The hub is designed to lower the friction of deploying AI agents for campaign management, optimisation and reporting across the platform.
Startup of the Week
This week, US AI visibility company Profound launched “Aim”, a ChatGPT-like interface that monitors a brand’s citation and sentiment across AI assistants including Claude and ChatGPT. When the system detects a shift – say, a drop in brand citations – Aim surfaces likely causes, writes a diagnostic memo, creates a project with tasks tied to fixing the problem.
Number of the Week
Only 4 percent say AI saves them time at every stage of the process, while 54 percent say leadership underestimates the human effort required to make AI-generated work usable. Perhaps most striking is that 44 percent of C-suite leaders say they frequently or always pass off AI-generated work as their own — the highest rate of any seniority level, nearly double the figure for managers. The people setting the AI mandate are also the most likely to be quietly outsourcing to it.
